General Application Performance

3dsmax Performance

Our 3dsmax 8 tests are particularly interesting under Vista because they showcase the poor OpenGL performance of current Vista GPU drivers in something that isn't a 3D game:

OS Performance - XP vs. Vista

If we switch to Direct3D for 3dsmax, the performance delta narrows considerably to the point where XP only has a 2% performance advantage over Vista.

OS Performance - XP vs. Vista

Encoding Performance

Encoding Performance using DivX and WME9 are both slightly slower on Vista than under XP, but the difference is negligible.

OS Performance - XP vs. Vista

OS Performance - XP vs. Vista

Application Launch Performance

Similar to our earlier ReadyBoost testing, we timed how long it took to open Adobe Photoshop CS3 and 14 images under the three OSes,

OS Performance - XP vs. Vista

Finally we have a benchmark with Vista is faster than XP, and for some reason Vista x64 is even faster than that.

Office 2007 Performance

Our final two Vista vs. XP tests are from Intel and they measure performance in Microsoft Word 2007 and Excel 2007.

OS Performance - XP vs. Vista

OS Performance - XP vs. Vista

Document comparison performance in Word is about 7% faster under XP than under Vista, while numerical calculations under Excel are about equal under both OSes.

Synthetic Application Performance New Features
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  • FireChicken - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link

    I liked the old article title better..
  • grzemaz - Thursday, June 24, 2010 - link

    What should you do if the readyboost pendrive had been lost? How turn readyboost off when you do not have your old pendrive and you want to turn readyboost on with another one???
  • ghd nz - Monday, January 7, 2013 - link

    http://www.ghdplanchas-baratas.org
  • lordcatalien - Thursday, June 6, 2013 - link

    I'm curious for you to perform the same test above with Adobe Illustrator. My performance didn't seem to be affected even with a 3GB ReadyBoost in place.
  • Ikem64 - Wednesday, August 31, 2016 - link

    > Vista's auto-_tuning_ system is designed to surpass XP's scaling system

    Typo.

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