Performance speeds Tiger vs. Leopard

Read this article.

*Tiger vs. Leopard: Which Is Best for You?*
http://lowendmac.com/ed/royal/08sr/tiger-or-leopard.html

Two comments in the above article:

+While Leopard has a lot of handy features, if your machine isn't way above minimum specs you will notice a drop in performance.+

+If you have the machine to run Leopard well, I would suggest it - after cramming as much as RAM as possible. However, if you're running anything lower than a 1 GHz G4, stick with Tiger.+

 Cheers, Tom 😉

I ran Tiger on my 1.25 emac with 512MB RAM and it felt a lot snappier than Leopard does now, with a 1.42 Ghz processor and 1.5GB RAM.

That said, I can't go back as I need Leopard to be able to sync my iphone. It comes down to a trade-off between features and performance in the end.

It was a similar thing that forced me to go from Panther to Tiger - I was finding more and more websites that wouldn't work with the older versions of Safari and Firefox I was using, and no way to upgrade the browsers without upgrading the operating system.

I am running 1.25 Ghz G4 PowerMac with 2 GB of RAM with OS X 10.5 Leopard.
There is a noticeable, but not detrimental slow down compared to 10.4 Tiger, but I find it's still snappy enough.
If you max out your eMac's RAM to 2 GBs, you should be able to run OS 10.5 as well as my Mac runs.
I would upgrade. OS 10.5 Leopard is currently the common minimum OS for many software requirements as well as for much of Apple's new mobile devices. That written, there is going to be a point soon in the future where Apple may no longer support the older PowerPC Macs.
OS X 10.5 Leopard is the last PowerPC supported Mac OS.
So, I would take advantage of upgrading as far as needed.
The ride for PowerPC users is going to see an end...probably sooner than later.
It has been a good run for all of us still on PowerPC architecture.

I am not sure of the why. The video card I have in my G4 supports both Quartz Extreme and Core Image.
I am using an ATI Radeon 9600 with 128 MBs of VRAM.
On your eMac, the installed video should handle QE, but probably not CI.
I do not think there is an easy way to disable QE or CI on OS 10.5 on the eMac's built-in video, but I am not sure.
I believe that there was a piece of software the enabled QE on Macs with PCI graphics, but it didn't always work for those Macs that used PCI video.
I believe the eMac's built-in video card only has 32 MBs of VRAM.
I know the OS architecture in OS 10.5 Leopard is different in some aspects than that of Tiger and I think it's those differences that are the real issue for me.
It's funny, but I had this issue on my Mac with Panther VS. Tiger.
Tiger ran much better on my G4 than Panther did.
The video maybe an issue with running OS 10.5, but I think it will still run fine for you regardless.
You may experience some screen refresh/redraw issues, I am thinking this will be annoying but minimal.
My mother's eMac is a 800 mHz model with 1 GB of RAM.
Leopard does run appreciably slower, but still runs acceptably.
But it has more limitations than your eMac.
It only has a 100 MHz system bus, and it can only take, supposedly, a max of 1 GB of RAM.
I think the slow down is more related to the system bus speed, CPU speed and not enough RAM.
Has anyone tried to install and have recognized more than 1 Gb of RAM into one of the earlier eMacs?
If I could put 2 GBs of RAM into this eMac, I think it would help some to speed up Leopard.

I believe Dashboard is part of the problem, and Spotlight (was that new in Leopard?). At least, those are the features I often hear people talk about disabling in order to improve performance.

I went through 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5 on my eMac. Tiger was probably my favourite, but Leopard is kinda a requirement for a lot of software these days.

If you don't need Leopard, I'd stay on Tiger.

Years ago there was a work around for turning off Quartz Extreme on older versions of OSX

I believe you are thinking of another QE issue. QE was not supported for PCI video cards like in the G3 minitowers and the first G4s. QE would, by default only work with an AGP video card. There was a hack to change QE support from AGP to a PCI card. It worked but w could cause other PCI cards to stop working.

Having uses a PCI G3 lacking QE support for years, trust me when I say you do NOT want it turned off. 2D actions like scrolling and dragging are miserable.

I agree with the wise Hobo--Dashboard remains running in the background once you activate it. Widgets that have to "phone home" regularly (site monitoring widgets; web cam widgets; some weather widgets) can eat a lot of resources. YOu can either completely disable Dashboard or, what I did: get the amazingly useful widget DashQuit:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/dashquit_berenguierduncan.html

It lets you use Dashboard and then turn it off with a click. Very nice to have. Lets you get the benefit from widgets without paying the performance price when you are done widgeting.

I don't consider Spotlight a big resource hog except when you first upgrade the system. I upgraded my G4 tower from 10.4 to 10.5 last evening and the initial Spotlight indexing ran for several hours. Now it's finished and things are back to normal. With normal computing patterns, Spotlight will run only for short intervals. The only times I had it seem obvious after the initial indexing was when I moved a larger number of files from a backup drive to my boot volume.

Hi,
I have the same eMac like yours and installed - and un-installed the Leopard (about 1½ years ago). It was just too slow...

Langdon wrote:
I'd like to disable Spotlight since i know it can spike CPU usage randomly but I have concerns about not having any search utility

You should be able to find a version of EasyFind that would serve as an alternative to Spotlight.

Is there anything like http://unsanity.com/haxies/shadowkiller for Leopard or any other things that can be disabled that would take some workload off the video chipset?

Go into this area with eyes wide open and your head on a swivel. Too many haxies that change system attributes do what they claim but also cause problems in other areas.