Windows XP vs. Vista: The Benchmark Rundown

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As an engineer using Solidworks and with friends using UGS, Pro/E, etc. I will have to warn all of my engineering friends and colleagues to AVOID Vista at all costs. I will also try to warn the purchasing managers to avoid purchasing Vista systems as it will significantly hinder professional engineering work.

What an abysmal decision by Microsoft, many engineers will surely end up with Vista systems trying to run Open GL specific CAD/Analysis software and they will suffer for it unknowingly. I suspect there will be a strong backlash from the engineering/professional community.

chart11.gif


Though OpenGL can be run, it takes a MASSIVE performance hit. Apparently there may be a driver directly from OpenGL that will offer superior performance but it will not be installed with windows so most users will still not know to add this driver to obtain reasonable OpenGL performance.
 
honestly. Software developers should be legally obliged to publish something like a Good Faith Estimate when releasing new products. So instead of being told to "sit back and enjoy while a faster and more reliable version of windows is being installed" you actually find out what you're in for
 
Define "fine". They recommend at LEAST a 128 MB card for vista, with 2 gigs of ram as well. If you ask me thats quite a bit higher than the 256 or whatever that XP recommended. What i think he was trying to say was in order to get the best performance you need to start upgrading to higher end components.
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The minimum specification for Vista is:

800 MHz processor
512 MB of RAM
20 GB hard drive with 15 GB of free space

If you want the fancy interface you'll need also a DirectX 9 compatible card with 128 MB. Which isn't any hard to get or expensive part.

These are the recommended requirements from MS site:

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space

Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:
WDDM Driver
128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware
32 bits per pixel

It's more than Win XP, but this one also only runs smoothly with 1 GB of RAM.
 
OpenAL does work on my system, and I am waiting on ATI to release some good drivers for openGL. true it is kind of messed up, but the way they wrote the new interaction, it kinda screwed over opengl support. but it can be run.


also, DRM is something that the RIAA, MPAA and all the others came up with, Microsoft is throwing in support for it so you can play back Bluray, HD-DVD, protected content etc. it HAS NO BEARING ON OTHER MEDIA. I repeat, I can play back my entire media library with no problems! sides, bluray and hd-dvd have already been cracked. on the other hand, I wouldnt mind seeing it bite the dust. 😉

overhead? I will throw up a screenshot, but right now at idle I am using 1-5% cpu and 842MB memory on a E6400 and 2 gigs of ram with all the aero stuff on full and basic background apps. a little more memory than XP but imho it is a tad snappier.

Overall I am not displeased with Vista, and I am hoping that the other vendors get off their bums and actually write some drivers that are worth there two bits. 😛
 
i got my free copy of Vista Business from partaking in the PowerTogether program. I'm still not sure of it I like parts of it, but then theres others i don't.

My System:
AMD Athlon X2 3800+ (939)
X1900 AIW (only using Radeon Beta Drivers)
Audigy 2 ZS (Beta drivers)
2gb of DDR400
160gb of HDD space
my system scored a 4.2

I am having very few issues running apps, i haven't tried many games yet, i can say though Chess Titans (included), doesn't render with my GPU, its odd. I do have oocassional Audio Spikes of static when playing a game, or using Windows Media Player.

I've installed
Office 2003 Pro.
Civilization 4
IceChat (IRC)
AIM Lite
Combined Community Codec Pack
Daemon Tools
Firefox

I will be Installing
Photoshop CS2
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5
Macromedia Studio 8
can't remember the other apps i use at home.
 
These are the recommended requirements from MS site:

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space


It's more than Win XP, but this one also only runs smoothly with 1 GB of RAM.
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Setting aside 15GB and 1GB RAM is a freaking amount just for the OS. That screams "bloated code" in any language.
 
Fcuk sony
Fcuk drm
Fcuk vista

When I see stability and performance increasing in all other OSs, demanding even less on the hardware we use, makes me feel like taking a crap at the microsoft's main door.
 
These are the recommended requirements from MS site:

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space


It's more than Win XP, but this one also only runs smoothly with 1 GB of RAM.
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Setting aside 15GB and 1GB RAM is a freaking amount just for the OS. That screams "bloated code" in any language.

Maybe, but then, there are tons of applicatives out there that take a huge amount of space in disk and memory (Battlefield 2 for instance takes about 700 MB on memory with all features set to max, and the Rational developer's plataform install files are 10 GB - installed are about 15 GB), and nobody seems to make much of an issue because of that.

Also, I found this review from Firingsquad that seems to be quite contradictory with THG review:

http://firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_performance_amd_catalyst_7.1/

Fortunately it looks like AMD is well on their way to making Vista a seamless upgrade from the driver perspective. While we did note a few titles with sluggish performance (F.E.A.R. and Half-Life 2 Lost Coast being the most notable), we were honestly surprised to register as many performance improvements as we saw, particularly with the Radeon X1950 XTX and surprisingly enough, with the Radeon X1650 XT as well.
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For the people that are complaining about how much space Vista takes up on the hard drive, keep in mind that hard drives have increased in capacity as well. You can get a 250gb hard drive for 70 bucks. What percentage of the drive does vista use, now the computers commonly come with 160gb and greater drives? What percentage did XP use when computers were shipping with 20gb and 40gb hard drives? I really don't think the storage space is an issue.

On a separate note, when are we ever going to start seeing 64bit and multithreaded applications? Come on you lazy programmers, earn your money!
 
We already know that Windows Vista offers tremendous improvements in usability, but isn't that good a choice for gaming - at least not yet. How is its application performance compared to Windows XP?
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Nice article. I don't mind some of the necessary tweaking used as it was mostly focused on getting consistent benchmarks re: file-caching.

I would have preferred to see something on the impact that Ultimate should provide with its ability to 'really' support multiple core dispatching... maybe in a quick follow-on article?

Joe
 
On a separate note, when are we ever going to start seeing 64bit and multithreaded applications? Come on you lazy programmers, earn your money!
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Those who earn their money are working for linux and apple :)
 
You don't need a "heavy" cpu or cpu to run Vista. With a 128 mb video card and a athlon xp you'll run it fine.
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Here's the stupid joke of the day: if there was before Athlon XP will AMD lauch the new "Athlon Vista" cpu? ...
My jokes are getting worst everyday... 🙂
 
For me other than DX10 there is no other "feature" in Vista that i want/need that XP does not have already.
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Well, IMO Vista has some nice things besides DX10:
- the nice looking "Eros" interface (finally my $300 graphic card will also be used beside the games);
- that interesting new tech thing that uses USB pen drives as a system accelerator (what was the name of this thing??);
- the sleep mode, which allows fast boot (not from scratch of course).

Bad things:
- DX10 that won't run on XP on purpose... :-(
- Heavier... i like to have XP as light and fast, with fast boot, the best i can configure and mantain, and now if i go for Vista i will loose all that...
- Bad benchmarking... yes, for people that care about OC and benchmarking it's really annoying despite we all know each new OS will consume more and more resources.
- Price: c'mon, $200 is too much for the common user... i'd say half of it for common user would be pretty much acceptable... :-(

Just my 2 cents.
 
"There is a lot of CPU performance available today! We've got really fast dual core processors, and even faster quad cores will hit the market by the middle of the year. Even though you will lose application performance by upgrading to Vista, today's hardware is much faster than yesterday's, and tomorrow's processors will clearly leap even further ahead."
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Wow. Make slower software because there is faster cpu's :)
When benchmarking cpus, one can declare victory by 5%, and it is a good margin for applications. With vista, you already start behind!

People work hours to get their ram timings to their optimums, yet it only makes, what, %0.5 difference in real world applications. People consider %20 overclock a good achievement, when using stock material. However, just upgrade to vista and you start encoding your mpeg's 20% slower :)

I hope my english was good enough to point out the contradiction here!
 
Bad things:

- Price: c'mon, $200 is too much for the common user... i'd say half of it for common user would be pretty much acceptable... :-(
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On this one, no problem. I got coupon discounts at thepiratebay.org eStore :wink:
 
"There is a lot of CPU performance available today! We've got really fast dual core processors, and even faster quad cores will hit the market by the middle of the year. Even though you will lose application performance by upgrading to Vista, today's hardware is much faster than yesterday's, and tomorrow's processors will clearly leap even further ahead."
Click to expand...

Wow. Make slower software because there is faster cpu's :)
When benchmarking cpus, one can declare victory by 5%, and it is a good margin for applications. With vista, you already start behind!

People work hours to get their ram timings to their optimums, yet it only makes, what, %0.5 difference in real world applications. People consider %20 overclock a good achievement, when using stock material. However, just upgrade to vista and you start encoding your mpeg's 20% slower :)

I hope my english was good enough to point out the contradiction here!

Yes, you made your point. We should apply this to game developers also.
The main thing that bugs me is the fact that they can't keep up with mac os' hardware/software performance.
 
Bad things:

- Price: c'mon, $200 is too much for the common user... i'd say half of it for common user would be pretty much acceptable... :-(
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On this one, no problem. I got coupon discounts at thepiratebay.org eStore :wink:

Pois... that is unfortunatelly the common thought for people that don't buy a computer with OS already installed on it and payed.
Windows should have accessible prices for the common user...
 
Honestly I knew the results would be like this before reading the article. Vista requires MUCH more RAM, uses lots of processing power, and that Aero graphics system really combine together to make it much more strain than Windows XP. The same thing happened with Windows 2000 and XP: XP was slower with applications compared to windows 2000, but eventually updates to software favored XP and so XP was smoother. Was this because the applications were designed primarily for XP, or was it due to improvements in XP performance and application performance in general over time? Hard to say--but one thing is certain: running Windows 2000 with 128MB of RAM is certainly much faster than running XP with 128MB of RAM, and with only 512MB of RAM Windows XP likely destroys Windows Vista as far as performance.

My guess is that once we start adapting programs more and more for Vista, it will become more evident of Vista's newer capabilities and functions, particularly with a high-end PC. Also I believe that THG is EXTREMELY misleading with this article because the Enterprise Edition of Vista is not designed for 95% of the apps they tried to run on it. Think of it as you would Windows 2000 Advanced Server vs. Windows 2000 Professional--the Server version lacks much of the OpenGL support and overall 'client' features, so it can focus on running Server type stuff, and 2000 Pro is designed for the stuff like games and such. Well, Vista Home and Vista Home Premium should be tested with games instead. Those versions will have incredibly different results, I'd bet the farm on it.
 
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