[LINK] Fwd: vip-l: Vista / Win XP comparison - Long

[Jan Whitaker]

>Following is the Conclusion from an article on the Toms Hardware 
>site comparing XP and Vista.
>
>Conclusion: K.O. For Windows Vista?
>
>Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to 
>executing single applications at maximum speed. Although we only 
>looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not 
>expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit applications).
>
>Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly 
>slower than under Windows XP. The synthetic benchmarks such as 
>Everest, PCMark05 or Sandra 2007 show that differences are 
>non-existent on a component level. We also found some programs that 
>refused to work, and others that seem to cause problems at first but 
>eventually ran properly. In any case, we recommend watching for 
>Vista-related software upgrades from your software vendors.
>
>There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing 
>performance. Unreal Tournament 2004 and the professional graphics 
>benchmarking suite SPECviewperf 9.03 suffered heavily from the lack 
>of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista. This 
>is something we expected, and we clearly advise against replacing 
>Windows XP with Windows Vista if you need to run professional 
>graphics applications.
>
>We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video 
>transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 
>Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark 
>scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP. 
>There aren't newer versions available, and we don't see immediate 
>solutions to this issue.
>
>There is good news as well: we did not find evidence that Windows 
>Vista's new and fancy AeroGlass interface consumes more energy than 
>Windows XP's 2D desktop. Although our measurements indicate a 1 W 
>increase in power draw at the plug, this is too little of a 
>difference to draw any conclusions. Obviously, the requirements for 
>displaying all elements in 3D, rotating and moving them aren't 
>enough to heat up graphics processors. This might also be a result 
>of Windows Vista's more advanced implementation of ACPI 2.0 (and 
>parts of 3.0), which allows the control of power of system 
>components separately.
>
>Our hopes that Vista might be able to speed up applications are 
>gone. First tests with 64-bit editions result in numbers similar to 
>our 32-bit results, and we believe it's safe to say that users 
>looking for more raw performance will be disappointed with Vista. 
>Vista is the better Windows, because it behaves better, because it 
>looks better and because it feels better. But it cannot perform 
>better than Windows XP. Is this a K.O. for Windows Vista in the 
>enthusiast space?
>
>If you really need your PC to finish huge encoding, transcoding or 
>rendering workloads within a defined time frame, yes, it is. Don't 
>do it; stay with XP. But as long as you don't need to finish 
>workloads in record time, we believe it makes sense to consider 
>these three bullet points:
>    * Vista runs considerably more services and thus has to spend 
> somewhat more resources on itself. Indexing, connectivity and 
> usability don't come for free.
>    * 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.
>    * No new Windows release has been able to offer more application 
> performance than its predecessor.
>
>Although application performance has had this drawback, the new 
>Windows Vista performance features SuperFetch and ReadyDrive help to 
>make Vista feel faster and smoother than Windows XP. Our next 
>article will tell you how they work.
>
>

Jan Whitaker
JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
personal: http://www.janwhitaker.com/personal/
commentary: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/

'Seed planting is often the most important step. Without the seed, 
there is no plant.' - JW, April 2005
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