Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown - Page 2

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Honestly I knew the results would be like this before reading the article. Vista requires MUCH more RAM, uses lots of processing power, and that Aero graphics system really combine together to make it much more strain than Windows XP. The same thing happened with Windows 2000 and XP: XP was slower with applications compared to windows 2000, but eventually updates to software favored XP and so XP was smoother. Was this because the applications were designed primarily for XP, or was it due to improvements in XP performance and application performance in general over time? Hard to say--but one thing is certain: running Windows 2000 with 128MB of RAM is certainly much faster than running XP with 128MB of RAM, and with only 512MB of RAM Windows XP likely destroys Windows Vista as far as performance.

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. Also I believe that THG is EXTREMELY misleading with this article because the Enterprise Edition of Vista is not designed for 95% of the apps they tried to run on it. Think of it as you would Windows 2000 Advanced Server vs. Windows 2000 Professional--the Server version lacks much of the OpenGL support and overall 'client' features, so it can focus on running Server type stuff, and 2000 Pro is designed for the stuff like games and such. Well, Vista Home and Vista Home Premium should be tested with games instead. Those versions will have incredibly different results, I'd bet the farm on it.

lol, I wondered that too.

Maybe because it runs cooler...perhaps so cool that ya don't even need a heatsink! lmao...

Guess they'll have to re-run their benchmarks all over considering that ATI released Cat 7.1s for Vista today. Pays to actually wait till the launch date to do a review like this, especially when it now has OpenGL support!

Yes, but even if the benchmarks are better than what you have under XP, it still does not remove the fact that they will not be as fast as they could be. MS could continue to tweak various DirectX DLL calls and other procedures to make them more efficient. This does not, however, remove some of the fundamental issues with locking out the core from 3rd party developers. This is something the EU trade commission is already investigating and hopefully will force MS to revert this model.

wonder how long will it take to rip the dx10 and port it in xp!
That would render upgrading to vista useless - unless- you need the 64bit version and huge amounts of ram or can't live without aero and transparencies. I know I can!

wow... everyone and there dog has an excuse for Vista even though they don't know anything about how it works. Seriously people, if you don't know what you're talking about don't post statements, ask questions, or don't post at all.

To the best of my knowlege:

By default OpenGL in Vista runs as a virtual OpenGL v1.4 (not 2.0 or any future version) interface on top of Direct3d and takes a very large performance hit. Using an OpenGL ICD (the same way we use OpenGL now) *should* work as long as Aero is turned off. This means if the game is full-screen, or if you simply turn Aero off, you should be able to get full OpenGL performance out of your GFX card.

Here is the important question that wasn't answer:
THG benched Vista with Aero **OFF** and the OpenGL performance SUCKED. Why is this? It should of worked, it didn't, this is a huge problem. Did THG screw up? Has anyone been able to get OpenGL working properly in Vista? Has anyone pledged to make it work?

This is not some "oh well, something else will replace OpenGL". OpenGL is *the* standard for high-end GFX. If you start listing off games that use DirectX as a counter-argument to that statement you don't know what high-end GFX is, so stop assuming this isn't a problem. OpenGL is, as you may have guessed by the name, and OPEN standard. All of the information MS needed to impliment it properly was freely available to them and they chose not to. This should make you extremely sceptical. If it doesn't it's because you are either extremely niave or extremely ignorant, or possibly both. Don't get offended about it, open your mind. The benchmarks are right in front of you: UT2004 suffered more than 30% performance hit on a very high-end system and the only thing that was changed was the OS.

OpenGL should work on Vista the same way it works on XP: with IDC supplied by the GFX card maker. Either this benchmark is screwed, or Vista (at least currently) is broken. So stop making excuses for MS. If anyone has any info as to what the problem with OpenGL on Vista is please post. If you don't care, don't post, go buy and xbox, and plz never come back. Some people do care and like to be able to actually use their hardware and software to it's fullest potential.

@bourgeoisdude... I'm pretty sure you're completely off base. Vista Home Premium and Vista Enterprise are teh exact same OS, they just have a few different "features" that have no effect on performance. All of these benchmarks were run with Aero OFF. Windows 2000 advanced server has just as much OpenGL support as Win2k Pro and you could, in fact, Configure Win2k Adv. Server to be exactly the same as Win2k Pro and have idenentical performance but even at default settings the extra features of the server version would have verly litte affect on performance of these kinds of benchmarks as they wouldn't be doing anything. The "advanced server" part is just a bundle of server-related features sold as a multi-lisence package, it's the same OS. Name one reason that the Vista Enterprise Edition should have lower performance than Vista Home Premium, I don't care what you bet on it as it has no effect on the performance of the OS, and furthermore I bet you don't even own a farm THG said "This article deals with basic application execution under Windows Vista Enterprise, which is representative of the other editions. ", if you're going to debate that you kinda need some reasons to back it up with, not vague assumptions. I could be wrong... but you're gonna need some evidence if you want to convince any rational person. Also, several of the applications they ran WERE optimized for vista, a few were incompatible with superfectch (because they already had their own memory managers anyway) and that was noted: they were all slower.

I think the points you make about the ram are very good often glazed over. Even with and extra GIG of ram to use for SuperFetching Vista was STILL slower. If an extra gig of ram made my computer faster or somehow better I'd be ordering ram right now and buying vista, but it doesn't. This is a problem, a very big, expensive, slow problem. SuperFetch seems like a good feature, but it fails to make up for how bloatedly slow Vista is.

I heard a rumor that DX10 games will be required to check and make sure that you're running Vista or they won't run. I can't find anything to back it up with though WINEHQ is planning on doing it, but as of Dec19th 2006 no one was actually working on it as they are trying to get WINE 1.0 feature frozen and finalized.

You are ridiculous. There are valid points to be raised against Vista, but this is not one of them, and especially not in this negative tone. If you watch the news flashes here at Tom's, you'll see that ATI (AMD) just released their driver with OpenGL support today, and nVidia's driver release is tomorrow. The reviewer clearly identified this as a driver issue. I would give it at least a chance to see how much improvement the final drivers make before any ultimatum-like statements, if that's your only objection.

Again, I'm not a Vista lover / defender, but we have to stay objective and well informed.

You might be disappointed to know that the majority of the world doesn't game. I'm sure there is 20-30 million households in the US alone, that could care less about gaming. Most of the Vista users for the next 6-12 months will probably be people upgrading their 2-3 year old system, which even with vista will still offer a nice performance jump. In about 6 months more business will start moving towards Vista onc ethey know all their apps work with it, and I don't see many of them caring about gaming performance either.

Not that I'm in love with Vista, but there is a much bigger world out there then just games and running apps at warp speed. In my old office, for a large company, we had people who still ran P3-800s with 512MB of ram and Win2k. So if they get a new Core Duo 2 with 1GB of ram, they will be in hog heaven, even with Vista
That doesnt disappoiont me as vista doesnt give a nice performance jump. Other than games vista only hold about an even performance to XP as the benchmarks show.

The DRM is BS, I agree. Nonetheless, it isn't something that isn't already in XP assuming you run windows updates...

XP is indeed a higher performance OS than Vista, but 2000 SR4 is faster than XP! Guess what I'm running? There isn't a single prog that I run (all of Adobe, Lotus Suites, Office 2003, SoundForge 7, a ton of games, etc., etc.) that require more than W2K. Since I'm running an Opteron 154 (2.85Ghz)-A8N SLI Premium, 2x512 Ballistix 2-2-2-8 1T, Ultimate X1950PRO, and (4) Raptors I haven't found the need for multi-core CPU's, so "up" XP-Vista's ass

I did indeed read the article, as well as MS's response to it that is generally dismissed within the article itself.

My opinion on the subject is rather unpopular on these forums. I can only sum it up by saying that I can see both sides of the argument.

Let me start out by saying that I think that DRM, as a concept, is wrong, and that I think that, in general, MS is pretty much as evil, lazy, and anti-competitive in their business practices as a company gets.

However, I do not blame MS for the DRM situation in Vista; and I do have a problem with the article in that link.

Let's start with the problem, because it's easy to summarize. The article is extremely biased and, although not making any misrepresentations, it twists the truth in a manner that it designed to present the situation in the worst possible way for Vista. An example of that would be making statements regarding certain protections in Vista that were also, for a long time now, included in the previous OS's, which serves the point of making it look like Vista adds an avalanche of new protections that severely impair the user's enjoyment of content. This kind of biased presentation is, in my mind, repugnant, and automatically destroys credibility of the author. That is why I asked for an unbiased review with real life impact and real life scenarios (vs. the worst possible case examined in the article) of the new (additional) DRM measures on user experience.

One other thing I need to mention here, is that I have absolutely no problem with impairing user experience of pirated material, be it software or multi-media content. I am in no way, nor have I ever been associated with any of this content creation. Still, I am sorry, but I have no sympathy for people who feel entitled for anything.

Now in terms of the unpopular view that all this is not MS's fault. Well, really, it is quite simple. I think MS is smart enough of a business to realize that an OS is just a platform for content, be it software (traditionally), or, recently, movies, music, etc. In fact, the reason why Windows survived and killed off the superior tech such as OS2 was specifically because of content. For this reason, it is imperative to the success of the OS that they conform to industry norms in terms of protected content, to insure that there is content released for the system (or, alternatively, that there are no accusations from the industry groups that MS encourages piracy). In this, I disagree with the contents of http://badvista.fsf.org site somebody linked to. I do not think that Vista is marketed to content providers and not consumers. But I do believe that MS knows that they have to conform to industry standards in order to ensure availability of content for the system because it is content availability that is ultimately required in order to attract consumers.

Which brings me to my next point, and that is who is to blame. And that is the various industry organizations that came up with these DRM schemes in the first place. I wish there was some kind of a law that would render them illegal, because I do think that they place certain impairments on the legitimate consumers' enjoyment of purchased stuff. And that is not right. For some reason, even scandals such as the Sony/BMG rootkit do not seem to reduce their zeal for these severely restrictive schemes. But until that changes, I can see how a major platform is almost forced to accommodate these industry norms if it wants to be successful.

Again, in no way do I think that a user's experience should be restricted if he or she acquired the content in a legitimate manner. I feel that the schemes implemented in Vista will result in this, but I have not experienced this first hand, nor have I seen any practical examples yet. I think this situation is wrong. But I think that the anger should be directed at the industry bodies that ratified these standards.

Everything runs through this machine, from Photoshop, games, Adobe Audition, internet, lots of USB stuff, you name it. I want to thank Microsoft for releasing their plans on pulling the plug on XP in 2010 which makes this particular rig more than adequate until then. Most other products have been matured in testing before release to an unsuspecting BETA public. Want to fly on Boeing's new prototype? Tickets half price.

I'm sure I'll build a Vista machine sometime but not as a replacement just yet. Considering the hardware upgrades I would need, that's a lot of money for a pretty face.

Maybe, but I'd trust Microsoft to control the US market to over trusting the EU to control it

Those benchies have zilch to do with dx10

They also left out HDD benchmarks (at least, I didn't see any), so yeah, you're right, it isn't fair, but not in Vistas favor. HDD performance has a lot to do with at least some of the benchmarks, and I've already proven to myself, that at least the Vista software aspect concerning HDDs, is A LOT slower.

Just like for the last article, I mentioned that a 4x RAID0 array that performed at 132MB/s substained in XP Pro, only did 85MB/s sustained in Vista. Thats a considerable performance hit. Now, not EVERYONE NEEDS this kind of disk performance, but depending on what I'm doing, I make good use of it.

It makes sense to me that Vista would not be good for Open GL. Open GL makes it easer for people to develop cross platform applications. Write an ap or a game In Open GL and it is much easer to port it to Linux or OS X.

If developers are required to write a Direct X version for Windows and A GL version for everyone else, they will write much fewer Mac/Linux applications.

Just my little bit of paranoia.

I'm gonna bet that's a driver issue. NTFS is NTFS. The rest are the drivers.

Oh, by the way, to whomever this concerns - if you're gonna rate something anyone posts as low, please at least respond with why you did so. I have no problem if people disagree with me, but at least do so.

Decreased performance, decreased license flexability, increased resource demands, increased hardware demands, increased price AND restrictive DRM. Oh and someday, there will be more 64bit compatable software that can make use of it.

Whats not to like?

How skinny it makes your wallet?

I'm not holding my breath. They still haven't figured out how to handle parallel processes, let alone a multi-threaded process! Thank you Tom's for doing this analysis. This was a great article! It confirmed my suspicions about Vista.

AUD 750? Is Bill Gates insane?

From what I've read, the main reason for Windows' bloat comes from MS sticking to their guns on compatibility issues. MS has to make a lot of compromises in order to have 10+ year-old software run on their OS. Compare this to Apple's switch (either OS9 or OSX I can't remember), where they took a gamble and came out with a truly modern OS. Backwards compatibility is sacrificed, but the end result is beautiful. MS realizes that the number one reason people buy their OS isn't because it's better in any way other than compatibility. Big firms don't want to have to buy new applications, so they stick with Windows.

Vista tries to do everything at once. It tries to catch up to other OS's in terms of being modern and intuitive (and pretty). It tries to run all your old applications dating back to the '90s. The fact it works at all is really quite amazing.

For all that, though, Vista also tries to take you more out of control of what you can do with your computer. DRM issues noted (and significant), according to the EULA, MS reserves the "right" to delete applications from your computer without notice. Isn't that crossing a line?

Ah a paraphrase of Bill Gates when asked about Lotus 123

I have not seen anybody prove or even allege anything in terms of the code you are referring to; that would be halted and is clearly and undisputably wrong.

Now, what Microsoft has done time and time again is not adhering to any knid of open formats, essentially taking a dump on anything they didn't like because of their, let's call it, penetration. That is bad, too, but they are getting better, just look at the new XML based office formats. More to come on this later.

Sorry to say, but both on my laptop and my desktop I use OpenOffice and never had a problem. I started with 2.0.1.0 and I'm now at 2.0.4.0 (or is it 5?) if my memroy is right. I never had a crash on it.
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About the question on XP vs Vista, I have my answer. I'm getting my new system during february and will get my 320GB HDD at 2*160GB and do dual-boot. I'll have both XP Home 32-bit and Vista Home Premium 64-bit. Adding a 2nd HDD plus my USB2.0 HDD will let me do all the home movie encoding that I want and I will be ready for when Vista will surpass XP. Adding a Dx10 VPU will follow in late 2007 when DX10 games will be available, and price not too high.

I remember seing game benchmark comparing W98 to XP when it came out and XP was always at least 1-2% behind when not a lot more. They then said than XP was too ressource hungry. Those who got new PC then, and went W98/ME only, sure regret it now. It'll be the same in 2 years from now with WXP.

I should say tough that I would not have upgrade to Vista if I would have kept my old PC (see below).

I'm with you on the time will tell thing. I think the adoption is inevitable - every new system you buy will have Vista installed.

Corporate world will eventually follow, probably, but that cycle always takes a couple of years. They'll have to make sure their existing hardware and software will work under Vista.

I was not a big fan of the Tom's news article on the bloggers and Vista. I would join in with slamming Vista on pricing (M$ is evil, as I said, and must be stopped somehow), or certain usability issues. In terms of driver support - give me a break, this is the first day of the release. I remember having to get a new mobo for XP because the old one did not have working drivers. So it could be worse then getting a printer.

But most of all, I have a problem with these "bloggers" because some of them, really, should not have a voice. I prefer the experts, such as Paul Thourott (sp? www.winsupersite.com). He seemed to be genuinely excited about Vista, and that's saying something. If you think he's in MS's pocket, just see his review of Zune, or how he slammed the media center features of Vista in one of his previews. He's not afraid not to pull punches.

Edit: The point is, if you don't like the new interface - well, that's your preference. If you are not happy with tiered requirements, that's fine, but they don't render a system (at least its Ultimate version) bad. Let's talk about real issues. Is enterprise-level networking broken? Or has it been fixed? Is DRM so intrusive that it disturbs typical consumer experience as we came to know it with XP? Those are the things we should be talking about.

And of course, application incompatibilities. But that list should be updated as new drivers become available, such as the OpenGL benchmarks since the release of updated AMD/Ati and Nvidia drivers.