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."

Comments

Too Bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Too bad no one wants Windows 10 or a macbook!

Anecdotal evidence

[Neo-Rio-101]

There doesn't seem to be much factual evidence to make the claim that "It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X,"...
The claim, by it's very language deletes a lot of information making the claim worthless.

Unequivocally ... (says who?)
Better... (by what standard?)
Performance (by what metric?)

I know that this is probably just a personal blog with an opinion.... and he does want to quantify the claim with stats... but it's a bit too early to make the claim.

Re:Anecdotal evidence

[Sycraft-fu]

True, though there is some precedence. OS-X does not seem to be particularly zippy in the few cross platform app benchmarks that are to be found. A good example is DAW bench's test on Cubase, Protools, and Kontakt: http://dawbench.com/win7-v-osx.... What you see is that Cubase has a much more efficient engine than ProTools (no surprise) and that on Windows either one gets a lot more polyphony than the Mac. At any given buffer size (lower buffers are harder to deal with) Windows did better.

Pretty good test too since you are dealing with tools that have long been cross platform. Kontakt has been cross platform for its entire life, Pro Tools was Mac only until version 5 (1998ish), since when it has been cross platform, and Cubase has been cross platform since back in the DOS and Atari ST days. All the software has long development histories on both platforms, yet Windows gives superior results.

None of this means OS-X is unusable or anything, but it doesn't appear to have the performance Windows does, when pushed.

Re:Anecdotal evidence

[ILongForDarkness]

There is also the "fast enough" metric. Mac users generally have mid to high end equipment. Chances are "slower than windows" for them is probably still plenty snappy. It is like the aero, vs OS X versus lightweight and snappy on a 1990's laptop debate: if you have the money to buy the hardware and feel more comfortable with the UI design, available software, heck just want transparency effects or whatever: who cares? It is a matter of preference. We are like whinny car nuts debating the merits of Ford vs Chevy trucks. It's a box you put shit into, if you are happy with it that is good enough I don't have to prove mine is better.

Re:Anecdotal evidence

[tburkhol]

There doesn't seem to be much factual evidence to make the claim that "It's unequivocally better than performance on OS X,"... The claim, by it's very language deletes a lot of information making the claim worthless.

My guess is that he means "user perception," and I don't find that claim hard to believe at all. Notice the comments in TFS about 'animations?' One of the (to me) most annoying features of every windows from XP is the extensive use of fade in the user interface. Click on the start button, and it spends 300ms fading into existence. Click on an item, another 300 ms fading a sub-menu into existence. This makes the UI feel horribly sluggish and is the first thing I turn off on a new system. OSX has its own bits of animation, like bouncing a task bar item while it starts up. Maybe these things look great at product demos, but they get in the way of me working: always waiting, just a little bit, for the computer to get around to drawing the menu I asked for.

Point is: if MS turns down or off task bar and menu fade in Win10, it will "feel" much faster than other Windows, and very possibly OSX.

Re:News for shills, stuff that costs money

[etinin]

Oh hey, this whole site is ridiculous, isn't it? Look, they talk about computers, computers cost money... And cellphones? Have you seen how expensive these are, gosh... Thank god we live in the United Federation of Planets and don't use this kind of thing anymore. Hey computer, where's my free coffee?

Embed controllers

[DrYak]

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.

Welcome to the fantastic world of "embed controllers" (EC). The small custom chip sitting in the middle of a laptop, and in charge with all the peculiar functionality that are peculiar to this laptop, but don't exist in standard desktop/workstations. (like battery management, etc.)

The problem is that there is absolutely no standardisation of ECs. Every model is its own special snow flake (and when I say "model" I mean model of motherboard. In some case, specially consumer oriented laptop, some product range might have the same model name and the same plastic case and looks absolutely the same from the outside, but is actually different revisions which looks completely different under the hood, depending on which parts were the cheapest during the month this one was produced) (that's why for the same "Model" you have a few different BIOS downloads depending on part number, revision, etc.)

To get it working the manufacturer could write a specific driver. Usually this is done by the hardware manufacturer who write drivers for the target OS they have. Most laptop manufacturer write drivers for Windows, because they produce windows laptops. Here it's an *Apple* don't expect much.

To make things worse: usually these aren't your garden variety of drivers. Very often, platform functionality like ECs are handled by ACPI (now part of UEFI). i.e.: by firmware that is byte-code interpreted by the running system. In theory it should make things more OS-agnostic and portable. In practice it's a nightmare as every ACPI implementation is buggy in its own way, and every OS has a different variety of quirks. So writers of firmware (BIOS/UEFI/ACPI) for laptops have to release new versions of firmware (again, one per model of EC on mother board).
You can count on big brands to release a new BIOS pack download to cover the major flavours of Windows that they ship with this model. Maybe cover an update.

But don't count on engineers working for Apple to scram to release a new firmware update, just because some random schmuck decided to install a newer version of windows whose ACPI implementation is broken in a subtly different way than the preceding.
Their official OS that they support is OS X, they might have decided to add as a bonus a version or two supported as part of their Boot Camp offering.
And that's about it, don't count much more from them.

Funny that *windows* is now at the receiving end of this firmware/EC problem, that usually haunts Linux users on laptop that mostly run Windows.
(The problem that you report trying to run Windows on Apple hardware ? That's the daily plight of Linux users on most Windows laptops).

--------------

Also that might be the reason of the performance gain and "overall smoothness" reported by TFA:
- when running under OS X, the OS balances performance with battery life, thermal limits, etc. hardware runs at an equilibrium. Thus isn't as smooth as it theoretically could, because OS decides to save a bit power.
- Windows 10 has very probably an ACPI implementation that is subtly broken in a different way that its predecessor. Power management doesn't work. GPU is run at max power profile, CPU is run at max frequency. Results are probably smoother, but if the guy had actually carred to measure it in details, he would probably have observed shittier battery life.
Relevant quote (emphasis by me):

Battery life seemed very good from the short time I used it. I didn't fully deplete the battery, but I was on track to get over 9 hours of use with brightness at 40%. Mac battery life is rarely as strong on Windows, but there doesn't seem to be as enormous of a gap here, which is good.

Yup definitely a possibility that shitty battery life and heat that you describe and the high performance that the author got are the

parts of me

[dkman]

The pessimist in me says "That's ok. MS has plent of time to screw it up before release."

The realist in me says "You paid too much for the Windows laptop."

Isn't the Apple motto "It just works"? Not it works well, or quickly.

The optimist in me is still sleeping.

Some things never change

[Pecisk]

Ohhhh, old Slashdot - some things never change. Upcoming Windows release and "ohh so much true this Windows version is a best" posts, for one example. Sorry, people, Windows 10 is just rehashed Windows 8.1, with quite a few subsystems optimized. It is just another Windows. No, it won't convince people to switch. It merely will make Windows fans less frantic about not knowing what to do.

Re:Lets cut through to the chase

[Glock27]

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.

You're conflating a couple of different things. Windows general-purpose multitasking is terrible compared to Linux/MacOS (at least based on Win7 experiences).

On the other hand, Microsoft has had a laser focus on Windows gaming, with the obvious tie-in to Xbox gaming. This has resulted in very fast graphics drivers for Windows.

Linux seems to be doing well lately, with some Steam games getting higher frame rates on Linux than on Windows. Linux may end up being the best of all possible worlds (well out of three worlds anyhow) given its lean design, performance and stability. Perhaps eventually it'll see more proprietary software ports like Solidworks and ProEngineer.