Hardmac has posted results that illustrate performance improvements in Snow Leopard when an application makes use of Grand Central and Open CL technologies. Christophe Ducommun who is optimizing his applications MovieGate for Snow Leopard has sent results of performance tests done on his Quad Core 2.66GHz Mac Pro to Hardmac. The performance tests compare frame rates and CPU load in Snow Leopard and Leopard for the application.

As you can see in the table above there is a 50 percent increase in frame rate and CPU load for decoding drops by more than half. However, CPU load for MPEG-2 encoding saw a 30 percent increase. Christophe says he is still optimizing the applications and encoding performance should also improve.

The above results clearly illustrate that Grand Central and Open CL technologies, which Apple added in Snow Leopard can improve performance of applications even on old hardware. This should encourage other developers to support these technologies in their applications.