The most striking performance observation of my experience was that Apple took a system, OpenStep 4.2 which ran okay on a 33 MHz 68040 (and acceptably on my 25MHz Cube) and made it run only a little bit better on a 400MHz G3 as the Mac OS X Public Beta.
The difference of course was anti-aliasing, and much greater bit depth, and running multiple programming environments/toolkits (Carbon and Java).
The difference of course was anti-aliasing, and much greater bit depth, and running multiple programming environments/toolkits (Carbon and Java).