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:
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.
Encoding Performance
Encoding Performance using DivX and WME9 are both slightly slower on Vista than under XP, but the difference is negligible.
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,
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.
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.
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:
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.
Encoding Performance
Encoding Performance using DivX and WME9 are both slightly slower on Vista than under XP, but the difference is negligible.
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,
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.
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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
105 Comments
View All Comments
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