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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
75 Comments
View All Comments
rqle - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
dont really need bad memory module, overclock the memory just a tad bit to give errors while keeping the cpu clock constant or known stable clock.JarredWalton - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
That still only works if the memory fails. Plenty of DIMMs can handle moderate overclocks. Anyway, it's not a huge deal I don't think - something that can sometimes prove useful if you're experiencing instabilities and think the RAM is the cause, but even then I've had DIMMs fail MemTest86 when it turned out the be a motherboard issue... or simply bad timings in the BIOS.PrinceGaz - Saturday, June 17, 2006 - link
Erm, no. Just overclock and/or use tighter-timings on a known good module beyond the point at which it is 100% stable. It might still seem okay in general usage but Memtest86 will spot problems with it. Now see if Vista's memory tester also spots problems with it. Pretty straightforward to test.xFlankerx - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
I love how I was browsing the website, and I just refresh the page, and there's a brand new article there...simply amazing.xFlankerx - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Masterful piece of work though. Excellent Job.