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How Windows 10 Performs On a 12-inch MacBook
An anonymous reader writes: As Microsoft prepares for the launch of Windows 10, review sites have been performing all sorts of benchmarks on the tech preview to evaluate how well the operating system will run. But now a computer science student named Alex King has made the most logical performance evaluation of all: testing Windows 10's performance on a 2015 MacBook. He says, "Here's the real kicker: it's fast. It's smooth. It renders at 60FPS unless you have a lot going on. It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X, further leading me to believe that Apple really needs to overhaul how animations are done. Even when I turn Transparency off in OS X, Mission Control isn't completely smooth. Here, even after some Aero Glass transparency has been added in, everything is smooth. It's remarkable, and it makes me believe in the 12-inch MacBook more than ever before. So maybe it's ironic that in some regards, the new MacBook runs Windows 10 (a prerelease version, at that) better than it runs OS X."
... there's still a long-ish way to go until Windows 10 is out. And I'm afraid it'll come with surprises that we don't want (more bloatware? Advertising?).
I'm impressed by the performance boosts Windows got through 8, 8.1 and now 10, but unfortunately that is not enough for an OS. I'm uncomfortable with navigating the OS, something which should be seamless, logical and extremely easy to do; imagine if you had to think about every step you take whilst you go shopping.
I've also installed Windows 7, 8, 8.1 on a Macbook Pro and it's terrible. Oh, it is fast, trouble is the energy management is so poor the processor is overheating so the fans go turbo-mode. Not a pleasant experience.
I'll stick to 7 for the moment and OS X, they do the job properly without the hassle of a sad smilie BSOD.
My beloved 7 crashed, bad, again, this past week and I finally decided to try out 10, I am running 10074 and it made my ....5? year old pavilion DV6 6135 feel like a brand new computer. It really is gorgeous and has a lower overhead. Not sure that this is relevant other than additional praise for 10, but I thought you would like to know.
The difference is that Linux and Mac GUIs get choppy under the slightest load, while Windows says smooth like butter in every situation. Some people have even installed Windows on their Macs and they are getting more graphics performance from the same hardware.
It's nice to hear that Win10 runs well on a MacBook, but it's pure clickbait to claim that it "runs better" than does OS X. The measure being used is completely subjective. Microsoft and Apple might be optimizing for entirely different things. Without far more objective tests, we simply have no idea. It's silly to claim to have an objective answer based on this observation. Even the writer's claim that Win 10 runs at 60 fps turns out to be made up, because he admits that it simply looks that way and he hasn't found a way to test it. In other words, this is purely subjective AND this subjective observation about one thing says nothing about how either operating system performs overall. He can reasonably say that he installed Win 10 on the MacBook and he liked the way it performed. He can't reasonably compare the performance of the two operating systems, at least not based on anything he said here. Windows may be better by some objective measures. We just can't tell that from anything here.
Nothing rigorous that I've found. I've seen some things like a Mac user posting on a forum asking why Cubase was hitting harder on OS-X than Windows along with screenshots of the overall load meters that it has, but little in the way of details on methodology.
While I haven't done extensive looking, I haven't come across anything and it is something I'm interested in.
Sadly, there seems to be little interest in testing. People who own PCs can't really test it, outside of building a hackintosh, and Mac users are not very interested in testing particularly since many of them have a real need to believe their money was well spend and do not wish to do something which might challenge that idea.
If someone gave me the hardware and software I'd love to try it, but I own only a PC, and the DAW I use (Sonar) is Windows only.
The only thing I can point to with some newer data is a Sonar benchmark, conducted by their lead programmer, showing improvements in Windows 8 vs Windows 7. They found basically an across the board improvement, with no code recompile http://blog.cakewalk.com/windo... . Now that says nothing of cross platform (as I noted, Sonar is Windows only anyhow) but does indicate that MS continues to improve Windows' performance with regards to intensive time critical tasks like audio.
They learned a lot from the Xbox, and developed a lot of tools for optimising game performance that could also be used to optimise Windows. It was most evident with the transition from Vista to 7, where a lot of the major bottlenecks were eliminated and performance vastly improved. With 8 they did a lot of improve application performance too.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The 15" rMBP has a 95 Wh battery and lasts 7-8 hours. The Dell XPS 15 with similar hardware and a higher res screen has a 91 Wh battery and lasts 6-7 hours under Windows. If you're only getting 3 hours in Windows on your rMBP, that's more an indication that Apple has put very little effort into optimizing their Windows drivers. Not an indication that Windows sucks.
If you want to compare the 13" rMBP, it has a 75 Wh battery and lasts about 10-12 hours. The Dell XPS 13 manages 9-10 hours with a battery only 2/3rds the size (52 Wh) and a higher res screen (3200x1800 vs 2560x1600). If you get the lower res screen (1920x1080) it'll go 15 hours.