8. The Supposed Difference Between Windows XP And Vista

Here at Tom’s Hardware Guide, we’ve been grappling with how to set up and run Vista benchmarks since last year, before the product began shipping in late January 2007. These DHCAT results will be reported for both Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. We did this in part to investigate the claims of an Intel engineer who told me that his team was seeing improvements of 20% on the same hardware between the older and newer operating systems, in the newer OS’ favor. Table 7 presents DHCAT results for both systems, running MCE 2005 (denoted XP) and Vista Ultimate (denoted Vista), and provides numbers to compare PCMark05. We also generated numbers for 3DMark06, but they shed no additional light on the subject, so we forgo their inclusion here.

Table 7: Test Results

Numerous observations emerge from this data. First, it’s obvious that when it comes to handling the mix of simultaneous tasks that DHCAT presents to PCs under test, especially in the more demanding assessments, four cores score better than two. The difference in scores between the two processors for the same OS is between nearly 40% and just over 45% in favor of the quad core. But it’s also interesting to observe for DHCAT that the absolute differences between Vista and XP are not that great: 2.5% for the quad-core and 11.9% for dual-core. And it’s equally interesting to observe that for the quad-core, XP actually does better than Vista running DHCAT, while the situation is the other way around for the dual-core build.

Based on this small sample of results, and the numbers we see from PCMark05 (which are mirrored in 3DMark05), it looks like Vista has a clear edge in graphics, as you might expect because of DX10 support and improved graphics processing. On the other hand, XP is on parity if not slightly better at CPU and memory, and XP enjoys an apparent advantage at HDD, where it outperforms Vista by 9.4% on the E6750 and by about 2.8% on the QX6800.

To us, it’s not clear that the advantage swings consistently one way or the other in terms of pure performance. But Vista is going to get the benefits of new multimedia technologies in the future that XP may or may not also inherit. As we write this story, for example, Microsoft has announced a new Media Extender architecture that works only with Windows Vista Home Premium and Windows Vista Ultimate; it’s not unreasonable to suppose that there will be many more such announcements in the future, and that the newer operating system is going to get the most new multimedia bells and whistles.