Boot Camp reveals that OSX is slower than Windows

[orangepeel]

Boot Camp reveals that OSX is slower than Windows
No wonder Apple didn't want them side by side
By Nick Farrell: Thursday 20 April 2006, 08:35

PLASTIC MOLD FIRM Apple, might be finding out that the problem with having a dual boot alongside Windows is that users can compare both operating systems better.

According to Penny Arcade, the introduction of Boot Camp makes it a lot easier to benchmark what the two operating systems can do.

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[2blue4u]

Not so sure about this. I've found that OSX is very fast on the new MacIntel compared to an older imac. But I will say that XP is extremely quick on a 2GHz MacIntel. I reckon its just as responsive on the 2GHz duo as it was on my 3.0GHz dual core. And no, I'm not running any games to compare one against the other

 

[Ross]

I personally cannot see how the games developers spent as long optimising the game for OSX as they did for Windows. It would not have been financially viable. They probably sell 1 OSX copy for every 1000 Windows copies.

 

[SammyC]

I don't know about OSX but I do recall that Windows XP allows very direct access to the display hardware which allows the games producers to get full performance out of it.

Linux et. al. limit your access, to stop you crashing the computer basically, but that does slow things down a bit.

 

[orangepeel]

I don't know about OSX but I do recall that Windows XP allows very direct access to the display hardware which allows the games producers to get full performance out of it.

not true. Windows from NT and above is written in layers called rings. Applications (which is all games are) can't access any hardware directly due to this system.

Conceptually rings are a way to divide a system into privilege levels, you can have an OS running in a level that a user's program can not modify. This way, if your program goes wild, it won't crash the system, and the OS can take control, shutting down the offending program cleanly. Rings enforce control over various parts of the system.

There are four rings in x86, 0, 1, 2, and 3, with the lower numbers being higher privilege. A simple way to think about it is that a program running at a given ring can not change things running at a lower numbered ring, but something running at a low ring can mess with a higher numbered ring.

Games must access your hardware via something like DirextX which is a software API which then speaks directly to the drivers without going through the OS. However even DirextX can't speak directly to hardware.


I suspect the speed differences are probably down to video drivers not being particularly well optimised for performance. What would be interesting (for us) would be a comparison of a number of PS functions.