monline

I'm not sure whether Apple's Developer Tools (aka. Xcode) is an essential part of Mac OS X or not (you can get it from Apple if you don't have it installed on your machine), but it has some useful apps that are worth taking a look at them. Eg. there's one named Quartz Debug which has a nice feature: in it's Tools menu you can activate Show Frame Meter, which puts a gauge on your screen showing the current frame redraw rate. Go and test it. Launch a video (eg. visit youtube.com) and see how many frames per sec has the given clip. Or go to a site with some Flash anims, etc. Of course you can also use this to check how much juice you can get out of your Mac while playing games.