General Performance
While gaming performance is suffering due to the changes to the underpinning of Vista, general performance does fare a little better.
Overall, performance under Vista is still below that of XP, but again due to the debugging system in place, we have no way of knowing just how much of this is Vista being artificially held back by it. With the exception of the OpenGL shading score of Cinebench, which again highlights the poor performance of the current video implementation on Vista, nothing else is doing too poorly on Vista compared to XP. Vista x86 comes in behind XP in everything, but these scores are much more encouraging than the gaming scores, and they suggest that any performance deficiencies will be sorted out by the time Vista goes gold.
As for Vista x64, specifically on Cinebench which is our only 64-bit-enabled benchmark, Vista x64 actually pulls ahead of both Vista x86 and XP, showcasing the potential of x64 when used intelligently. We're also seeing the same general quirks of running 32-bit software on a 64-bit version of Windows: it performs slightly better than on the equivalent 32-bit version at times.
Startup Times
We also tested the boot times for a clean install of each operating system, using a stopwatch to see how long it took for the OS to boot to the point where it presented a usable login screen.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that Vista took longer than XP to boot, if only because it's a much bigger OS overall than XP. Compared to the boot times for XP, Vista x86 takes a full 60% longer to boot up than XP, and while in absolute terms this is only 18 seconds for an activity that will be happening rarely, it's still disappointingly long. Vista x64 in turn is in a category all of its own with 73 seconds, nearly the amount of time it would take to boot Vista x86 and XP combined. Because of the WOW64 translation layer, it's not a stretch to say that Vista x64 is really loading 2 operating systems anyhow, but anything over a minute is an unacceptably long period of time to wait on just the operating system to boot, and this is not even factoring in the time it takes for a user account to load.
We'll take a look at this again when the final versions of Vista ship, but it's not likely that boot performance will be able to improve to the point where Vista actually loads faster than XP, at least not without additional new hardware.
While gaming performance is suffering due to the changes to the underpinning of Vista, general performance does fare a little better.
| General Performance | |||
| XP | Vista x86 | Vista x64 | |
| Cinebench 9.5 (Rendering) |
363 | 347 | 340/376 |
| Cinebench 9.5 (OpenGL shading) |
3934 | 2613 | 2330/2499 |
| Adobe Photoshop CS2 (seconds) |
220 | 243.7 | 235.5 |
| AutoGK Encoding (Xvid 1.1 - seconds) |
1040 | 1141 | 1094 |
Overall, performance under Vista is still below that of XP, but again due to the debugging system in place, we have no way of knowing just how much of this is Vista being artificially held back by it. With the exception of the OpenGL shading score of Cinebench, which again highlights the poor performance of the current video implementation on Vista, nothing else is doing too poorly on Vista compared to XP. Vista x86 comes in behind XP in everything, but these scores are much more encouraging than the gaming scores, and they suggest that any performance deficiencies will be sorted out by the time Vista goes gold.
As for Vista x64, specifically on Cinebench which is our only 64-bit-enabled benchmark, Vista x64 actually pulls ahead of both Vista x86 and XP, showcasing the potential of x64 when used intelligently. We're also seeing the same general quirks of running 32-bit software on a 64-bit version of Windows: it performs slightly better than on the equivalent 32-bit version at times.
Startup Times
We also tested the boot times for a clean install of each operating system, using a stopwatch to see how long it took for the OS to boot to the point where it presented a usable login screen.
| Operating System Boot Time | |||
| XP | Vista x86 | Vista x64 | |
| Time in seconds | 30 | 48 | 73 |
It shouldn't come as a surprise that Vista took longer than XP to boot, if only because it's a much bigger OS overall than XP. Compared to the boot times for XP, Vista x86 takes a full 60% longer to boot up than XP, and while in absolute terms this is only 18 seconds for an activity that will be happening rarely, it's still disappointingly long. Vista x64 in turn is in a category all of its own with 73 seconds, nearly the amount of time it would take to boot Vista x86 and XP combined. Because of the WOW64 translation layer, it's not a stretch to say that Vista x64 is really loading 2 operating systems anyhow, but anything over a minute is an unacceptably long period of time to wait on just the operating system to boot, and this is not even factoring in the time it takes for a user account to load.
We'll take a look at this again when the final versions of Vista ship, but it's not likely that boot performance will be able to improve to the point where Vista actually loads faster than XP, at least not without additional new hardware.
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shamgar03 - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
"3) final verdict? same as it ever was -- i'll be running vista for games and linux for programming. and since i've recently been bitten by the switch bug, os x for everything else."Ditto
darkdemyze - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Personally I'm excited to see where Vista is going. But I still myself in the same position as stated above ^CSMR - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
What has OS got to do with programming?Pirks - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
The guy's obviously coding some Linux stuff - do you want him to code stuff in cygwin on Vista? I don't think he's THIS kind of pervert, now is he? :))fikimiki - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
AMD will replace Intel, Linux is going to replace Windows.Microsoft is close to death, Bill is gone, Ballmer is crazy.
They are going to make this system usable with SP3 working on Athlon64 16000+ (which is just 4x4000) acting as a fast turtle....
Pirks - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
and Mesa 3D is going to replace DX10 - woohoo man keep this stuff coming, you're doin' great :))stash - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
lol close to death, and yet they somehow find a way to ring up a billion (with a B) dollars in profit every single MONTH.Xenoid - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
BEWARE THE MAN WITH THE TINFOIL HATTHE WORLD IS ENDING!
darkdemyze - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
lol gg.I think some people need to get a grip..
sprockkets - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
1. Nice fade into the desktop.2. I'm sure they'll make new sounds and music, otherwise, it sadly is a new UI with and old annoying XP theme.
3. Still can't use anything other than .wav for sounds? Why?
4. Everything is all over the place, yet the classics are still there if you need it.
5. Finally, an all GUI installer. Welcome to the rest of the world haha.
6. Instead of asking for permission all the time, why not allow the control panel to open, then ask, then do not ask again when using anything in it?
7. Like mentioned, why make it so hard to hide the turn off button? Stupid.
8. It will take getting used to. Might as well switch to a Mac or even Linux, because you will be spending effort to get used to the differences. "Where is the start menu? No display properties? OK, it is personalize. Where did all the usual menus go? "
9. Funny, doing a file download in IE7 shows a nice progress bar, with the old as hell earth graphic with the flying piece of paper into the folder with the little red crash mark. Couldn't think of anything to replace it, or feeling nostolgic?
10. Major annoyances gone with fresh new ones.
11. Usual Microsoft behavior: Change for the sake of change (that damn power button!)
Other thoughts: Yeah, OSX officially runs on x86 hardware, as long as it has an Apple logo on it. We did it to not have to worry about drivers and such. Yeah, as if you don't both have the same Intel chipset to support.
Sometimes in Xp you cannot burn unless you are an Admin. I couldn't even run Asus Probe for whatever reason, and all it does is check for temps and such.
Is Expose the same as the new compiz and XGL?