| Article Index |
|---|
| Windows XP and Vista Performance Comparison |
| The Test Machine |
| Results - 3DMark06 |
| Results - PCMark05 |
| Conclusion |
| All Pages |
Onto PCMark05.
In PCMark, the tests were run at a resolution of 1280x1024, with the video cards in SLI mode.
We can see an overall performance decrease of about 15% in Vista compared to XP, and when looking through the results, the main culprits are the graphics memory tests, where XP was a massive 11 TIMES Better than Vista!!! XP was able to pass through 3600frames per second compared to Vista’s lowly 312FPS. Again, hopefully future driver releases can help fix this issue, as that’s just pathetic.
Video playback of a WMV file also suffered greatly under Vista, giving just 30.8FPS compared to 69.1FPS under XP. This means Vista would struggle to do anything else while a WMV video is playing, quite poor really considering the hardware we’re testing on.
HDD performance was generally better on XP, but only by a few % barely worth a mention really. The only areas Vista excelled in were rendering transparent windows (i.e. like the Aero theme) and audio decompression. For transparent windows, Vista beats XP almost 4-fold, with 2671windows/sec under Vista, to 713windows/sec under XP. Microsoft has obviously optimised this process quite well for Vista to make the Aero theme run smoothly. Audio decompression was twice as good under Vista, working at 2665KB/s compared to 1371KB/s under XP. Unfortunately audio compression is the same under both, so you won’t be able to rip your CDs to MP3’s any faster.
