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.

We also found with Windows Vista that we consistently had to run a 2D application benchmark a couple of times and discard the first result, which is always much slower than the other results. This is primarily due to SuperFetch, which preloads frequently used applications and files them into memory in the background so that they're ready and waiting. This appears to work, but ironically, it merely prevents Windows Vista from being dog-slow and makes its trouncing by Windows XP less embarrassing.

Perhaps the most telling way of showing how slow Windows Vista is compared with Windows XP is the fact that there were quite a few benchmarks in which Vista only achieved scores comparable to those of XP when the processor was overclocked by 12.5 per cent; this implies that you'll need a 12.5 per cent faster CPU clock to obtain the same 2D application speed.

Game for a laugh

Sadly, our games test results largely told a story similar to that of our Media Benchmarks. 3DMark06 was 6 per cent slower under Vista with Nvidia, and 3 per cent slower with ATI, and this theme was continued with most of the games we tested. Using BFG's Nvidia hardware, the frame rates in Windows Vista were 10 per cent slower than XP when running Far Cry, but only 1 per cent slower with the Sapphire's ATI Radeon HD 2900XT.

We encountered bigger problems with Need for Speed: Carbon. Version 1.3 and earlier versions don't work with Windows Vista, and we found that 1.4 didn't work either until we selected Windows 98 compatibility mode. Even then, Carbon was as flaky as an evening at a Kellogg's breakfast cereal factory.

It was also around 12 per cent slower than XP with Nvidia hardware, and 10 per cent slower with ATI. There's definitely a need for more speed in Windows Vista when playing this game. In its defence, EA currently claims that none of its titles is Windows Vista compatible, so you can't say you haven't been warned. Hopefully, later patches will fix this.

Company of Heroes was kinder to Nvidia - the results weren't as slow as ATI in this test. However, it was no kinder to Vista, which was 10 per cent slower than XP with the GeForce, and a rotten 33 per cent slower with the Radeon. Company of Heroes was also the first game to add support for DirectX 10, but included extra graphical features with its 1.70 patch, which was launched in June 2007. The DirectX 10 mode enables some extra 'Ultra' effects settings. Strangely, we could enable Ultra Terrain under XP (and hence in DirectX 9 mode), whereas in Vista, you need to be in DirectX 10 mode for it to work. Perhaps this is a sign that Vista's DirectX 9L isn't entirely identical to regular DirectX 9. As we've previously reported, however, ramping up quality to Ultra with DirectX 10 results in a big hit on performance, more than halving the average frame rate. You could just about make it through the single-player game like this, but you wouldn't want to play another person at this frame rate.