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.

[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:I question the results.

[purpledinoz]

If he tested all 3 OSes on the exact same hardware configuration and compared those results, then the tests results are valid.

My major problem with these test results is that he ranked them 1, 2, and 3. He should have put in the actual amount of time these tests took so we could see how much big of a difference it is. 1, 2, 3 tells me nothing. The difference between 1 and 2 could be 0.01% or 5000%.

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.

[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.

[TheNetAvenger]

Scheduler in Vista also performs worse than on XP (so MS had to resort to such hacks: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2007/08/27/1833290.aspx [technet.com] ).

Saying this with the link you provide pretty much discredits anything you continue to say.

You have no idea what you are talking about...

Here:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp

Make sure you read the PCMark, then click Next to go to the Gaming Page. Vista outperforms XP in every test. (The only test it is a couple of points behind is the synthetic 3DMark.)

And this is SP3 - the fastest XP compared to Vista.

So go on again about how horrible the scheduler is in Vista, I am guessing you don't even know what a scheduler does and especially I know you don't know how it works in NT.

If you want to put your hands over your ears and eyes and keep screaming, "Vista is slower", try clicking your heels together too, it is as likely to make it true and take you to Kansas.

The Vista is slower myths need to stop and the idiocy behind them is really getting annoying.

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.

[mrsteveman1]

Take results with a grain of salt

Salt is forbidden by the EULA......and my doctor.

Re:I question the results.

[Anpheus]

And they say Linux isn't ready for regular users.

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.

[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.

[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.

Still making 32 bit?

[Dyinobal]

When are 32bit OSes going to start going away?

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?

[vux984]

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

Of course they can, and do. Vista x64 runs 32 bit apps just fine.

Unfortunately MS doesn't have the source for all the devices out there, and can't just recompile all of those to be 64-bit, and the 3rd party vendors that can do it, would rather not spend the effort -- hell, they kicked and screamed and did a half-assed job of updating their drivers to work with Vista in 32 bit (the main source of most real Vista woe).

Re:Still making 32 bit?

[Tubal-Cain]

32bit or 64bit is essentially meaningless...

Unless you have more than 3.5 GB of RAM

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: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?

[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:Completely useless

[bhpaddock]

It isn't useless. It isn't "subjective" since it's based on actual objective measurements. It conveys the indication that Windows 7 has *broad* performance improvements.

It has been suggested that exact numbers were not given due to the beta's EULA clause that prohibits benchmarking against the pre-release build.

How does it "feel"?

[john.picard]

He tested things like moving files around, compression, decompression... This is all good and fine, but it's probably not the thing that most people "feel" when they use a computer. What I would like to know is how snappy or sluggish does the operating system "feel" when using it for every-day tasks? Does everything halt while the hard drive cranks away when you click a menu? Do the GUI animations help use the computer or do they simply slow you down? That's the sort of thing that matters to most users. How often do you really have to move 100 MB or 2.5 GB of files around?

Re:win7 rocks

[DAldredge]

Installing kernel level software that isn't certified for the OS you are using isn't the smartest thing in the world to do.

It could be

[ShooterNeo]

The general feeling around here is that no-one WANTS to believe it is even possible that Windows 7 doesn't suck. Because if that were true, that would sort of devalue everything done to improve Linux the last few years. (because if Windows 7 is fast and stable and lets you play games, that doesn't leave any room for Linux on the desktop)

It could actually be that Microsoft got it right. It may be that the core of Vista is not as terrible as we all think it is. I've seen posts discussing how Vista uses a completely refactored kernel, with more layers of abstraction and cleaning up of many of the quirks of win32.

Then, on top of this decent foundation, they overloaded it with poorly thought out gimmicks in an attempt to compete with Apple. In addition, some of their rewrites introduced new bugs, such as the networking problems where Vista machines are unable to talk to shared file servers.

It's possible that Windows 7 succeeded. If they fixed the bugs, and ripped out some of the bloated, inefficient Vista code then you might have a decent OS after. Microsoft might be a monopoly, but if they sat on their heels for too long, eventually (it might take 10 years) alternatives would overtake them.

Re:Two reasons for this

[Belial6]

There is no excuse for MS supporting any legacy code in Win7. None. Zero. Zip.

If they were halfway competent, they would port VirtualPC to Win7, include a modified copy of XP that will only run 1 program at a time, and include drivers to share the clipboard between the host and the guest. A little configuration magic so that launching the virtual machine also launches the application instead of a desktop, and virtually 100% all current software would not only work, but could be sandboxed by default. If they really wanted to do things right, they would include images for every version of Windows and MS-DOS ever released. This would not only improve security, clean up the API DRAMATICALLY and keep only one code base which would be fully 64-bit but it would also make Win7 by far the MOST backward compatible version of Windows ever released. Hell, they could make even make it XBox 1 compatible and let all of their partners re-release all of their XBox 1 games as "XBox Classic".

Of course, this would have the negative side effect of not letting them claim that backward compatibility was the reason for all of the crap in Windows.

Re:Completely useless

[Shadow7789]

No, you're wrong. Read the EULA.

You may not disclose the results of any benchmark tests of the software to any third party without Microsoft's prior written approval.

What the author did was within the bounds of the EULA since he didn't disclose the results (the numbers).

What really frustrates me though is that you would suggest that the author is LYING. What gives you the right to make such accusations? Are you working on some kind of historical precedent? Do you know the author personally? Has he lied before? Or are you just being a douche? I can completely understand if you want to see the raw data, so do I. But really, I thought Slashdot attracted a smarter caliber of readers who don't have to result to personal attacks. Apparently, I was wrong.

For the record though, the relative performances he gives us are a valuable indicator. Are you saying that a race scored based upon who crossed the finish line first instead of a stop watch is not a valid way to measure the performance of the athletes in it, because I can think of plenty of sports (even a few Olympic ones) that are scored this way. That makes no sense. Maybe next time, you should think before you post.

Re:win7 rocks

[dreemernj]

Windows is working with them to develop security software. So, what actually happened is your friend installed a Beta test of an OS, and then installed a technical preview beta of antivirus software and on his hardware something goes wrong.

As long as he reported the issues to MS, then it all seems like standard operating procedure for using test software running on a test OS.

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.