XP vs Vista

Posted at: Tuesday 2nd October 2007 by James Morris

James Morris puts Windows XP and Vista head to head in a gruelling set of benchmarks to see which Microsoft operating system runs your games and applications the quickest.

It's been more than six months since Windows Vista arrived, and while Microsoft has been keen to portray its arrival as a victory march, to some observers its progress looked more shaky than stately. Dell reintroduced Windows XP as an option for consumers, and likewise, many other system integrators still offer a choice between XP and Vista. At the end of January 2008, however, Microsoft will begin to force the issue by stopping OEM sales of Windows XP, thus ending the option of buying a new machine with the older OS. Only Vista will remain.

With the end for XP in sight, is it time to consider that Vista upgrade you've been putting off for the past few months before Microsoft forces the issue? Perhaps early adopters have done all the hard work, and the driver support is now mature. Or perhaps Vista still isn't up to speed, lacks drivers and is a terrible resource hog. It all depends on whom you listen to, so we've decided to find out for ourselves and look at some of the problems Vista created, whether or not they've been solved and, most importantly, how Vista stacks up against its precursor, Windows XP, across a range of tasks, from multimedia to gaming.

What does Vista do?

Before we get down to the nitty-gritty of our performance testing, let's take a look at what Windows Vista is supposed to deliver, and what you'll find once it's up and running.

One of the biggest features of Windows Vista for the enthusiast is DirectX 10 and, if you want it, you must upgrade to Vista (although check out 'Is DirectX 10 really Vista only?'). We've covered it in detail before, and while it's undoubtedly technically very advanced, there are still only a handful of games that take advantage of its new features.

BioShock features some fancy DirectX 10 enhancements, as will the imminent Hellgate: London. The patched version of Company of Heroes, along with Call of Juarez and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition also feature DX10 support.

However, five games won't be enough to convince most people that DirectX 10 is essential. Another selling point is Games for Windows Live, the online gaming system first launched on the Xbox. It's now included with Windows Vista too. Microsoft's own Halo 2 was the first PC title to support Live, and more than 12 games have been announced, including the upcoming Gears of War. However, only the 'Silver' level of Live is free. To obtain all the features, you need to upgrade to 'Gold' at a cost of $49.95 a year. Worse, it's also allegedly coming to Windows XP later in 2007, so that won't be a huge incentive for Vista either.

Along with DirectX 10 comes a new driver architecture, which takes the majority of code out of the kernel and moves it into a new 'User' Level. This means that drivers can crash and be restarted without taking the whole operating system with them. Graphics driver bugs in particular could seriously hang a Windows XP system, and during our extensive testing there wasn't a single occasion when we had to resort to the Restart button on our Vista box to escape from software unresponsiveness.