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I ran some benchmarks on my unibody Macbook Pro 17″ just before the Graphics Firmware Update 1.0 to check if the firmware updater really just downclocks the Nvidia Geforce 9800M GT.

First I ran three tests using Geekbench in 64-bit mode, quitting and restarting Geekbench between each test. Then I did the same using Xbench. After running the Firmware update, I ran all the tests again.

These are the results:
In Geekbench, total scores were 4388, 4407 and 4429 before the update, compared to 4410, 4413, and 4425 after the update. Since Geekbench doesn’t measure graphics performance, these numbers are less interesting than those from Xbench.

Xbench 1.3 Scores before the update:
Total Scores: 238.00, 238.79, 244.40. Average 240.46.
Quartz Graphics: 247.24, 247.35, 248.13. Average 247.57.
OpenGL Graphics: 183.64, 186.47, 184.33. Average 184.81.

After the update:
Total Scores: 232.48, 238.97, 240.08. Average 237.18.
Quartz Graphics: 247.04, 248.35, 248.48. Average 247.96
OpenGL Graphics: 186.06, 185.11, 185.70. Average 185.62.

So, no big difference there. The firmware update does not seem to be downclocking/underclocking the graphics chip, but since I have not (yet) conducted any high-stress (i.e. high-temperature) tests I do not know how it performes when it’s under heavy load.

All tests were on the same hardware, a unibody Macbook Pro 17″ with 4GB RAM using the Nvidia Geforce 9800M GT graphics on Mac OS X 10.5.6 with all the latest updates as of this moment.