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

Still making 32 bit?

[Dyinobal]

When are 32bit OSes going to start going away?

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[DigitAl56K]

What bothers me about Vista 64 is that Microsoft do not let you load unsigned drivers. Got a driver from a vendor that's not signed? You have to go through the trouble of signing it yourself and kicking your OS into test mode. The problem became worse with SP1 when MS made several known workarounds disappear.

I understand they're trying to work against root kits but I'd rather be able to easily install any drivers I choose on my own system then have Microsoft protecting me against myself and causing me all kinds of grief. I've also never been hit by a root kit and I would guess that regular viruses are just as problematic and more common for nearly everyone.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[DA-MAN]

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

Intel's Atom processor is 32-bit.

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

It's the proprietary drivers that make it hard for MS to do the same. In Linux the vast majority of drivers are maintained in source, so this isn't as much of a problem.

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[644bd346996]

And in practice extra x86-64 registers are not that great improvement because modern CPUs got very good at pipelining and data prefetching.

Good point. However, those extra registers may matter quite a bit more for something like the 64-bit Atom processors, which deliberately forgo most speculative features that mitigate register pressure. It would be interesting to see whether it's a better use of silicon to make an out-of-order processor or a 64-bit in-order processor when you're operating under the power constraints of the Atom. The current existence of 64-bit in-order Atom processors suggests that the performance per watt impact of 64-bit is better than out-of-order execution. I suspect this is because 64-bit takes less silicon than OOE, in a similar manner to how useful a good implementation of simultaneous multithreading can be.

Re:I question the results.

[N!NJA]

WTH! if i had run those tests and come to the conclusion that Win7 installs faster than XP, i would have rushed to the basement, grabbed my Win3 floppies and performed a "3 vs 7 Install Death-Match"!

that just sounds like a fisherman tale....

Re:Microsoft has a good version of Vista!

[Belial6]

No, it isn't. What is a problem is that MS has not integrated VirtualPC into Windows, and included a virtual environment to run your 16-bit apps in a 16-bit environment. I know it may sound like splitting hairs, but it is long past the time that MS should be leaving bad code in new OSes just to claim 'Backward Compatibility' when it is totally unnecessary.

Re:I question the results.

[je ne sais quoi]

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.

Here are some benchmarks right over at tomshardware that show that the "SlashDot world" in this case is accurate (amazing!).

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. Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance.

This was on a system with 2 GB of RAM, so according to you Vista should have been faster, but it wasn't. So your idea that it's the RAM that's the problem is bollocks.

Anecdotally, a colleague of mine was complaing her brand new lenovo thinkpad with Vista was slow compared to her imac -- she was kind of amazed that the they had the same processor and memory.

Re:I question the results.

[venuspcs]

I have been using Windows 7 Beta 1 (Build 7000) for 3 days and am utterly surprised. Here is a quick overview of the experience to date. On Wednesday I finished downloading the ISO and burned it to disc using Nero 9. Once burnt I removed the hard drive from my Toshiba Satellite A215-S5818 laptop and replaced it with a blank 120 GB SATA 4300 RPM drive with only 4MB Cache. I had previously upgraded my ram from 2 GB DDR2 to 4 GB DDR2 while using Vista and it had no discernible effect on performance. After installing the 120 GB hard drive I inserted the Windows 7 Beta 1 DVD and booted to it. The entire install (including initial setup and installing my Cellphone as a USB modem, setting up my internet connection and downloading newer Video Card Driver) took less than 30 minutes. I was blown away, especially considering the Internet Setup was 100% completely and totally different than under Vista, XP, 200, 98, etc. Then I went to restore my 40+GB of data from my external 1TB Buffalo DriveStation which was ridiculously slow (almost unuseable) in Vista. It took less than 20 minutes to restore all my data to the correct locations (even though I had to find some of them because they where in different places). After my data was restored I went to re-installing all my software (about 50 programs and games) which was all backed up to and restored from that same 1TB external drive. I was able to reinstall every single program in about 2 hours without a single reboot (until they where all installed). Office 2007 Professional installed in less than 5 minutes. Nero 9 took the longest at about 8 minutes. Firefox 3 less than 15 seconds. Google Chrome less than 10 seconds. Acrobat Reader 9 about 4 minutes. Adobe Photoshop CS3 about 7 minutes. All 10 of my games in less than 10 minutes. Once everything was reinstalled I started playing around with the OS. First thing I always try is to open several hundred Windows Explorer windows and see how many it takes to crash the system. Much to my surprise Windows 7 said "hell no you only need one and that is all we are giving you". Then I said well I will open a couple hundred pictures, again Windows 7 said "hell no your note" and kindly opened them all in 1 Preview Window. Then I said well let me open about 50 Word and Excel Documents at the same time and low and behold they all opened in less than 10 seconds (after I finished the First Run wizard) and didn't slow down the system AT ALL. SO while they where open I decided to open QuickMediaConvertor and convert a divx avi to vob. Once that was started I opened several different games (including Hardwood Solitaire IV, 3d Texas Holdem Poker, Freeciv and Mahjong Titans all at Maximum Graphics and Detail levels. Still my system hadn't blinked so I opened Google Picasa and selected a 1000+ pictures and applied the "I'm Feeling Lucky" filter. It was done in about 2 minutes. While I was waiting I went and played a game of Hardwood Solitaire IV with no noticeable slow down. Now thoroughly impressed I decided to crash it one way or another and opened every single thing I could find to open (about 100 programs) all running at the same time. Now the system finally slowed down as my processor (an AMD Turion X64 running at 2 Ghz with 2 cores) was almost maxed. Suprisingly my memory (3.5 GB usuable by Windows) was only using about 2.75 GB. System was still easily usable and probably faster still than a normal XP/Vista installation with normal programs running. Now that I have figured out I just can't make it crash I close all those programs. I was fully expecting CPU/Memory to stay up much higher than when I first booted. Much to my chagrin everything returned to roughly the same levels as a fresh boot. Then I started poking around and discovered some remarkable changes in Windows 7 that frankly I hadn't expected. Almost every single process is Sandboxed (Virtualized) by default. My older programs that are not Windows 7 compatible (every one I installed) was Automatically checked and if need be was run in Compatibility mode AUTOMATICALLY. In fact out of the 100

Re:I question the results.

[je ne sais quoi]

Fine. Here's some benchmarks from Vista SP1 vs. XP SP2 from ZDNet. Again, Vista is slower... despite the mighty passage of time:

So, onto conclusions. Looking at the data there's only one conclusion that can be drawn - Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows Vista SP1. End of story. Out of the fifteen tests carried out, XP SP2 beat Vista SP1 in eleven, Vista SP1 beat XP SP2 in two of the tests, and two of the tests resulted in a draw.

Beyond that, I have yet to see any conclusive benchmarks posted by the defenders of Vista on this thread showing any proof that Vista is faster than XP, just empty assertions. What I do see is a bunch of Microsoft fanboys comforting themselves that their favorite brand released an OS that has turned out to be a flop.

Let me qualify my positions here though. I have Vista installed on an old hard drive on a brand new PC -- my own conclusion is that Vista is not as bad as everyone makes out, but you all need to stop pretending that Vista is fast. It isn't. It's not terribly slow on nice hardware, and it looks very nice and it has some nice features, e.g., the DX10 features on new games, but it's not fast.

Re:I question the results.

[Score Whore]

"It is by far the most advanced personal computer audio system available on any platform." - is a complete lie.

True. I wasn't exactly clear. I'm talking OS audio subsystem for delivering audio from apps to the hardware. Not apps.

JACK (http://jackaudio.org/) is probably the best personal high-quality audio system (it has a zero-latency design). It's followed by PulseAudio which is now not quite yet zero-latency but much more efficient.

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. 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. Where's the signal processing layer in there? Oh, it's third party. Where's the channel synchronization? Can't find it. And awesome how it punts sample rate changes back to the apps. And it uses floats as the sample format? Talk about a really bad design decision. I mean you get three of four apps going in hi definition audio (96/24/7.1) and you're going to be seeing twenty or thirty percent of your system going down the shit hole just to do sample format conversions. And what is the upside? Nothing. For every 32 bits of sample data you get 24 bits of mantissa and a useless exponent. And shockingly enough it's all software. Where's that hardware acceleration you're so fond of?

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.

Adding some more latency into audiobuffers to adjust timing is a fairly trivial task. Also, a good implementation would just turn off this misfeature if the system uses only one sound sink.

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.

Re:I question the results.

[Frools]

I know you were just making a joke but on Vista you can actually update graphics drivers without rebooting.
The installer will tell you to reboot anyway, but the driver has been updated.
This is possibly the best feature in Vista ;)