Since it seems like Vista is finally running stable on my new system, I decided to do some benchmarks. My older system kept crashing all the time with Vista due to incompatibilities between my Creative Labs Audigy 2 soundcard and the NVidia NForce 4 chipset. Somehow the XP driver could live with those incompatibilities but the Vista one goes mad and causes BSODs.
The test system is an Athlon64 X2 6000+ with an Asus Crosshair (NForce 590 SLI) board, running 4 GB in 2 OCZ ReaperX EPP EB DIMMs. The graphics card is a PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro 512 MB and the sound card is a Creative Labs Audigy 2 Platinum.
My benchmark will compare Windows Vista Ultimate x64 and Windows XP Professional x86. For the benchmarking, I used PCMark 05, which is a 32 bit application and needs Vista’s 32-bit-on-64-bit emulation layer, referred by Microsoft as WoW (Windows-on-Windows), so the comparison isn’t even strictly fair.
Both systems were fresh installs with the latest updates and drivers. Additionally, Windows Vista had Visual C# 2005 Express, Visual C++ 2008 Express, NAnt, Subversion and various development tools installed, whilst Windows XP had Need for Speed: Pro Street and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance installed. None of the systems had been defragmented before.
Test Vista (x64) XP (x86) Boot 36 s 22 s PCMark 05 6618 PCMarks 6602 PCMarks
This may look like Windows Vista is holding its own in PCMark 05, but actually, it isn’t. Check out the detailed results to see that the graphics card literally won the battle for Vista. Whereas XP does alpha blending in software, Vista uses Direct3D for transparency, resulting in a mad number of transparent windows being rendered.
Test Vista (x64) XP (x86) HDD - XP Startup 9.15 MB/s 10.15 MB/s Physics and 3D 183.0 FPS 226.1 FPS Transparent Windows 5296.28 Windows/s 898.65 Windows/s 3D - Pixel Shader 316.44 FPS 330.54 FPS Web Page Rendering 2.67 Pages/s 3.25 Pages/s File Decryption 52.09 MB/s 52.45 MB/s Graphics Memory - 64 Lines 1007.04 FPS 1843.43 FPS HDD - General Usage 7.33 MB/s 7.42 MB/s Multithreaded Test 1 / Audio Compression 2689.71 KB/s 2955.91 KB/s Multithreaded Test 1 / Video Encoding 443.5 KB/s 434.99 KB/s Multithreaded Test 2 / Text Edit 138.69 Pages/s 173.68 Pages/s Multithreaded Test 2 / Image Decompression 33.99 MPixels/s 34.35 MPixels/s Multithreaded Test 3 / File Compression 5.5 MB/s 6.21 MB/s Multithreaded Test 3 / File Encyption 27.96 MB/s 30.75 MB/s Multithreaded Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan 38.86 MB/s 43.25 MB/s Multithreaded Test 3 / Memory Latency 12.98 MAccesses/s 12.02 MAccesses/s
So, the overall result is that Windows Vista Ultimate x64 is marginally slower than Windows XP Professional x86 for me. Boot time was measured from pressing the return key in my boot menu up to when windows was fully loaded (for Vista, that meant the side bar was completely running and for XP, that meant the desktop and all icons had appeared). Vista had the sidebar with various gadgets, including the CPU meter gadget, running during the whole benchmark.
On my old system, I had been running Windows Vista Ultimate x86. I didn’t run any benchmarks besides measuring the booting time. Interestingly, Vista booted faster than XP back then while now it doesn’t. Therefore, I’d really like to add Windows Vista Ultimate x86 to the chart, but I don’t have the nerve to reinstall my Vista partition from scratch again.
January 26th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
[…] month ago, I published some personal benchmarks of my AMD system comparing the performance of Windows Vista with that of Windows XP. Back then, I […]