| Article Index |
|---|
| Windows XP and Vista Performance Comparison |
| The Test Machine |
| Results - 3DMark06 |
| Results - PCMark05 |
| Conclusion |
| All Pages |
The Results:
For 3DMark06 we ran 3 different tests, one with the video cards in SLI mode, one using only a single video card, and another in SLI mode using 8x Anti-Aliasing to try to see if there’s more of a difference when the 3D system is pushed hard. All tests were performed at a resolution of 1280x1024.
As you can see above, there is around a 5% performance increase using Windows XP under both SLI tests, the single card test showed a negligible difference, but still in favour of old-hat XP.
There were a few tests within 3DMark that showed a massive difference between the O/S’s, specifically the shader tests. The simple Vertex Shader test showed almost a 50% drop in performance under Vista, with XP running 369Million Vertices/sec versus 186MV/s under Vista. The shader particles test also showed Vista had a 25% drop from XP, and the pixel shader test a 15% drop in performance.
3DMark also performs Batch Size tests of moving triangle systems, starting with 8 triangles and moving up with 32, 128, 512, 2048 and finally 32768.
This test demonstrates graphics card memory throughput by testing how many triangles per second can be drawn. In these tests both versions of Windows improve at close to the same rate as the batch size increases, until (as you can see on the graph above) Vista seems to hit a wall, indicating a big problem with memory throughput under Vista. Hopefully this is only a driver issue that can be fixed by nVidia in the future.
