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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dev0lution - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
I'd happily boot into Vista everyday if all of my hardware devices would work. Not MS's fault, but rather my fault for buying a smaller manufacturer's product who has yet to post even beta drivers.In combination with Office 207 Beta2 and IE 7, Vista x86 has run fine and rather stable for me. It does tend to eat up a bit of memory, but I should probably add another GB anyhow. If I could just solve a couple app related problems and get Media Center (and MC remote) to change the channel on my set top box, I wouldn't be running from my MCE disk much at all anymore.
I kind of like the new layout and explorer...
RogueSpear - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
I've had been using Vista on one of my computers until shortly after the Beta 2 was released for public consumption. Once I saw that there was no appreciable improvements in that release, I finally decided to revert back to the relative comfort and superior performance of XP. First off, I have nightmares when I think of the mass confusion that will ensue among the mass of computer neophytes that are just now getting over the adjustment from moving off of 98/ME to XP. These will be trying days for help desk staff and even those are the "computer guy" in their family.More importantly, changes that are allegedly substantial, seem to me more cosmetic than anything. Yes, I realize that there are a lot of serious changes under the hood, but the benefits you can see and touch appear very superficial at best. This seems like an extreme makeover in an attempt to get people signed up for even more pervasive and hideous DRM. I know I'm living in the past, but I'll always be nostalgic for the days when my computer was actually my computer and the software/media I paid for were mine to use as I saw fit.
Pirks - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
I noticed this sentence: "As currently implemented, UAC surpasses Tiger's security features by giving more information about what application is requesting privilege escalation" Could you please elaborate a little on what "more information" exactly Vista provides in UAC dialogs that Tiger does NOT provide?From my experience Tiger gives the same information, I probably misunderstood you on that, could you please explain in more detail?
johnsonx - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Ok, these two sentences seem contradictory. First you say you don't know if 32-bit and 64-bit versions will come on the same disc with an installer that can pick correctly, then in the next sentence you say the installer will pick based on product key because both versions will use the same install media.
So which is it, or there there something I'm not getting?
Ryan Smith - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
There's something you're not getting. A disc can install any variation of Vista(e.g. 1 disc can install Home Basic x86, Home Premium x86, Ultimate x86, etc); it can only install that bit-version of Vista however.DerekWilson - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
it is difficult to say ... i think three different editors mucked around with that sentence :-)to try a different angle, both of these are true statements:
1) the x86 disk can install any x86 version of vista
2) the x64 disk can install any x64 version of vista
dhei - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
When you can, do a test to see how well they redid it please. Someone told me this would be noticable on those with broadband easily, not just LAN or network tests. Im really intrested in this aspect, though not sure how to really test it.Did you try a LAN benchmark vs winxp to see if any diffrence?
Ryan Smith - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
We did not do that, it was already a 12k word article + the time to run the benchmarks we did use. We'll be taking a much heavier look at performance once we have a final version of Vista to look at.Pirks - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
and read this while you're at it:http://developer.apple.com/internet/security/secur...">http://developer.apple.com/internet/security/secur...
You can minimize the risk of a network service being used to attack your machine by using the firewall built into Mac OS X. Called ipfw, it can prevent potential attackers from reaching these services. As of Mac OS X 10.2, Apple has included a simple GUI for configuring ipfw. The GUI is good for adding simple rules to your machine; more complex rules will require you to use either the command line tools for manipulating the firewall, or a third-party GUI that has more features.
Ryan, do you know what BSD ipfw is? It blows any XP firewall to ashes, Vista is only pathetic attempt to get to its level (well hopefully MS will get something similar in Vista, I really hope they do)
Also read this: http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/brickhous...">http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/brickhous...
That's another GUI to configure ipfw in OSX.
Otherwise an excellent article, I'm impatiently wait for your review of the final Vista release, but please don't do such stupid mistakes again, Mac boys will hack and slash you for that ;-)
"it's time for a full featured firewall for Windows and Mac OS X alike, and only the former has it" - what a funny lie :-) Please read about OSX ipfw (I gave you a couple of links) and fix it ASAP. Thanks.
Ryan Smith - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
I'm aware of IPFW, and what it can do(and boy is it nice!). But this is a competition among what the two OS's can do on their own, without significant intervention from the user. Out of the box, Vista's firewall is a full-featured firewall that can block inbound and outbound connections. Tiger's firewall can't do the latter, and in the age of spyware(and as you saw in our spyware test), it's sometimes the last thing keeping spyware and other malware from breaking out.Tiger may not have significant malware problems at this point, but there's no good reason why it(and more so Leopard) shouldn't have outbound protection too.