32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP

An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes tested the latest Win7 build against XP and Vista and came to a surprising conclusion: Win7 performs better than the other 2 OSs in the vast majority of the 23 tasks tested. Even installation. 'Rather than publish a series of benchmark results for the three operating systems (something which Microsoft frowns upon for beta builds, not to mention the fact that the final numbers only really matter for the release candidate and RTM builds), I've decided to put Windows 7, Vista and XP head-to-head in a series of real-world tests...'" This review shows only a 1-2-3 ranking for each test, so there's no sense of the quantitative level of improvement.

Comments

I question the results.

[Tubal-Cain]

Take results with a grain of salt. He ranks Vista as better than XP on the AMD machine and as nearly equal on the Pentium machine.

Of course, the AMD machine has 4 GB of RAM and the Pentium machine has 1 GB, so that could have something to do with it.

Re:I question the results.

[Ethanol-fueled]

But the only number-one score for XP was on the Pentium machine - Move 100 MB files a quick glance through the results seemed to imply that XP usually came in second place for moving/opening smaller files, shutting down, and performance of few other tasks which would be attributed to a "stupider" computer. XP did come on second roughly half the time across both machines(from a quick glance, YMMV). It's nice that his charts are simple and straight-to-the-point instead of the usual spreading of the results across 10 pages, but I still find the results hard to believe.

It's possible that the people who compiled the test results rated the OS's from 1 to 3 with 3 being the best ;) and Mr. Hughes confused the data when he wrote the article. And even if he didn't confuse the results, the 1-2-3 standings aren't very meaningful when the first-place OS opened the file in 1.255 seconds and the second place OS opened the same file in 1.26 seconds.

Re:I question the results.

[Skal Tura]

i've found out that generally speaking ZDNet articles are total bullshit, with no relevance to the real world.

This article and your example is just one example of that.

Re:I question the results.

[TheNetAvenger]

Take results with a grain of salt. He ranks Vista as better than XP on the AMD machine and as nearly equal on the Pentium machine

Sadly, as much as the SlashDot world not like to believe, this is accurate.

If you have 1GB of RAM even on old hardware, Vista is as fast as XP, as the extra RAM offsets the Vista features overhead and Superfetch and other tricks of Vista help make up performance gains.

With 2GB of RAM, Vista will be faster, even if you have a 800mzh PIII and a 1998 ATI video card.

Vista or should we say the NT kernel in Vista is not slow or bloated, it is the extra features that Vista is doing that consumes RAM that offsets its performance gains over XP. (Search Engine, etc.)

The CPU cycles for the Vista features are light, it is all about RAM. Just like with virtually every Windows and known OS update in history, they want more RAM for the features they add.

- Even for Leopard to perform as fast as Tiger you need 1GB of RAM, which is funny considering Apple was making fun of Vista for the exact same reason.

Here is how it works:

512MB RAM - XP > Vista
1GB RAM - XP = Vista
1.5GB+ RAM - Vista > XP

Windows7 so far is showing that even on 512MB is faster than XP in many cases, which is the result of the event based service manager, that unloads processes/services when not needed and saves RAM.

An example on a running test system with 3Ghz P4 and 1GB RAM:
Vista 41% - OS Consumed RAM
Win7 20% - OS Consumed RAM

See how that might help the Vista RAM overhead and put Win7 back in line with XP?

PS And on this test system Vista is faster than XP - even in gaming with a Geforce 5600 video card.

Re:I question the results.

[Nutria]

Unless you need the proprietary ATI or nVidia drivers, one reboot at the end of installation and it's done. And, if you do need to download those drivers, that's only one more reboot. Two at most, and you're done.

Not true, even if you use [gxk]dm, you should be able to "activate" the new driver (after updating xorg.conf) by killing the dm. It'll auto-restart and thus load nvidia.ko.

Of course, God only Smiles on you if you use startx.

Re:I question the results.

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

The win7 beta EULA says no benchmarking. This is his way around that. If he could have posted times he would have.

Re:I question the results.

[yoyhed]

In my experience, as long as you weren't on a complete piece of shit of a computer, XP did start up faster than 2000, and also application startup times were noticeably faster.

Re:I question the results.

[techno-vampire]

Do you still have to rebuild/reinstall modules for Linux for each version of the kernel? That's always awesome ..

That depends on which driver and how you install it in the first place. I use Fedora, so I can only use that for my example. If you use a different distro, YMMV. If you download the nVidia driver from the OEM site and install it, you will have to reinstall it every time you update the kernel, because of the way it works. Or, you can download kmod-nvidia and install that, because that gets updated whenever the kernel does. And, just in case there's a time gap, you can also install akmod-nvidia. That checks on boot to see if you have the latest kmod, and if it's out of date, builds another one on the fly.

So, the answer is, yes, you do have to rebuild/reinstall modules, but the process can, and often is, done either by the distro maintainers, or on the fly without any user intervention.

Re:I question the results.

[ozmanjusri]

If he could have posted times he would have.

But he could have benchmarked Vista and XP, then given an above/below rating for Windows 7.

And in fact, he HAS performed that test in the past and come to the conclusion that XP outperformed Vista.

The fact that his results are reversed this time must throw serious doubt on his credibility.

Re:I question the results.

[Daengbo]

The test you link to used SP2, while the new tests use SP3. XP SP2 and SP3 aren't the same thing. In fact, most benchmarks put Vista SP1 ahead of XP SP3 or at least within spitting distance of each other.

I'm not a big fan of Adrian, but he does hardware pretty seriously and lays out all his testing method well enough for you to duplicate it.

Re:I question the results.

[Cyberax]

"Right. Zero latency. Talk about lies. It establishes callbacks in the apps, writing into shared memory segments which are then mixed and delivered to the standard linux audio device."

That's pretty much all I want from my audio system. Just give me a precise control over my audio stack and then you can build anything on top of it.

XP does exactly this - there's a fast, efficient, hardware-friendly kernel streaming layer.

Vista on the other hand forces you to use inferior-quality stack because MS couldn't figure out how to do protected audio path with kernel filters.

"Yeah. Zero latency as long as you stay ahead of the playback. Just like pretty much every sound system since the days of the original Soundblaster Pro using DMA."

DirectShow is famous for its imprecise timing control due to KMixer ;) My previous employer made a lot of $$$$$$ by making time-correcting kernel streaming filters.

"Where's the signal processing layer in there? Oh, it's third party. Where's the channel synchronization? Can't find it."

Everything is third-party. JACK only gives you a microsecond-precise information about audio system. You can do the rest yourself.

"And shockingly enough it's all software. Where's that hardware acceleration you're so fond of?"

It's possible to have hardware filters in JACK. The problem is that hardware filters are not that useful for professional-type audio systems. Look at OpenAL/EAX for hardware acceleration of spatial sound and other goodies.

BTW, OpenAL Creative Drivers even work on Vista by bypassing all its audio stack.

And.... SURPRISE! Windows Vista uses 32-bit floats as internal audio sample format ( http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/04/03/volume-in-windows-vista-part-1-what-is-volume.aspx )!

"And what happens under load and the realtime scheduler can't quite keep up? Ah, I see, you get drop outs. What happens on Vista? Nothing, they hook into the scheduler to guarantee that their audio paths get time on the CPU."

Newsflash: if Vista scheduler can't quite keep up - you'll get sound drop-outs (I _do_ get them when I test my audio app on VMWare). There's no way around it. Realtime scheduler guarantees that your audio stack will get the highest priority, just like in Vista.

"It's not a matter of delaying individual streams. It's a matter of delaying individual channels from the same stream. So that your rear speakers sitting against the far wall behind you play just a bit earlier."

That doesn't matter. It's still not hard to do using kernel streaming.

I can distinctly remember that nice '3d-room' settings on my Creative Audigy 2 back in 2003. All in hardware.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[Tubal-Cain]

I agree. Nobody is selling 32-bit processors anymore.

Linux can handle 32-bit applications on 64-bit OSes. Surely MS can do the same?

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[Tubal-Cain]

32bit or 64bit is essentially meaningless...

Unless you have more than 3.5 GB of RAM

Microsoft has a good version of Vista!

[tkrotchko]

Their 64 bit version of Vista is actually the best consumer level OS they've done so far. It's the version that should become Windows 7. It's stable, fast (way faster than the 32 bit version on my machine), and its backwards compatible with almost every application that I've tried.

If they made the default install 64 bits, they'd actually be pushing forward an improvement in their consumer OS. As it is, we'll be living with Vista mk. II.

I'll bet the folks who work on the 64 bit version are scratching their heads wondering why they bother!

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[TheNetAvenger]

lol. you've drunk the kool-aid, 32bit or 64bit is essentially meaningless

There is kool-aid, but you need to check you own cup.

If you are referring to the Apple marketing machine, they ya, 32bit and 64bit are not much different, just larger memory addressing. (Of course OS X is still a 32bit OS could be the reason they like to create this mis-perception.)

On a real 64bit OS, there are 64bit registers and tons of other tricks and optimizations that happen, let alone full 64bit drivers that can shove data to devices oh like Video cards much faster.

If you look at Vista x64 it performs 15% faster than Vista x32 if you have 2GB of RAM.

This includes not only the OS's operation, but even 32bit applications running on the OS.

You see when you have a 64bit memory addressing and can optimize for this in the memory manager you no longer have FS and pagefile lookkup tables for extended amounts of RAM.

You also can do like Vista x64 does and shove two 32bit memory writes into on 64bit address space, so when it can, you get double the read/write performance out of the memory chip because you are pulling two 32bit chunks in one read cycle.

And we could go on and on and on...

Understand yet?

Re:win7 performance

[Z80xxc!]

Who likes chairs anyway?

Steve Ballmer, that's who.

Re:How does it "feel"?

[Jugalator]

How often do you really have to move 100 MB or 2.5 GB of files around?

A benchmark like this still probably matters though, as if it's fast on moving 100 MB (a size more easily measurable than 10 MB), it's likely faster at 10 MB too. And it's at these ranges it starts creeping into everyday use and the "feel" you're talking of.

Re:win7 rocks

[3vi1]

So, you're saying that when Win7 nags you and clicking the nag opens up http://www.microsoft.com/windows/antivirus-partners/windows-7.aspx, they're pointing you to uncertified software? BTW - I just went to his system and did the install again and didn't get any warning about installing uncertified software, so I'm guessing it's signed.

Are you guys actively testing Win7, or just ragging on people that don't report the bestus experience ever?

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[DA-MAN]

Unless you have more than 3.5 GB of RAM

Unless you allocate more than 3.5 GB per process.

PAE has gotten around the 4 gig limit a long time ago.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[Metasquares]

Despite supporting PAE, Vista-32 still limits addressable physical memory to 4 GB (Wikipedia). PAE will also run into problems at 64 GB, whereas 64-bit machines shouldn't reach another addressing limitation until they hit 16 EB.

Transitioning to 64-bit is a better solution in the long term.

Re:The devil is in the details

[Khyber]

How about this.

HP DV9825NR
1.83 GHz T5550 Intel
4GB DDR-800
320GB SATA
512MB GeForce 8600M GS
RealTek HD Audio

I had to hack drivers to get the video card to be seen under XP.

Used for audio production, I made a quick multi-tracked setup using CoolEdit under both Vista and XP, then tested mixdown/encoding from .WAV to MP3.

XP beat Vista - 13 seconds in XP vs 28 seconds in Vista, for the same minute and a half of music.

For gaming, even with my hacked driver to get the video card recognized, playing Fallout 3 in Vista at 1280x720, medium details, gives me an average of 32 FPS. In XP, same detail settings and resolution, I average 40, following the same path, same difficulty. In XP I also lose the stuttering issue in Fallout 3 that Vista users seem to be getting, which seems to be caused by the audio subsystem, as turning audio acceleration to Basic stops about 90% of the crashes, and fixes several noise loop issues.

So, Vista SUCKS. My laptop is dual-booted with it and XP, and I only use the Vista partition for internet stuff, webcam, skype audio chat, etc. Games and any WORK gets done in XP.

I want to try 7 on this laptop.

About rebuilds

[DrYak]

Do you still have to rebuild/reinstall modules for Linux for each version of the kernel?

In addition to the other /.ers' reports :

- openSUSE : No, you don't.
if you install the drivers from an RPM (which is one single click on a web-page away, thanks to their 1-click-install feature) everything is taken care of by the package manager.
if you install the drivers from an ATI/NVIDIA installer or something more esoteric that you compiled your self, the openSUSE kernel upgrade will attempt (successfully in all my occurence) to import automatically the previous .ko into the current modules collection.

- Debian stable : no you don't.
Everything including the kernel version, etc. stays the same across version updates, except for patched bugs. The previous modules keep working because the situation is exactly the same as before.

Atleast you don't have to reinstall every driver in Windows each time you've ran Windows update...

The fact that their whole OS stays exactly the same and doesn't improve a bit over the course of 5 years may have something to play in this situation.