Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown - Page 3

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I just got back from the Las Vegas 'office 2007, Vista, launch across America'
Seminar, and most of the features they are pushing, are ones, you can have in XP, or similar, but at an added cost, or at least usage through th rid party software. The main thing they were pushing was the new search engine within VIsta its self, and yes, its kind of cool, but really, the service really knocks the piss out of the CPU when its indexing (first thing I noticed during RC2), and while once everything is indexed, things are definitely faster search wise, indexing takes a good long time, when you have 1.5 + TB storage (such as myself).

For myself, I dont plan on getting Vista any time soon, but I was pretty much impressed from what I've seen with Office 2007(will run under XP also), and their other business oriented products are looking good as well. I do know that when I do upgrade to vista, it will be the ultimate version, but then again, thats more than a year away for me, maybe even two . . .

Adoption is not inevitable: look at Windows ME.

For any platform to succeed it must have a killer-app. Vista has none. This is Windows ME all over again. I hope Vista dies the same death as ME and Microsoft is forced to come out with a real OS like they did with XP. Of course it took ME and 2000 to flop before they came out with XP… (2000 runs OK but it takes forever and one day to load and shut down)

There is a big problem with Vista taking up too much harddrive space: backup and restores will be painful. So will virtual machine. You need a light OS so that backups and VM are as painless as possible. Btw: Vista does not support VM and you are violating your perchase agreement if you try to VM Vista. VM is a very cool thing that XP does well and Vista wont.

Some people like these new things:
-New Aero interface – you will turn that off the moment notice how much faster you pc runs w/o it.
-Superfetch – there are ram-disk programs you can buy for XP that do the same thing. Also, there are ram disks you can buy.
-Sleep mode – XP does this.
-DX10 – there are no games for X10 yet!!! And they could make DX10 run on XP if they wanted to and it would probably run faster. We can prey that someone will crack DX10 so that games will run on XP – this would help make the game industry money so someone might get paid to make this crack…
-64 bit and multi proc – XP _PRO_ does this MS still hasn’t worked out the bugs – I bet they wont now that Vista is out…
-IE7 and Office07 – XP does this
-Search your PC – Google has a free download for this and it uses very little ram
-Encrypted HD – XP does this

Again, where is the killer app?

OK people! Win98SE was the same speed as XP but XP was way more stable and ran every app that 98 would plus it could see more then one cpu. XP’s was a smaller and tighter code set then 2000 and loaded way faster. XP kicked 2000’s and XP’s ass. Nuff said on that!

Lots of people are staying stuff like this: “My guess is that once we start adapting programs more and more for Vista, it will become more evident of Vista's newer capabilities and functions, particularly with a high-end PC.”

NO! Vista is way to much of a resource hog to ever compete with XP! Kernel lockout is making this even worse.

I don’t think too many people will switch to some other os, I think most will just keep XP until the next os just like we did with ME and 2000.

They world cares about more then games? Well, the world didn’t take to ME too well.

I will be running XP stripped-to-the-bone for a while it seems – 79 MB of ram at boot on install. With all my apps running I might hit 300 MB until I load a game. BTW: games are supposed to take lots of resources because of their graphic – that’s the price of graphics. Vista should be just as small and tight or better then XP when you turn Aero off.

Oh, I think the code bloat is to make it harder to fileshare

Sure is alot of Microsoft haters out there.

Though I hope for the fall of Vista as well, I guess I just hope for it, not because I hate Microsoft, I just don't like Vista (or XP that much) I hate this need to have an overly pretty GUI and I sure wish there was a theme that I could run that striped away everything I didn't really need. You know a Power Users theme.

I also, am totally against them making DX10 a vista only thing. I understand part of the reasoning, of wanting to have a new OS with a all new DirectX. But I think you have to allow the XP users to have a choice.

What still amazes me, is the difference between MAC users and Windows users are. Mac users dance happy dances and praises Apple everytime a .1 release of their new OS X comes out (which is alot more often than windows) and Windows user curse Microsoft even though it's been 5 years since that last OS release.

I guess if Microsft spent more time being better than Apple, then simply trying to make their OS look and feel like an Apple, then windows users wouldn't despise them so much.

A idea for the people who want to try vista and have 160gb hard disk or more With 2 partions 80gb each or higher. is setup a dual os. Like windows xp verson and windows Vista verson. Untel they get all the bugs out of Vista.

But it comes down to one thing. We are going to have to change some time. Best bet to wait untel it cheaper.

Wow, there are loads of ppl here that are def. not getting the picture. Kinda scary actually...

All of the buzz surrounding DRM is nothing but FUD. First of all, the DRM in Vista doesn't do anything with your currect media (DVD, CD), but only with new formats like HD-DVD and Bluray. So, you'll experience no performance drop while you're not playing one of these discs. That Peter Gutmann guy should have done his homework a little better.
Secondly, a lot of ppl blame MS for incorporating the DRM in the first place, which doesn't make any sense. I mean, what did you expected them to do? MS doesn't stand a change against all of the big movie studios so not incorporating DRM means that we won't be able to play the new formats under Vista. I'm sure Apple will do the same thing with the new version of OSX (and get away with it). Linux will probably not get any DRM and subsequently Linux-users won't be able to play HD-DVD or Bluray movies. Pity for them, but don't blame MS. Blame the MPAA.

As for the article, I think it completely misses the point with respect to OpenGL. Anybody who has done some research into OpenGL knows that the best solution for running OpenGL under Vista is to use an installable client driver, since it's a much faster solution than Vista's native OpenGL support. ATi just released a driver-set which has a OpenGL ICD incorporated. nVidia's ICD has been available for longer. Yet, the test system in the article uses an old ATi driver which doesn't have a ICD, thereby making all OpenGL-benchmarks not even worth looking at.
Also, the benchmarking in the article strikes me as incomplete. For example, the way in which Vista uses dual-core cpus is very different from how XP does this. Therefore, a multitasking benchmark should have been part of the article.

Wrong on every account. Three strikes, you're out!

I have to agree with you for the most part. I have see no issue at all with DRM.

As for the benchmarks it not really an issue if they get it to about a 10% performance hit. Because if your that close to your target performance you need a upgrade with either OS. Gamespots benchmarks claim that just want to see others confirm that. Driver stabilitly does need to get sorted out though.

how about results for 4x4 systems wasnt there a feature of vista that was said to improove performance of this power hungry system

(please no argueing about how power hungry 4x4 is i merely want to see if there is an improvement)

Looking at that we see tom's w/o the 7.1 drivers for vista, but they use them on the XP machine... strange.

It would seem to me that you would want drivers from the same revision time for a true comparison. Yes, vista vs. XP drivers is not apples to apples. (drivers are different) but you would still be closer b/c of release times than brand-new ones vs. month-old ones...

The firingsquad review is not all glowing, openGL being a big snag but the fact that there is ANY improvement at all says that tom's should have gotten the new drivers. JMO of course, and I still think the site does good.

MS will force your prediction to come true when they quit supporting XP.

I would like to know how well ProENGINEER/MECHANICA or other CAD/CAM software are going to end up running in Vista. What's really happening with OpenGL, as I keep reading about how Vista is dropping it, and then I read something about how nVidia and ATI are coming out with work-arounds using a different way of getting OpenGL to work? If OpenGL works to within 5% of how it would perform in XP, then I will retract this particular objection to Vista. Thankfully, departments doing the kind of work that requires a lot of OpenGL-enabled software are going to investigate their options before buying into Vista.

I also hope that whatever changes are necessary to OpenGL and hardware-accelerated sound processing don't result in massive redesigns of the hardware so that open-source code doesn't work on them any more. This is the biggest objection most of the doomsday-sayers have about Vista. If you read things a certain way, it certainly looks like MS is forcing the hardware designers to make everything more difficult to use with non-MS software. It's a sign of a major problem when you have this reality. It's an effective monopoly.

Now I hope that IF fully compliant Vista compatible hardware won't work or won't work as well with open-source software that hardware manufacturers will produce non Vista-compliant hardware that does. What are the odds of that happening? I don't know, but I think the number of people out there running Linux is greater than the number of people who will put down $600 or more for a video card.

Has DaSickNinja entered this topic? (If not then when he does this will get more interesting). Anyway my opinoin is that you should not get vista right now unless you are running a server of simple computing.

MS will force your prediction to come true when they quit supporting XP.

Yes--when Microsoft ends their extended support for Windows XP in 2014...

...seriously, do you intend to use Windows XP for another 7 years?

What, you can't read through for yourself to find out?

going from pessimistic to down right rude... nice progression.

DirectX 10 hardware will be backwards compatible with DirectX 9/8.1, but DirectX 10 is NOT backwards compatible with DirectX 9 ...

I could nit-pick your entire post apart, but quite frankly I suspect you wouldn't listen to me regardless. Please prove me wrong.

Vista (DX10 software) runs on DX9 hardware. M$ would be cutting its own throat if it didn't, as would other software developers

nit pick away, if you haven't anything better to do in an anonymous forum

DirectX 10 hardware will be backwards compatible with DirectX 9/8.1, but DirectX 10 is NOT backwards compatible with DirectX 9 ...

I could nit-pick your entire post apart, but quite frankly I suspect you wouldn't listen to me regardless. Please prove me wrong.

Vista (DX10 software) runs on DX9 hardware. M$ would be cutting its own throat if it didn't, as would other software developers

nit pick away, if you haven't anything better to do in an anonymous forum

(sigh) Alright then...Vista is not DirectX 10 software--it has another version of DirectX (9.0n) that it uses INSTEAD OF DirectX 10 for backwards compatibility. And no, I have better things to do.

I think this review supports what I've been saying all along for the most part. As much as I was looking forward to Vista, after running the Beta/RC1 versions and now the RTM version for a couple weeks I'm totally disappointed.

Vista is laggy and slow. I can't see how anyone thinks Vista is smoother or faster in any way. Its slow on my system, and a total dog with a single core 3.0GHz Intel or 3500+ Athlon. This equates to requiring a completely new system for anyone having to upgrade a 2 year old system, as both a C2D and an Athlon 64 dual core will require a new motherboard (and quite possibly RAM) for systems over 2 years old. This is not acceptable for the average computer user.

The new security features are bothersome and will be turned off my most users anyway.

DRM has definitely effected music playback of my MP3s. Good luck installing your favorite file sharing program and getting anything to work from them.

There's less driver support for existing software. I don't buy the arguement that it's always been an issue. With each new version of Windows in the past, driver support has gotten better and better. Not so with Vista. This is a giant step backwards. There's absolutely no good excuse for not having basic RAID, audio, media player, and anti-virus support on an OS that's taken 5 years and several delays to make it to market.

The comparison to ME is a good one from a marketing perspective. Both are lemons.

Stability wasn't an issue with XP, so is a non-issue for Vista.

I've read every review I can find lately on Vista. I'm at around 80% negative to 20% positive. However even the positive reviews point out problems. No biggy for those who have 1 system to worry about maybe, but as a system builder I've got to support every system that goes out the door. I'm thinking we'll need a disclaimer for anyone who wants Vista from us (buy at your own risk and have fun getting everything to work on it).

It takes a suped up computer to run Vista with all it's bells and whistles enabled. No biggy for the enthusiast who OCs their CPU. Huge deal for those who don't and own 2 year old technology or earlier.

About the only good thing I can find is that the prices in AU for OEM versions are comparable to XP. But retail full versions double the cost for the computer. They're simply not going to sell in Oz, as most people can only afford a system under $1200AUD.

And anyone who thinks the listed basic requirements will run Vista smoothly has no idea what they're talking about. Funny how most who argue the basic requirements are running much more on their own systems. Well we've tested Vista Ultimate and Business versions on the basic requirements. Forget about it. For that matter, I can't remember the last time I bought any software that performed well with the basic requirements. Basic hardware requirements will allow the OS to boot up. The 3d interface will work on a 128mb card until you start another program. That's fine if you want to stare at your desktop. If you want to actually do things on the system, you have to close down half the options.

I'm not anti-microsoft... yet. Another joke like Vista and I will be. People want the new OS as it comes out and is marketed to be ready for public use. Its crazy to think that you have to wait a year or 2 for them to work all the bugs out of it before you can equal your productivity with the older version.

Netscape was not crushed until MS updated its IE to a version that was, objectvely, better than Netscape. Netscape was slow to react.

Touché

This is pretty much an idiotic comment. First of all, the 4 GB 32 bit limitation, if I remember correctly, is the limitation of 32 bit addressing so it would be impossible to write any code that would address more than that with 32 bit registers (somebody correct me if I'm wrong here). But even more importantly, both 32 bit and 64 bit versions come on the Vista DVD, you can install whichever.

@darklife: are you crying about driver support on the second day of the release? You must not remember the XP situation when it came out. And crying about upgrading a 2-year old system - you know, that's about the cycle of technology in this industry and has been for a long while. I'm not even talking about gfx, which has been going about 6 months between major updates / new releases in the recent past.

And to save the best for last, although nhobo's moronic point about DX10 has been beaten to death (rightfully so) already, I just can't resist. Yes, it is most likely that DX10 software released in the foreseeable future will also run on DX9, it will not have certain features in the compatibility mode. Let me try to explain, since you fail to grasp the idea. You can use SM3 if you have a DX9 card, say, in Far Cry. You can also play Far Cry on a DX8 card, but you are limited to SM2.0 (I think, but the idea holds). It's the same with DX10 and DX9. And let me make things clear. DX9 mode will not have some of the features reserved exclusively for DX10. As simple as that. Hope this clears things up.

Just to note: this is true for retail versions of Vista, but not OEM. I'm uncertain about the upgrade disks. Anandtech link.

Along with the other limitations of the OEM versions we listed above, only the retail versions of Vista are shipping with x64 and x86 together; the OEM versions are only sold in an either/or fashion: you can either get the x64 or x86 version, but not both at once.

i have done the beta for over a year now. vista isnt lagging my 3200@ 2.6.
Drivers were a problem a year ago but not now.
drm isnt a problem either.
the only problem i had with vista is that games didnt run as smooth as xp

That makes absolutely no sense. I have a dual core X2 4400 O/C to 2.5GHz with only 1 GB of RAM (2-2-2-5 timing). Vista Ultimate RTM installed unbelievably fast on my system. I didn't time it, but I would estimate it was about 15-20 minutes, tops, if that. I was extremely impressed.

It seems you might have an I/O issue with your system(s) because, once again, on my old system everything installs exceptionally fast. I'm only using a single 320GB Seagate as well. Honestly, even if installing an application on Vista takes marginally longer, is that really grounds to ignore all the good features and condemn a brand new OS?

By the way, on my primary development machine (the X2 4400), applications start up much quicker in Vista than on XP.

Really...

http://www.realtek.com.tw/download [...] o%20Codecs

You think a "systems integrator" would have been able to find that...

There was a driver for my Silicon RAID controller included in Vista RTM (dated 11/27/06.) The only thing that doesn't work right now on my system is my HP LaserJet 1012 printer.

I realize what you are trying to say though, but you make it sound like nothing works under Vista, which is utterly false. Yes there will be compatibility issues, just like Windows XP had (or Windows 95.)

Windows Defender is a top notch anti-spyware program built by the people that know the OS the best. I used to use Adaware and our corporate SpyRemover (which is horrible) but since trying out Windows Defender, I've been quite satisfied with its operation.

Anyone who turns off enhanced security (UAC) is a moron. Period. If you can't take a second to click a simple button for the sake of enhanced security, you should go back to Windows 98. UAC is a huge leap forward for Windows (*nix variants have had this for a while), especially for developers like me that have to run as Administrators but want confirmation when something requires admin level privileges.

Have you even been running Vista?! I've got Limeware and Azureus installed on Vista Ultimate RTM. Limeware complains but runs (and I haven't updated to the latest version...it is a known Java issue.) Azureus runs flawlessly.

How am I lucky? I can burn all my CDs to MP3s using WM11, download and play episodes of Top Gear using Azureus, a Bit Torrent client which you claim doesn't work because of DRM, play DivX files using the codec right from divx.com, watch DVDs, and transfer MP3s to my iPod Shuffle. Where is this highly invasive and performance crushing DRM code that you are talking about? Yes DRM is built into the OS, but it doesn't impact the OS like you are claiming.

Furthermore, all my games work, granted some of them have degraded performance, but they all work and future driver updates from ATi will address that.

Lastly, for someone that sells computers for a living, you would think that you would be more open to change and not so concerned about people with two year old computers. Yes, Vista is probably the most resource intensive OS from MS to date, but most new systems will be more than capable of running Vista with all its features enabled. By the way, my system is over a year and a half old (with the exception of my X1900XT) and, with the exception of a few games, Vista runs as fast as my XP installation.

Vista is far from perfect but it is also a far cry from the mangled mess some are making it out to be. Microsoft will also be quick to rectify any serious issues that people have with their new OS. Afterall, this isn't WinME that we're talking about here...

Here, here Digitalfiends. I read through Darklife41's post and does he have a clue what He is tlaking about. Looking through his post I wonder did he do any installing or testing of Vista at all.

I am currently a member of the technet program. I have installed Vista on 3 different machines of various specs. From an athlon xp 2400 with 1 gb ram and a 9800pro to an opteron 170 dual core cpu with 2GB ram and a 1900XTX. I have been using Vista as my main operating system since september. I update to the final release in November. The only issues I had were with the beta versions and sata support for raid. Nvidia's drivers were very hard to get. But Since the November release these have been fixed.

Install times for the operating system have been fairly quick, I didn't time them, but there were no major delays.

Digitalfiends is also right about file sharing programs. They all work really well, in fact better than XP, as you don't have to run any reg hacks to open the max transfers. I have tried Shareeazza, Bit tornado, Limewire and Azerus. No problems.

Darklife41 has also reported no anti virus progams, and that his favorite AVG isn't available for Vista, well, I used AVG free on 3 systems here in my home, with only one problem the control panel wouldn't run on startup, I had to start it manually. But, again, since November AVG has released a Vista version and it works flawlessly.

Also, I use Power DVD to watch movies, DVD's and some HD content as well. In fact I cannot name a single program that hasn't worked on Vista yet. Programs like open office, VLC video player, adobe premier 2, Photoshop 6, illustrator cz and more. Games like football manger 2007, Oblivion, Half life 2, company of heros, CS:Source, FEAR. Also Software like UltraVNC, teamspeak, MIIRC, quicktime player.

I have serious doubts that Darklife41 did any sort of testing at all on Vista. As Digitalfiends pointed out, he couldn't even find sata and HD drivers that are readily available, and he also couldn't find his favorite antivirus program for Vista even though it's been vista ready sinve November of last year.

This is like when XP was first released. Lot of people said the same things that they are saying now about Vista. About how crap it is about the compabitility issues about programs not running, about drivers. Blah, blah bla, and it's all happening again.

Oh, and directx10 will never be ported into XP. Do you not all realise that part of the reason for Vista is the fact directx could not be upgraded any further on XP. DirectX 10 is built right into the operating system of Vista. To get DirectX 10 working on XP you would have to rebuild the XP operating system from Scratch. Which microsoft have done already. it#s called Vista.

Yes there are issues still with Vista. But I think Vista will be a much better operating system than XP ever was. Alos nobody is forcing you to change over to Vista. By the time people start to move over to Vista in the large scale things like Hardware requirements, Drivers issues etc etc. will not be as big a concern. Just like XP, in fact.

I wonder if you read the article attentively. He said that people complained that DOS was "just a file loader." That was his way of making the point that integrating new services into a system makes it just bloated and just as useless. He used unix as an example. I disputed his claim that people were unhappy with DOS because it was a loader; I simply said that there were a lot more important issues people raised. He used Linux as a good example of the direction things should be going in, and I brought up 3.1 because the first Linux kernels (along with graphical shells) started showing up around the time 3.1 was maturng. He proceeded to call Windows a sysem from its early days, as a natural progression from DOS, which is why I said that it never actually was an OS until W95, but really XP (well, NT, really, which was way earlier, but I'm assuming we're talking about consumer segment).

And by the way, Firefox, for being a pioneering piece of software, still does not work with a bunch of websites that we, for example, use on a day to day basis for our business, and that's why it will never be a corporate standard. That's what I was talking about. Nor will Open Office.

Without a financial obligation between the user and the maker of the software, there is only limited obligation on the part of the software maker to support it, and no major corporation can accept tht state of affairs. When they need support, they need it now (if not yesterday). That's why open source, at least in its purest form, will never work for the corporate segment, and as a corollary, will not be the future despite your claims.

It's a cool thing to dabble with, though, don't get me wrong. I'm all for it.

except of course for Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, Apache, Linux, OpenOffice, etc.

open source is the future despite the best effort of M$, which has invested everything in copyright protection, monopolistic practices and hypermarketed bloatware

as for the rest of Dvorak's article, very little of what you said even applies. Dvorak didn't mention 3.1, 98, the relative quality of DOS vs. CPM, etc. - that's all your (russki's) stuff

Even the Linux Operating Systems are very well supported for the enterprise. Both SUSE and REDHAT ship with both consumer and enterprise versions. The Enterprise versions tend to come out less often and have the most tried and true components. The consumer versions bring cutting edge technology. These companies make their money not on selling the open source code, but providing the expertise in supporting the product.

And guess what! If the OS does not act exactly as you need it, you can MOD it to match your needs. You are not stuck with what the vendor thinks is good for you.

Also notable for anyone wanting to go the linux route... Eye candy isn't exclusively a MS or Apple domain. I just started playing with the Beryl window manager, and it's pretty sweet. Totally customisable as well. Check it out at YouTube.

You know, I've wanted to try a flavour of Linux many, many times, but everytime I get around to trying I can never decide which one to get. Plus once you decide, then you have to figure out what variants to use and which various patches to apply.

I love the idea of Linux and really hope to see it do well and become more mainstream. Unfortunately, Linux requires a large investment of time and money, primarily to figure out what it is you actually need. If that is one thing MS does very well it is catering to ease of installs. Heck, our company even offers a flavour of Linux OS on its 32x ES7000 servers.

Someday I think I'll get around to installing Linux...

yay i'm in buisness!