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.
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yxalitis - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
intersting, the first thign I did wiht Vista X64, is to compare Half Life 2 Lost Coast timedemos between the X64 versions of Windows XP and Vista. I found a MASSive improvement, quite repeatable, at the highest quality settings at 1600 X 1200 on an ASUS p5W deluxe running an X1800 XT. I mean 68 fps compared to 48 in XP.I wonde if Anand and tema would consider doing an X64 comparison. I have lived in teh X64 world for some time now, and therefore have all the XP X64 drivers I need to install all my hardware! This is a far cry from Windows 2000, wheere ti was like it or lump it! (New HP scanner anyone? Creative sound cards? Forget it!)
flexy - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
wait 4,5,6 months, say, spring next year.We will have Vista and hopefully new and better drivers, and new DX10 cards from ATI and Nvidia.
Until then performance-enthusiasts can stay with XP..it's not that someone gets FORCED to go Vista, especillay since some drivers and 3rd party apps still need some maturity. Just be patient.
As for right now...i got Vista 5728 64bit and i am VERY please despites MINOR quirks (say: CREATIVE Audigy :)...i dont have reason to think negative, instead positive....things need a while to mature.
And then in a few months load up Crysis under Vista w/ a DX10 card and noone will complain anyore :)
mgambrell - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
The compatibility score would drop through the floor if they tested the 64bit version of vista. It's got nothing to do with the 64bitness--I am comparing to XP-64. The 64 bit version forbids unsigned drivers from loading, which while this may be eventually resolved by all the indie developers, for now means no daemon tools and no ultramon.Be very careful with 64bit vista, it has disadvantages when compared to xp-64
yxalitis - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
I disagree, are you using RC1, or Vista beta? I loaded all my hardware using various unsigned drivers, including my Epson RX510. I am fairly certain Microsoft dropped that requirement from RC1, because I have read it in lots of forum posts, but never encounterd any problems.ProviaFan - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
I'm using Vista RC1 (build 5600) x64, and it still seems to have the signed driver requirement. You can select to disable signed drivers temporarily for one boot from the F8 boot options menu, but under normal operation Vista will prevent my Gretag Macbeth Eye-one drivers from loading (said drivers work perfectly in XP x64, naturally).mgambrell - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
Hamachi too. i was just reminded of that by a hamachi update which said they added driver signing. so hopefully this stuff will begin soon.yacoub - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
With this many years to develop it, it is not at all unreasonable to expect IMPROVED performance, not equal and especially not lesser performance. Totally unacceptable.ChronoReverse - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
When was the last time a new OS was released that ran significantly faster on the same hardware?I can only think of WinXP boot time and even then only the usual case compared with Win98.
mgambrell - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
Well personally I expect more robustness, capabilities, and security. That stuff all comes at the cost of speed. I absolutely do not expect several years of development in an OS to improve process startup time. I expect the process to become more involved and powerful and thus the speed to on the whole remain the same.Pirks - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
This "gaming" review may be interesting for people who buy ATI cards which are a mix of nice hardware and stinking decomposing corpse of software... until I see your review with various GeForce video cards I won't pass any judgement on Vista. I expect ATI to continue producing a joke they call "Vista drivers" and will accept only the gaming benchmark results made on nVidia cards. Thank you.