Snow Leopard benchmarks show modest gains

If recent Mac OS X Snow Leopard developer builds are any indication, users should expect performance gains -- if slight -- over the earlier version.

GeekBench tests run by Dutch site Mac-Zone show an early version of Snow Leopard just barely edging out today's operating system with a score of 3,351 versus 3,274 on the same 2.2GHz MacBook Pro.

Apple has promised that the future Mac OS X release, which isn't due until 2009, will offer better multi-core performance but is primarily focusing this on future computers rather than most current Macs, which with two cores are already heavily used by current software.