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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
60 Comments
View All Comments
Spinne - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
No offense to the Anandtech team and Ryan, but that article was a little too light. Considering that Anandtech doesn't write about Vista builds very often, I expected more! For one thing, when you mention a feature or a change from the previous build, don't just mention it, ELABORATE! Not all of us have the time toi beta test the RC builds and sometimes we just weren't aware of the feature/change you've just glossed over. A case in point being MS's dropping hardware EAX. I'd never heard that they'd be doing this, and so either don't mention it in your article (save it for your next article), or do an Anandtech style job, not a glossy PC magazine type effort.michal1980 - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
i'm with you on the WAY TOO LIGHT.after the great write ups about apple recently. This close to a major os release, we are hearing whispers
LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
According to what I have read, the November release of Vista is supposed to be the Enterprise versions only. Versions for non-corporate users are not supposed to be available until 2007; Microsoft is hoping to use this time to fix issues pertinent to home users as well as to provide time for OEMs to come up with better drivers for their hardware for home users' graphics/sound/etc.Keep this in mind, because that's why MS is waiting to address any gaming/enthusiast issues, which aren't necessary for the corporate editions of Vista, so they're not considered pressing at the moment.
That said, the disappearance of hardware Directsound3D acceleration and EAX really bothers me, and if Vista causes me to lose that, it is yet another reason not to use Vista on my primary machine. One of the primary reasons I even use a Creative Labs card is for this, and to offload from the CPU, as well as some of the neat effects EAX provides when done right.
ChronoReverse - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
Likely the rationale behind this (which I don't like but understand because of the changes to the entire audio subsystem) is that since dual-core will soon be the norm, it'll be an easy way to use the additional cores.Furthermore, I don't really see any reason why new audio card designs cannot provide acceleration again. It's really the current generation that isn't designed to account for it. But time will tell on this hopeful guess.
mostlyprudent - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
Serious reduction in gaming audio performance ability + increased burden on the GPU = Poor gaming experiencee = Sell more Xbox 360s. GRRRRRR!LOL...Sorry, but I think every article on an MS product needs a conspiracy theory in the comments!
flexy - Thursday, October 5, 2006 - link
>>>increased burden on the GPU
>>>
i love how some people see things from a different point of view :)
ONE person defines it as
"Some tasks are offloaded to the GPU now to take the burden off the CPU"
while another person sees it as "increased burden for the GPU"
BUT THEN...what's the big deal ?
OF COURSE new GUI features (like the 3d windows flipper) will burden the GPU...you will get nothing for free..of course.
Nevertheless you could ALWAYS disable the new windows-management and go classic (if so desired)...IN FACT as mentioned multiple times) people could VERY WELL tweak down Vista A LOT, starting w/ disabling services, turning off spyware scanner. set to classic GUI ----> MINIMAL
BUT THERE IS NO POINT !
You dont go out and buy a $250 OS w/ XYZ new features and then disable all features due to a lack of memory or scared it would use too much resources.
Either GO VISTA and be aware that new features/processes/programs WILL use more mem/CPU/GPU....or just stick w/ XP and save some coins til you can buy an addtional stick of memory. ?
The other "hardware requirements" are really only a myth....Dx10 gfxcard requirement is a myth, and every $499 off-the shelf computer from CompUSA/BestBUY/Dell already has a decent CPU...ALTHOUGH i am positive there will be again many "complete" systems sold w/ Vista installed with RIDICULOUS low amount of memory...eg. 512MB with the option to "upgrade" which (of course) would HIGHLY be recommended :)
ChronoReverse - Thursday, October 5, 2006 - link
And it's not like the GPU is doing anything under normal usage. When a game requests fullscreen mode, the GPU will then dedicate everything to the game. It's not a hard concept.withalacrity - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
For many upgrading to VISTA will require hardware upgrades. After all is said and done, after the expense of the hardware, after the expense of the new OS, it comes down to performance. The performance indicators shown in this article rhetorically ask the question: what is the point of upgrading?stmok - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
To get you to spend money, of course!
...And hence, make the hardware manufacturers happy!
Windows users should be well in-tuned with the general pattern by now!
=> With every new release of a new Windows, you must upgrade your system or buy a new one.
Nailer - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
Ryan,Could you please update the article with the Windows Vista RC2/5743 build, which will be released on Friday? This will be the final interim build released to the public before RTM therefore I would expect a high level of anticipation with respect to the performance of this build.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4409">Windows Vista RC2 Coming This Friday