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Generational Windows Multicore Performance Tests
snydeq writes "Windows XP, Windows Vista, and (soon) Windows 7 all support SMP out of the box, but as InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy notes, 'experience has shown that multiprocessing across discrete CPUs is not the same thing as multiprocessing across integrated cores within the same CPU.' As such, Kennedy set out to stress the multiprocessing capabilities of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 in dual-core and quad-core performance tests. The comprehensive, multiprocess workload tests were undertaken to document scalability, execution efficiency, and raw performance of workloads. 'What I found may surprise you,' Kennedy writes. 'Not only does Microsoft have a firm grasp of multicore tuning, but its scalability story promises to keep getting better with time. In other words, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are poised to reap ever greater performance benefits as Intel and AMD extend the number of cores in future editions of their processors.'"
Because ALL software has to run the DRM hook gauntlet. basically, the way Microsoft has set it up is that the DRM processes are ALWAYS running and CANNOT be disabled. So every single bit of data is processed through the DRM loop, slowing everything down.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
Complete and utter bullshit.
We're a VFX company. We work with all manner of multi-core applications. Cloth simulation, Global Illumination, Caustics, Optical Flow tracking, compositing etc etc.
Every single one of our computers are 64 bit. We have Windows XP x64 and we have Vista x64.
I'm looking at a chart right this very second of render times for our current job. 9 million polygons, 6GB of RAM usage, 100% CPU usage across all 4 cores. NO RENDER PERFORMANCE HIT. Render software scales better than just about anything else on earth. Each core renders its little slice of the scene and returns it to the application. There is no cross talk, it scales pretty much linearlly with very very little overhead. If anything is going to expose some sort of massive performance hit, it would be rendering.
If Vista x64 is running a DRM check on every ray casting function we would see it. If Vista was running 118% slower we would see it. We have identical machines running the identical piece of software and they're returning on average statistically identical results.
I've got millions of photons bouncing around a scene and supposedly each calculation is being 'taxed' by some DRM check? I don't see it.
They're all generating pixels, what could be more "DRM related" than reading footage, processing footage and creating new footage?
Maybe this test found some piece of software that doesn't run well on Vista. I can buy that argument. But Vista and Windows 7 are not substantially slower than XP at processing. In fact they seem to be no slower from my experience with a wide variety of extremely processor and memory intensive tasks.