Windows Vista Update: RC1/5728 Preview
by Ryan Smith on October 3, 2006 4:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
Vista Performance
In some respects, we've been spoiled by having Windows XP for so long. At the ripe old age of 5 years, it's effectively a lightweight operating system for a modern high-end computer. Vista changes all of that, as like most other software it has grown in size to make more use of modern computing power, and no matter what optimizations Microsoft makes, that will be felt on some level. No matter what, most enthusiasts will find Vista's GUI slower than XP's, even with 3D acceleration, and this isn't likely to change with a final release.
Speaking of 3D acceleration, we've seen some improvements out of both ATI and NVIDIA, but there's still some distance to go. Neither can offer XP performance under Vista, and in the case of ATI they still aren't offering OpenGL support under Vista. Where things will be on launch day remain to be seen. We'll have complete Nvidia numbers next month when Vista ships along with Vista x64 numbers, but for now we'll be using our Radeon X1900XTX on just Vista x86.
General Performance
Under general performance, Vista is a mixed bag with one interesting result. Encoding under AutoGK with XviD is a little over a minute longer, or about 13% slower. Photoshop CS2 shows a much smaller gap at only 11 seconds, which comes out to only 5% slower. Neither of these results is really poor, but anything over 10% is a pretty stiff hit for just switching operating systems.
Moving on to Cinebench, the tables turn. Although barely enough to consider it outside of the expected experimental error range, the performance boost of just under 3% is the first sign we've seen out of these release candidates that Vista can be faster than XP. By far the most interesting result however is PCMark05 with a 23% performance improvement in favor of Vista, but we're not entirely sure what's going on. Since it's a multitasking heavy benchmark, one possibility is the changes made under the hood for Vista benefit multitasking the most, which may also explain why Cinebench did so well since it too can split its rendering jobs so well. PCMark05 also has some HDD benchmarking activities, so another possible explanation is that Vista has more optimized I/O performance. Multitasking performance in particular is something we will take a closer look at with the shipping version of Vista.
Gaming Performance
All games were tested at 1600x1200 resolution for the results below. This places a larger burden on the GPU than the CPU, but represents a common resolution for owners of high-end graphics cards. We will conduct more complete testing when the final build of Vista becomes available.
As far as gaming performance goes, the news is universally less pleasant, and sometimes even grim. 3DMark06 comes within 3% of its XP performance, but that's as close as anything gets, and since this is a synthetic benchmark that's about all that needs to be said on the subject. Half Life 2: Episode One shows the best performance out of the real games we tested, only dropping short of 10% of its performance moving to Vista without antialiasing, and even less with antialiasing enabled. Losing performance is never good, but here it doesn't impact playability at all.
Such is not the case for FEAR or Battlefield 2 however. Here the performance drops are all over 25%, the worst being FEAR with antialiasing at 40%. At this point these are large enough drops that they'll certainly impact playability, necessitating cranking down the resolution or settings in order to make up for the drop. As we've said in previous articles, hopefully performance will continue to improve, but the window between now and the launch is getting perilously small, so it seems increasingly likely that Vista gaming performance won't match (or even come close to) XP performance at launch time, at least with ATI's cards. We'll leave the question of why anyone would release a Vista-only game for you to debate.
In some respects, we've been spoiled by having Windows XP for so long. At the ripe old age of 5 years, it's effectively a lightweight operating system for a modern high-end computer. Vista changes all of that, as like most other software it has grown in size to make more use of modern computing power, and no matter what optimizations Microsoft makes, that will be felt on some level. No matter what, most enthusiasts will find Vista's GUI slower than XP's, even with 3D acceleration, and this isn't likely to change with a final release.
Speaking of 3D acceleration, we've seen some improvements out of both ATI and NVIDIA, but there's still some distance to go. Neither can offer XP performance under Vista, and in the case of ATI they still aren't offering OpenGL support under Vista. Where things will be on launch day remain to be seen. We'll have complete Nvidia numbers next month when Vista ships along with Vista x64 numbers, but for now we'll be using our Radeon X1900XTX on just Vista x86.
General Performance
| General Application Performance | ||
| Vista 5728 | XP SP2 | |
| PCMark05 | 4814 | 3901 |
| Cinebench Multi-CPU Rendering | 669 | 651 |
| AutoGK Encoding(XviD 1.2SMP) | 13:36 | 11:59 |
| Adobe Photoshop CS2(in seconds) | 215.1 | 204 |
Under general performance, Vista is a mixed bag with one interesting result. Encoding under AutoGK with XviD is a little over a minute longer, or about 13% slower. Photoshop CS2 shows a much smaller gap at only 11 seconds, which comes out to only 5% slower. Neither of these results is really poor, but anything over 10% is a pretty stiff hit for just switching operating systems.
Moving on to Cinebench, the tables turn. Although barely enough to consider it outside of the expected experimental error range, the performance boost of just under 3% is the first sign we've seen out of these release candidates that Vista can be faster than XP. By far the most interesting result however is PCMark05 with a 23% performance improvement in favor of Vista, but we're not entirely sure what's going on. Since it's a multitasking heavy benchmark, one possibility is the changes made under the hood for Vista benefit multitasking the most, which may also explain why Cinebench did so well since it too can split its rendering jobs so well. PCMark05 also has some HDD benchmarking activities, so another possible explanation is that Vista has more optimized I/O performance. Multitasking performance in particular is something we will take a closer look at with the shipping version of Vista.
Gaming Performance
All games were tested at 1600x1200 resolution for the results below. This places a larger burden on the GPU than the CPU, but represents a common resolution for owners of high-end graphics cards. We will conduct more complete testing when the final build of Vista becomes available.
| Gaming/Graphics Performance | ||
| Vista 5728 | XP SP2 | |
| 3DMark06 | 5615 | 5798 |
| Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (No AA) | 94.4 | 103.6 |
| Half-Life 2: Episode 1 (4x AA) | 84.49 | 86.4 |
| Battlefield 2 (No AA) | 55.1 | 77.96 |
| Battlefield 2 (4x AA) | 52 | 77.11 |
| FEAR (No AA) | 52 | 70 |
| FEAR (4x AA) | 32 | 52 |
As far as gaming performance goes, the news is universally less pleasant, and sometimes even grim. 3DMark06 comes within 3% of its XP performance, but that's as close as anything gets, and since this is a synthetic benchmark that's about all that needs to be said on the subject. Half Life 2: Episode One shows the best performance out of the real games we tested, only dropping short of 10% of its performance moving to Vista without antialiasing, and even less with antialiasing enabled. Losing performance is never good, but here it doesn't impact playability at all.
Such is not the case for FEAR or Battlefield 2 however. Here the performance drops are all over 25%, the worst being FEAR with antialiasing at 40%. At this point these are large enough drops that they'll certainly impact playability, necessitating cranking down the resolution or settings in order to make up for the drop. As we've said in previous articles, hopefully performance will continue to improve, but the window between now and the launch is getting perilously small, so it seems increasingly likely that Vista gaming performance won't match (or even come close to) XP performance at launch time, at least with ATI's cards. We'll leave the question of why anyone would release a Vista-only game for you to debate.
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kristof007 - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
Oh my God I have such a good laugh at that. I saw some Halo 2 vids for PC in some montage video and it looked pretty smooth. I'd say above 40fps but with this article I am sure your going to need like Quad-SLI setup or comparable to run it smooth and high res (1900x1200) or greater.
Locutus465 - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
My experience with vista RC-1 hasn't been that pleasent over all... Firstly, still no support for the Promise Ultra100TX controller card at all, which saddens me greatly. Secondly, whether I did something to mess it up or not I am not sure. But for sone reason I have no optical drive support in my RC-1. I was messing around with nVidia's pre-release vista platform drivers, so perhaps that is a part of the issue. Also, support for doom was absolutly horrendous for my system (running Gefore 7800GT). It appeared to me that there was absolutly no HW openGL rendering. Again, perhaps I messed something up with drives, though I did install the latest available Vista64 build on nVidia's website.Perhaps the 32bit version of vista is just much father ahead of the 64b version in terms of driver support and maturity. If this is the case, then I am rather conserned. MS is trying to move the world to 64b wtih vista, and I would love to join them. But not if it means destroying my already working Windows XP system.
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
Unfortunately, Nvidia has dropped the ball with the OGL icd for Vista. ATi, however, has released a working one.OpenGL works fine in Vista just like XP. MS just doesn't ship a driver since that's the job of the video card vendors. When Nvidia and ATi both get their drivers complete, MS will include a WHQL qualified driver with Vista, but you'll still want to update it.
Locutus465 - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
Yeah, but what is weird is that when I tried Beta 2 the drivers worked much better. Doom 3 wasn't fast by any means, but playable, and it looked like doom 3. It seems to me almost as if MS took a step backwards with the driver situation with RC-1. I'm waiting with bated breath for RC-2 on friday. I want to see how RC-2 compares.ChronoReverse - Thursday, October 5, 2006 - link
Well, considering that MS aren't the ones writing drivers, I hardly see why they're to blame. Thay've practically been screaming at the manufacturer to make them Vista drivers =/mmp121 - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
The article states:
Yet never expands on what the video issues are, or even HINTS at what they might be related to. Are the video issues driver related, video playback related, gaming related, what?
Clarification would be GREATLY appreciated.
theprodigalrebel - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
It's the game benchmarks. As much as 40% performance hit (in FEAR @ 1600x1200 with 4X AA). I too would like a clarification on who is to blame for this: 1) Windows Vista 2) ATi's Driver Team.I'm assuming it is a driver-related issue which ATi will most definitely resolve by the time Vista's released. If there was something fundamentally wrong with Vista itself, then 3DMark results wouldn't be near identical to the XP results.
kristof007 - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
I am REALLY hoping it's as simple as a newer (better) patch from ATI. I think it would be doable. We can see patches coming out pretty regularly adding value and features to our existing hardware. So hopefully as said above, the ATI driver should fix things. Did they test with nVidia and look for discrepancies?nullpointerus - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
When I ran F.E.A.R. on Vista RC1, the game had massive stuttering every second or so at 800x600 0xAA 4xAF high quality on an EVGA 7900 GT KO. An old 2D/3D RPG that I had lying around got massive framerate improvements - IOW, it became playable! - simply by moving it to an XP SP2 install with a lowly 6200 TC-256 card. There are definitely major problems for the Vista driver teams to fix. And I still can't get any sound out of my Audigy...gaesaekkiya - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
I think Windows2000 is the most powerful, reasonable Operating System of MS products'.Comparing OSs performances, please, include windows2000, too.
Thank kou.