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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Griswold - Friday, October 6, 2006 - link
What a pathetic comment.flexy - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
lol at your reply :)I am NOT going into the age-long debate "Ati has so bad drivers" discussion anymore...we could've had that YEARS ago in Radon 8500 times...now your biased blahblah just hasn't any base and just shows you're a n00b :)
VooDooAddict - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
I wish taht the article expanded more on the issue of lack of Hardware sound processing for older games.imaheadcase - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
Basicly put (someone correct me if im wrong here) MS moved away from all hardware based rendering of sound and put it into the OS. Im guessing its a directx 10 thing is why they did it..but Im sure Creative is pissed.Missing Ghost - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
If creative is pissed than it must be a good thing.michal1980 - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
creative sucking or not. M$ taking away ALL and ANY hardware accelration for games SUCKS.Creatives solution/monoloply is not the best, but given the fact that in general (90%) of the people buying an extra sound card do so for gaming, and creative for better or worse has 100% of the gaming market, locking creative out is a BAD thing.
So we had problems with creative and there drivers and bloat.
Answer me this? what do we have now? A M$ controled SOFTWARE SOUND SOLUTION!!!. EAX is not perfect, but alot of games use it, and when the do, it is GOOD!.
Now were are left with ONBOARD Sound!!!. YAAA thats a step in the right direction? phhhf sorry hardware sound, even creative owns most onboard sound solutions. (Yes there was sound storm, but that was generations ago now).
I'm not a creative fan-boy, I wish there was more then one 'real' sound card for gamers.
BUT I WOULD RATHER HAVE A CREATIVE SOUND CARD DOING EAX, THEN HAVING SOFTWARE SOUND ONLY.
Be a fanboi, Hate Creative. But this is not good for sound. (and yes there are ways around it, be geez, M$ just KILLED creative).
And yes creative knew about it for a long time. However I don't know if they really saw what happened until way too late.
So you Creative Haters, You won, lets all enjoy crappy on-board sound now!. YAAA, on board is soo cool.
squeezee - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
Basically they've changed the whole audio subsystem completely. As part of this change they have also moved DirectSound3D to a pure software implementation with no way for the hardware to directly interact with it. This is particularly effects games which use Directsound and EAX since the EAX effects are performed in hardware.However other APIs can still take advantage of hardware acceleration, such as OpenAL.
flexy - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
well..giggle..the creative programmers get PAID for writing drivers, right ? :)New APIs/implementations need new drivers, maybe even new HW if the old one is not capable. This is NOT necessarely a BAD thing !
Hulk - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
Because right now that seems like the only reason to consider upgrading. And even then we're going to have to wait for the "64 bitness" to show us some goods.Then again I've resisted every MS OS update and when I've finally updated I always wished I'd done it sooner!
Spoelie - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
Vista comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit flavors, you can choose which one you install.I also resisted switching before, but never really regretted it ;). I'm guessing Vista won't get on here before the first service pack - the gaming performance and mem usage is too horrid at the moment. Or maybe that'll get fixed with better drivers / tweak guides.