Overall Vista Performance: XP vs. Vista vs. Vista x64
Benchmarking in Vista is an extremely difficult task, thanks to features like SuperFetch designed to improve performance at the sacrifice of repeatability. We're in love with SuperFetch as a feature, but it does make our jobs a bit more difficult as we have to be very mindful of what has been cached into main memory and how that impacts the performance of our benchmarks. Testing difficulties under Vista are compounded by the fact that our major test suites don't work under the new OS. SYSMark and PC WorldBench simply won't run and thus we have to rely on individual application tests and home-brew scripts to measure performance.
Our goal for this article was to find out if Windows Vista, on modern day hardware, continues to be slower than Windows XP as it has been in previous beta and RC versions. The secondary goal is to look at x64 performance to see if it too has changed behavior, to the point where you no longer need to worry about losing 32-bit performance if you move to the 64-bit version of Vista. We ran a handful of application tests to compare the three OSes (XP, Vista and Vista x64), and later on we'll focus on gaming tests as well to showcase graphics performance.
PCMark '05 Performance
Despite looking quite synthetic, PCMark has grown into a nice lightweight alternative to the big application suite benchmarks like SYSMark. It was also one of the first benchmarks to get official Vista support, although it remains a 32-bit only test.
Performance under PCMark is fairly close between Vista and XP, with XP generally holding on to a 1% - 4% performance advantage in most of the categories. The only exception to the rule is the graphics score of PCMark which has XP at around 35% ahead of Vista, but we'll address graphics performance shortcomings of Vista later in the article.
The difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista are hardly pronounced, with the two being evenly matched across the board. Once again, remember that PCMark is a 32-bit benchmark so it is running in Windows on Windows (WOW64) mode. That it can remain competitive is good news, but whether that's because WOW64 works well in all cases or it is merely optimized for PCMark05 remains to be seen.
3DMark '06 Performance
We chose to include 3DMark '06 performance here instead of with our game tests to look at the gaming performance of Vista on a system level rather than a GPU level:
Overall XP is about 6% faster than Vista, although the 3DMark06 CPU score is nearly 13% higher on XP than it is on Vista. As a 32-bit benchmark, it's once again good to see no negative performance difference between the Vista x86 and x64 versions.
Benchmarking in Vista is an extremely difficult task, thanks to features like SuperFetch designed to improve performance at the sacrifice of repeatability. We're in love with SuperFetch as a feature, but it does make our jobs a bit more difficult as we have to be very mindful of what has been cached into main memory and how that impacts the performance of our benchmarks. Testing difficulties under Vista are compounded by the fact that our major test suites don't work under the new OS. SYSMark and PC WorldBench simply won't run and thus we have to rely on individual application tests and home-brew scripts to measure performance.
Our goal for this article was to find out if Windows Vista, on modern day hardware, continues to be slower than Windows XP as it has been in previous beta and RC versions. The secondary goal is to look at x64 performance to see if it too has changed behavior, to the point where you no longer need to worry about losing 32-bit performance if you move to the 64-bit version of Vista. We ran a handful of application tests to compare the three OSes (XP, Vista and Vista x64), and later on we'll focus on gaming tests as well to showcase graphics performance.
PCMark '05 Performance
Despite looking quite synthetic, PCMark has grown into a nice lightweight alternative to the big application suite benchmarks like SYSMark. It was also one of the first benchmarks to get official Vista support, although it remains a 32-bit only test.
Performance under PCMark is fairly close between Vista and XP, with XP generally holding on to a 1% - 4% performance advantage in most of the categories. The only exception to the rule is the graphics score of PCMark which has XP at around 35% ahead of Vista, but we'll address graphics performance shortcomings of Vista later in the article.
The difference between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista are hardly pronounced, with the two being evenly matched across the board. Once again, remember that PCMark is a 32-bit benchmark so it is running in Windows on Windows (WOW64) mode. That it can remain competitive is good news, but whether that's because WOW64 works well in all cases or it is merely optimized for PCMark05 remains to be seen.
3DMark '06 Performance
We chose to include 3DMark '06 performance here instead of with our game tests to look at the gaming performance of Vista on a system level rather than a GPU level:
Overall XP is about 6% faster than Vista, although the 3DMark06 CPU score is nearly 13% higher on XP than it is on Vista. As a 32-bit benchmark, it's once again good to see no negative performance difference between the Vista x86 and x64 versions.
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LoneWolf15 - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link
Firefox runs just fine on Vista. I've been running versions of it (both 1.5x and now 2.x) on Vista since RC1 (I've tested Beta 2, pre-RC1, RC1, and am running RC2 on a spare box).While IE is fast at loading pages on Vista, I've never been able to get used to IE7's UI. After trying to keep my beta-testing experience as MS-app-oriented as possible, I couldn't and loaded FF.
Aikouka - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link
I have to say, LoneWolf, that I agree with you when it comes to IE7 on Windows XP. I installed it and it simply didn't fit at all. Although, for some reason, IE7 doesn't seem weird on Vista at all. It's probably because of how Windows Explorer also looks the same (lack of a menu bar).Also to go along with LoneWolf, I have had no issues with Firefox (2.0.0.1) in Vista so far :).
Spacecomber - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link
I didn't see this covered in my first pass through this article, but I was interested in learning more about the potential impact of MS's new Universal Audio Architecture on gaming performance, which I recently saw covered in a http://www.dailytech.com/Underneath+Microsofts+Uni...">DailyTech news item.quanta - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
There is NO performance to speak of, because Vista does not support hardware DirectSound acceleration. Alchemy only works on X-Fi, so anything older is useless.Cygni - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link
One thing ive really been wondering about is what MCE is like in Vista? The article briefly mentioned TV Tuner support worked fine, but was MCE tried? Was it different? How was its performance under Vista? For me, thats the deciding factor.Anand Lal Shimpi - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link
I'll be doing a look at MCE in Vista as soon as we get a system in house with the ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner (formerly known as OCUR). I'm hoping that this will happen in the coming weeks.Take care,
Anand
Aikouka - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link
Anand, doesn't that digital tuner require some special sort of hardware to run? I believe I remember a thread on the forums (under Video if I remember correctly) that discussed how it won't run on every system regardless of how powerful they are.One thing I'm curious of... does Windows Vista's MC application have the same tuner restrictions as MCE's MC application? Because I originally purchased a TV Wonder Pro awhile back for normal use, and now it sits in my MCE machine dormant, because MCE doesn't support it (although open source MC-esque applications do). If it weren't for the nice ATi RF remote, I probably would've sold it already for one that works in MCE :P.
Ryan Smith - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link
To be honest, I have never more than glanced at MCE, as I don't have a HTPC to make much use of it. I could tell you a bit about it, but I'm not really qualified to go in-depth about it, so we left it out.Myrandex - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link
same here too. I used to run XP64 full time but then switched to MCE for the MCE app. I am really interested in Vista x64 with MCE and I would have loved to see something about it.ATWindsor - Thursday, February 1, 2007 - link
I really hope there is som driver-issue that explains the poor network-performance in this test, XP is already pretty bad in this regard, one of the big things with Vista is that the network performance should be better.And furthermore i have two questions: The search, does it support network-drives? Search Desktop for XP does not...
Is there software raid-5 support in Vista?
A few disappointing things with Vista:
- Still the 255-charachter-limit, that is really annoying.
- Still an enormously primitive file-copying-application. This is basic important stuff that should be better.
AtW