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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."
and my beat to shit 2007 DEL Inspirion 1720 Core 2 duo also flies smooth. Stange eh?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
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.
That benchmark is a bit dated, there must be a newer benchmark than OS X 10.6? Hower, now that I have let fly the obligtory nitpick of your post, the fact that Windows 10 performs well does not surprise me. I have long been aware of the fact that Microsoft quietly sank a lot of resources into rewriting Windows and improving performance so I'm not exactly thunderstruck by news that they succeeded. What I'd like to see is a benchmark shootout between Windows 10 and the most recent OS X AND Linux distros. Something tells me that if Windows 10 also turns out to be faster than Linux the atmosphere around here would shift from shadenfreude to righteous fury and calls for a Jihad.
I've recently installed the latest 64bit Windows 10 technical preview on a new computer running a gen 5 Intel processer with 6 cores and hyperthreading, SSD raid array and nVidia graphics card and the performance appears to be suboptimal. It requires DEP on by default, minimum RAM and other weirdness like specifying the type of cpu name (which I set to "core2duo") just to install but does allow all the usual hardware acceleration. I assigned several CPUs and a good chunk of DDR4 RAM to it with 16GB of hard drive space.
Running next to my trusty virtual XP windows 10 is a dog, even with all the settings for performance switched on. The integrated "search my computer and Internet" is painfully slow and the start button brings up this wacky osd box with embedded "metro style" elements. If you click a couple of times as it loads (can take any random amount of time) it doesn't ever appear again. I suppose this is a bug that will be fixed, but the whole thing feels slow to respond (including the mouse pointer and drag+drop snappiness). Some of this seems to be due to clunky design rather than the optimization of the codebase.
The only thing I can say is quicker is the startup and shutdown. I suppose the new "Spartan" thing loads alright, but I'm not a fan.
Well for registry file, we'll see, I think it might only be for universal apps but win 10 is supposed to have a virtual registry similar to how WoW works. An app sees a registry but in actuality it is a private clone of the registry. When the app is uninstalled the OS just blasts away that clone and no cruft is left. At least that is the theory. For the desktop user, I think Mac has the cleanest installation process. Drag and drop. Things are installed in a single folder. Drag and drop the app to the trash and it is gone. For the power user: debian like is my favorite: apt-get is great. But still always having to remember what's in bin, whats in sbin, etc etc. Things do get scattered all over the place in Linux. Oddly it is the command line friendly OS that requires a lot of jumping between directories (which is a pain in the ass from command line) to get anything done. VS windows where everything is pretty much dumped in the windows folder and or available in the ui from a single (albeit huge) widget (control panel).
It has long appeared to me that all the best talent at Cupertino is being assigned to work on iOS, and OSX is suffering as a result.
One upon a time, a new MacOSX release meant you might need to put more RAM in the box, but even some seven-year-old piece of hardware would go faster, and there would be fewer bugs or crashes. [Consider a late G3 iMac, upgraded all the way from Public Beta to Tiger.] These days, you put more RAM in (if you can if you have a machine old enough that Apple didn't solder all the memory in during manufacture) just to make it less sluggish.
Drawing performance seems especially poor, which makes me wonder: if I bought a top-end top-of-the-range Mac Pro, would it be any better at being a desktop computer than what I have now? I'm not sure it would.
Apple has never been very good at Systems software. The old MacOS was a huge piled-on mess. Their User Interface design took precedence over robust design 'beneath the hood.'
The Macintosh didn't have per-emptive multitasking until they finally gave up on an in-house redesigned new MacOS. There was Taligent, and Butt-Headed-Astronomer (previously known as 'Sagan' until Sagan sued them!)
Apple spent many millions in attempts at a new Operating System before finally giving up and buying NeXT Step, which itself is just pretty layers on top of UNIX.
They are an 'Industrial Design' and 'Marketing' firm. Better at coming up with cute names for APIs and proprietary versions of interfaces than actual nuts and bolts design.
MS Windows, by definition, has to run acceptably on crappy hardware. That is the selling point. You can buy a laptop made with reject parts for $300 and it will run. Therefore that is where MS puts it resources. Anecdotal evidence. I ran Windows 7 with Autodesk software in Parallel or Virtual Box. Windows 7 ran very well, I don't know if ran better than Mac OS X, but maybe it did. Autodesk stuff rendered fast, and had very little lag in modeling. Much better than most other laptops. But most other people did not have the speed, memory, or dedicated graphics card. For what I do, the Mac runs better overall than when I try to use my Windows laptop. The only thing the Mac really seems to suck at is transferring large amounts of data through USB. I wish Apple would fix that problem. It has been well known for several years that the best machine for MS Windows is running virtually on a Mac. If the MS Windows image gets borked,which it regularly does because of viruses, it is easy to copy the backup that was made an hour ago by Time Machine back and get to work.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Apple has been optimising OS X for years, but not for Graphics Performance. They've been optimising it for longer battery duration.
It's been years since I've needed or even noticed needing better graphics performance yet battery performance of OS X pure versus Windows? Oh yeah, THAT I notice. On the occasions I forget a charger I have to minimise running Windows or I'll be running out of battery at least twice as fast as when using OS X. I can get work 7 Hours using just the battery on my rMBP with occasional excursions to Windows to check mail but or use corporate windows only tools but running windows will only give me 3 hours. Windows isn't even doing much, it just does it all the time & never lets the CPU sleep for any significant time - see here for reasons why.
Yeah, the pure graphics performance may be poorer on OS X. Most people don't care as long as it's good enough.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I will preface this by saying that I was a Mac user and developer for over a decade until very recently...
To your Classical MacOS I reply Windows Me.
Sorry, will have to call this one out. At the time that classical MacOS was around, most users were either running Windows 98 or Windows 2000. Few people ran ME... I worked in the industry and I think at the time for every 10 Win2K boxes I saw, I saw maybe one ME and 15 Windows 98. Noone saw a compelling need for ME so they didn't upgrade. And early versions of OSX up to Jaguar (10.2) were horrendous messes under the hood. The interface was gorgeous but some of the APIs were kludged together wrecks.
Now, I'm not saying that Windows was much better, at least on the 98/ME track... but the Windows 2000 API cleanup actually produced some really nice results. This was at the same time (roughly) as Mac OS9 which was one of the most awful kludges of an OS I think I've ever had the displeasure to work on. It was obvious that OS9 was created in a place where OSX was getting all the attention, but even OSX wasn't really properly clean until 10.2... and even then it was slow. Have you ever used 10.0 or 10.1 on hardware of the time? It was horrifyingly slow to do anything and the only thing it really had going for it was the interface.
Speaking of the interface... seriously... Finder is significantly worse than Explorer in terms of threading, resource utilization and stability. You want to see a kludged mess, check out Finder circa... well... any version of OSX actually. Of course, I've recently abandoned the Mac platform for Windows 8 for various reasons so I can't speak to Yosemite... but every time I work on a machine running Yosemite I just feel like the entire OS is going in a direction I don't appreciate.
Need I compare OS X & Vista? Windows 8?
Vista and Windows 8 both had huge improvements under the hood. Windows 8 in particular has gotten a bad rep simply because it has a UI that people find really polarizing... but it's seriously a fast and efficient OS that really takes advantage of the underlying hardware. It actually is a better operating system than the much-vaunted Windows 7 (which was itself an improvement over Vista) but most people never get to see it because they get hung up on the UI.
I have played with Windows 10, and I like it. I run 8.1 on my computers today but will switch to 10 when it comes out. That's not to say it's a fundamentally "better" operating system than OSX... but for my needs the priorities are all screwed up in OSX. They're both modern, stable and secure operating systems... and if that's all you need then great. However, running the same applications on both platforms does show the weaknesses of OSX; memory management is of questionable value in OSX and the storage management is kludgy at best.
Windows has been faster than OSX on the same hardware since Windows 7. I know; I've always had a Windows Boot Camp installation on my Macs. My last Mac is still a good one (2012 15" MBP) but has now been surpassed significantly. It used to be that Macs had a 5 year lifespan whereas Windows had a 3... that's one reason I liked Macs. Nowadays, not so much... and it's not changing workloads that are killing it but rather the overly heavy APIs and core problems with OSX that just don't scale quite so well... so new versions get heavier and slower on the same hardware.