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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flexy - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
mem-usage is a URBAN MYTH :)You can check for yourself, and i did too. DWM, the new windows management uses SOME memory, comparable to Explorer...but then it does new 3d fancy stuff and similiar. Of course, more features need more memory.
You COULD always disable and tweak-down stuff in Vista, as well as you can in XP....HOWEVER i'd say 2GB for Vista would be perfect and 1GB (as i have on XP Pro right now) is a little tight. *IF* you go vista then you of course also want to take advantage of its fetaures, right ? Otherwise you could as well stay with XP..or even get 98 "to save memory" :)
But its NOT the case that the memory usage of Vista is SOOO over the roof as some people suggest..it's just not true.
Drexial - Sunday, October 8, 2006 - link
its not really a myth... those features that are unessesary mostly install by default... and unless you know what your doing (which i might add the new windows is even LESS user friendly) then the memory will remain taken up and what should have run without any hang ups on 1 gig now has you concidering 2 gigs would be better. as little a cost that is, the average user isnt going to need half the crap that vista adds and just makes those that dont need to get a C+ certifacation on computers will be even more lost. Windows isnt suposed to be a prosumer operating system. its supose to be an easy to use way for your software to work for you. Vista is like the Mini with 6 airbags... while it sounds better its just a gimmick. i do understand that there may have been some nessesary upgrades to the system. they just packed it with what ever crap they could think of.jonp - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
Wow, what folks are willing to consider normal today. If someone would have told you even just 5 years ago that the OS would require 2 billion+ (2,147,483,648) bytes of main memory, what would folks have said? And now it is considered just dandy? Even "bloat" doesn't adequately describe where OS’s and applications are headed. Big programming teams with less pride in craft left these days I guess.noxipoo - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
the price of progress. i'd rather move forward than backwards, price of memory has gone down and features have gone up. having so much memory will only limit progress.ChronoReverse - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
A lot of people are probably including the cache inadvertantly.MS should report only memory being actively used and rename the cache to TURBOMEMORY (TM)
ChronoReverse - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
There's a x86 version and that will be the version you'll want to install at this point.All the manufacturers STILL haven't gotten on the ball with 64bit drivers so if anyone tells you Vista runs fine (it does), they're using the x86 version.
yxalitis - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
WRONGTime to check the facts, X64 drivers for XP work in Vista RC1, so if you already use XP x64, as I do, it's a no-brainer. I have all my hardware fully supported by X64 drivers!
RMSe17 - Wednesday, October 4, 2006 - link
I doubt that the majority of hardware that works in WindowsXP with a 32bit driver has a working 64 bit counterpart. There are products from Windows 2000 era that work in XP, made by companies that are no longer around, or no longer support those products. Until there is a 64bit wrapper for 32bit drivers, those devices will be unusable.ChronoReverse - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
And the driver situation for x64 XP... still sucks compared to x86. So my point stands.ss284 - Tuesday, October 3, 2006 - link
No matter how much the final version improves in the next month or so, its still nice to know that the xp->vista launch will be much smoother than the 98/me->xp launch, as far as software and hardware compatibility goes.On the other hand, the 98 -> xp upgrade was probably a much bigger improvement in terms of features and general os design when compared to xp -> vista.