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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Squidward - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Having beta tested Windows XP when it was released, I have to say that so far I'm not very impressed with Vista. Granted there is still quite some time before final release but even with RC1 of XP it was a rock solid stable OS that I used as my full time OS and never had any issues whatsoever (especially security cause no one was writing viruses and malware for it back then). Quite frankly I don't see how the beta 2 I've been looking at and the final polished out the door product is going to happen in 7 months for a Jan. launch. The real problem however lies in the fact that I know I will move up to Vista at some point, but not because it's a better OS than XP but that I'll be hindered by continuing to use an older operating system. I just haven't seen anything in it yet that made me go. "Now that's the kind of feature I've been needing!", and the few features that did make me feel that way were removed to be implemented 'at a later date'. Fancy graphical effects are nice and all, but they don't make an OS. As it stands in the betas the UAC feature is just a complete hinderance that to me seems to punish the end user because of security risks that are out there. The end user shouldn't get a pop up on every single application or item they open to be sure it's 'safe'. There are far better means of controlling permissions within an OS that would have made a lot more sense that what we have now with UAC. That being said, I believe in time and with Microsoft really listening to customer feedback they'll work out a lot of the kinks, but I won't consider purchasing Vista until they do... or force me to upgrade. :)Pirks - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Besides this thing being early beta, also keep in mind that it's not a cosmetic chaneg akin to upgrade from W2k to XP or from OSX 10.3 to 10.4 - this is a major OS overhaul not too far from migration from 9x to NT, of course early beta of such a grand release will be total crap (at least for many people, but some others seem to enjoy it a lot). So, comparing this early beta release to XP release candidate is indeed pretty stupid. I don't even expect Vista release to be 100% usable out of the box, ESPECIALLY x64 version - Vista 64 will take another year or two to mature, get drivers/apps ready and such. And you should also keep in mind that MS is in a big hurry to avoid Apple to chop its balls off - some more delay and you'll see Apple market share well over 10% which is pretty dangerous to MS if they wanna keep enjoying their desktop x86 OS monopoly status. Hence MS does stuff quickly, cuts off features and will probably release something buggy just to avoid serious threat from Apple. Expect something usable only after SP1 and give it at least a year - in a meantime read some rumours about Leopard and salivate a little - that'll keep you going ;-))Yet another nice point - you think MS will sit still and let Leopard to chew its (MS's) private parts with impunity? I doubt that - MS will very likely release those nice sweet WinFS and other toys there were promising for years and integrate them in the next Vista release (I hope Leopard or whatever Mr. Jobs is up to isn't going to eat that for lunch - 'cause WinFS is the last hope for MS, really - DX10 won't count, too small a market it seems). So, in two years or maybe earlier you'll get those new sexy features you want, I believe... well, Apple could probably beat MS's ass here again, which is even more likely judging how well Apple devs were performing so far, so maybe you won't be interested in Vista at all - OS scene moves very fast - bang bang and u'r dead :) Especially now when Ballmer replaced BG - I'm worried, I don't quite trust Ballmer and Ozzie and others - ol' Bill was da man, not sure Vista survives w/o him when his archrival Jobs is only started to accelerate before real takeoff (Leopard?), but we'll see, we'll see...
Oh, interesting, tell stupid us what is this "far better means of controlling permissions within an OS" instead of annoying ugly UAC, this must be something revolutionary and ingenious - maybe MS will pay you big bucks for that, who knows ;-))
ChronoReverse - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
You tested RC1 of XP. Release Candidate 1.This is BETA 2 of Vista. Maybe when they release RC1 of Vista you can compare again.
Frallan - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Well i found 1 thing to be more interesting then the rest: Gaming Perfomance!!That means that at least til the games I want to play are DX10 combined with the fact that DX10 games get better results im going to stax with my XP.
Sorry M$
/F
Googer - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
There are so many versions and the feature sets will confuse most of us.Here is a screen shot from Paul Thurott's Win Super Site.
http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/Googer/Windows_Vista_...">Windows Vista Versions.
Ryan Smith - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Keep in mind that that's an old chart. Small Business Edition no longer exists, and Professional is now Business Edition.Googer - Saturday, June 17, 2006 - link
Thanks forthe update. Here is the now silghtly out of date chart but still has some usefull information.http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_edit...">http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_edit...
slashbinslashbash - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Page 8, "regulated" should be "relegated"Also in the same sentence, "Superfetc.h" (which might not be a typo)
A 14-page article with 2 minor problems.... The quality ratio here at AT just kills DailyTech.... please impose AT quality control on DailyTech!
JarredWalton - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Fixed - DT runs a lot of short, quick articles, and unfortunately that means they get more typos and errors. Anyway, since they are a separate entity, there's not much we can do. Feel free to post and tell them, though, but remember they're looking at probably 10X as many press releases as we do. LOLDerekWilson - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
1) vista is perfectly capable of being a stable light weight desktop system (with some quirks) at the beta 2 stage ... but try to do anything fast or power hungry and you'd be better off sticking with xp until vista is released. right now, at beta 2, vista is a neat toy. don't try to use it for everything.2) after all the spit an polish dries, i will still prefer os x to vista
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.