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.

Scores on the doors


* Click here to see the full XP vs Vista 2D benchmark results (opens in a new window)

* Click here to see the full XP vs Vista 3D benchmark results (opens in a new window)

A quick glance at the graphs will reveal that our tests didn't go well for Windows Vista. In all but a few exceptional cases, the new operating system was equalled or bettered by Windows XP. The video encode from our Media Benchmarks 2005, which use TMPGEnc to encode a DivX video to MPEG-2, ran around 6 per cent slower under Vista compared with XP at standard clocks, and 5 per cent slower when overclocked. Our Media Benchmarks 2007 were 6 per cent slower overall with Vista, although matters improved slightly when we increased the FSB, with just a 4 per cent shortfall. Windows Vista's biggest deficit in our Media Benchmarks 2007 was in video encoding. In this test, which uses the command line version of HandBrake to encode a high-resolution MPEG-2 video using the H.264 codec, Windows Vista was a massive 10 per cent slower than XP. Vista was slower at image editing and at multitasking too, although only by single-figure percentage points.

Our remaining individual tests continued to deliver dismal news for Vista. Ripping a CD to MP3 was clearly limited more by the speed of our optical drive than by processor speed or the operating system, and there was little significant difference on either operating system. However, the DVD rip was a different story, with Windows XP completing the task 10 per cent faster than Vista at standard clocks and 12 per cent faster when overclocked. The 2GB file copy was consistently slower on Vista, too, thanks perhaps to the overhead of providing a live assessment of copying performance in MB/sec, or the Instant Search indexing process.

The Cinebench scores told a rather interesting story too. On the one hand, offline 3D rendering scores were comparable between the two operating systems in both single and multi-CPU modes. However, OpenGL graphics performance was a different matter. There has been much controversy about the issue of OpenGL in Windows Vista, with proponents of OpenGL feeling paranoid that Microsoft would leave them stranded by not offering any support at all in order to force people to use its competing DirectX API instead. Our tests show that, although OpenGL is supported in Vista, its performance is lacklustre. Our results question whether it's Microsoft's work that's at fault, or if it's caused by the drivers provided by the GPU manufacturers. With software lighting, and running in OpenGL mode, Cinebench was 27 per cent slower in Vista than it was in Windows XP with Nvidia hardware, and 9 per cent slower with ATI hardware. Using hardware lighting, it was over 250 per cent slower on the Nvidia card. Due to the new driver model, the OpenGL driver is different in Vista, and Nvidia's Vista driver is clearly no match for its XP version yet, although ATI fared better, with a mere 15 per cent deficit. Vista's Aero interface and Desktop Window Manager force windowed OpenGL apps to synchronise with GUI refreshes, which can have a negative effect on performance. However, even when we switched to the Windows Classic theme - disabling Aero in the process - there was no noticeable improvement in the Cinebench scores.