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Windows 7 Benchmarks Show Little Improvement On Vista
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines Windows 7 from the kernel up, subjecting the 'pre-beta' to a battery of benchmarks to find any signs that the OS will be faster, more responsive, and less resource-intensive than the bloated Vista, as Microsoft suggests. Identical thread counts at the kernel level suggest to Kennedy that Windows 7 is a 'minor point-type of release, as opposed to a major update or rewrite.' Memory footprint for the kernel proved eerily similar to that of Vista as well. 'In fact, as I worked my way through the process lists of the two operating systems, I was struck by the extent of the similarities,' Kennedy writes, before discussing the results of a nine-way workload test scenario he performed on Windows 7 — the same scenario that showed Vista was 40 percent slower than Windows XP. 'In a nutshell, Windows 7 M3 is a virtual twin of Vista when it comes to performance,' Kennedy concludes. 'In other words, Microsoft's follow-up to its most unpopular OS release since Windows Me threatens to deliver zero measurable performance benefits while introducing new and potentially crippling compatibility issues.'"
I have to agree with you here, mostly. Most of the tests make very little sense, and expecting W7 to be a rewrite is just stupid. Watching some of the W7-related PDC 2008 videos, I never got the impression that improving performance was their major priority, except perhaps for some tweaks for netbooks. Instead, most of the focus appears to be on other areas such as improved usability and power consumption. Not to mention that the M3 is a pre-beta build.
However, the OS can certainly have a significant impact on something like video encoding: differences in the scheduler or system calls/APIs can do that. Here's a somewhat outdated Vista vs XP benchmark. The xvid and h.264 encoders are around 20% slower in Vista, and the impact is similar in some other cases, such as with WinRAR or UT2004. Differences of just a few percent can usually be ignored, but I find these significant. If somewhere between the release of Vista and W7 the maximum differences are lowered to around 5% compared to XP, whether with a service pack, new drivers or optimizations, I'd consider that good enough and possibly switch. After all, going from Win98 to XP also caused a drop in framerates, but was well worth it.
Vista is barely slower than XP on hardware bought within the last 2 years. It was fairly slower on RTM for many reasons, but vastly improved drivers & some colossal patches have put that to bed now.
When did this event occur? Last I tested Vista performance on this machine was with Crysis. That would be close to a year after Vista release. I got half the FPS compared to in XP. Half.
Apart from DX10 there is nothing in Vista that interests me that can't already be gotten for XP via third party applications. So far there aren't exactly a huge amount of DX10-only games, and unless the performance issue mentioned above has indeed been sorted it would be a moot point either way.