Benchmarks: 64-Bit XP, Vista, and Windows 7 Beta Compared

I don't get where you're coming from with the statement that "XP probably has 400 FPS" where vista and win7 have 300 and 315. Did you read the OPs benchmarks, Vista gets more FPS than XP... Or am I misunderstanding you?
It was a rash generalization. In some benchmarks that simply measure 'throughput' as I like to call it, generally 3dmark/sandrasoft type benchmarks, and in some cases, older games that are generally very high in FPS like FEAR/HL2/UT3 etc... XP is faster. You will see things like Vista 140FPS, XP 160 FPS. Yes, XP has more FPS but you'll never notice it. Then you bench XP vs Vista in games with much ore intense graphics, and the results are very similar.
 
yup, i've gotten vista running fairly well on a laptop that had 768mb of ram with some nominal tweaks + clean startup + letting it self-optimize for a few days....

and i routinely run it with 1gb in a VM, where it runs very snappy.....

some people just arent good at tweaking/optimizing their OS, dont feel too bad, you're not the only one

Tweaking? Well... I guess all the kernel shit I talk about is total non-sense. Some people can't wait for things to be done. Some people multi-task, not single task. Running in 768mb of ram will be a burden even you have 10,000rpm drive. If I click really slow around the computer, sure 768mb will be ok, but some people got jobs to do. It will constantly access the drive to dump the cache back and forth if you are multi-tasking. If you are single tasking, it is a bit different. Also, the cache gets fragmented a lot in Windows, because it doesn't have a dedicated partition to handle the pagefile.
 
Tweaking? Well... I guess all the kernel shit I talk about is total non-sense. Some people can't wait for things to be done. Some people multi-task, not single task. Running in 768mb of ram will be a burden even you have 10,000rpm drive. If I click really slow around the computer, sure 768mb will be ok, but some people got jobs to do. It will constantly access the drive to dump the cache back and forth if you are multi-tasking. If you are single tasking, it is a bit different. Also, the cache gets fragmented a lot in Windows, because it doesn't have a dedicated partition to handle the pagefile.

not a problem for me, even with firefox open with a good dozen or so tabs, and excel 2007 crunching away on a huge spreadsheet (in my line of work i deal with enormous amounts of data), the 768mb of ram doesnt skip a beat. sure, some apps might need more ram than that, but those same apps would need more ram on XP as well......

so yea, set it up well enough, and vista can run well enough on 1gb (as long as the apps you are running permit it.... which, once again, is no different than XP)
 
Tweaking? Well... I guess all the kernel shit I talk about is total non-sense.

Actually, it is, no offense.

The NT lineage has never been monolithic. NT, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 are all hybrid kernel. I don't really see what that has to do with this discussion. I'm sorry if that's not what your trying to say as I'm having a hard time understanding your posts. Again, no offense.

I used Vista with 1 GB of RAM for a couple months without trouble, I don't know what else to say. Around the time Vista came out the only game that really needed 2 GB of RAM was Battlefield 2 on high settings, otherwise you would get studdering (yay for EA software:rolleyes:).
 
Actually, it is, no offense.

The NT lineage has never been monolithic. NT, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 are all hybrid kernel. I don't really see what that has to do with this discussion. I'm sorry if that's not what your trying to say as I'm having a hard time understanding your posts. Again, no offense.

I used Vista with 1 GB of RAM for a couple months without trouble, I don't know what else to say. Around the time Vista came out the only game that really needed 2 GB of RAM was Battlefield 2 on high settings, otherwise you would get studdering (yay for EA software:rolleyes:).

NT3.51 and NT4 have been mostly Monolithic. Starting 2000, we start seeing switching to hybrid. Remember, Ms codes have to be behind few generation behind Intel CPUs. That is why we start noticing it doesn't require reboot to just a change display resolution and changing an IP address. 1gb ram is ok for Vista if your goal is open a word processor and few tab of a browser. For some users, that isn't enough. Some spreadsheets that financial analysts are working on are over 100 megs.
 
The cost of RAM doesn't make Vista any less bloated.

Actually, it does. Otherwise, even MS-DOS would be bloated, the only reason MS-DOS is not bloated is because the price of ram dropped from the days when 640KB of memory cost thousands of dollars or more. That is the nature of computers, cpu's get more powerful, ram gets cheaper and software adapts to put it all to use. 512MBs of Ram cost like $100 - $200 when XP was released, now you can buy 8GBs for less than $100, and Vista runs much better on 8GBs of ram than XP runs on 512MB, so relatively speaking, Vista is LESS bloated. The computer market is a complex thing, you can't always just add up the numbers without a deeper understanding of what's going on.
 
actuary here.... using huge spreadsheets, sometimes simultaneously, and vista on 1gb of ram is just fine for my task.....

Here is a thing, certain users get irritated even with a half second gap of read and write to the disk during the buffer. Maybe, you don't. I hate waiting for the PC to finish after me. For me, 4gb is solid for Vista. I can't imagine running Vista on 1gb. Sometimes, how fast things go is based on the person.
 
Here is a thing, certain users get irritated even with a half second gap of read and write to the disk during the buffer. Maybe, you don't. I hate waiting for the PC to finish after me. For me, 4gb is solid for Vista. I can't imagine running Vista on 1gb. Sometimes, how fast things go is based on the person.

whatever, 1gb with might not be enough for you, but im pretty sure it would be for 95% of regular users the way i set it up, and thats what counts in the end.... for the majority of people, properly setup and tuned, vista can be quite enjoyable at 1gb
 
whatever, 1gb with might not be enough for you, but im pretty sure it would be for 95% of regular users the way i set it up, and thats what counts in the end.... for the majority of people, properly setup and tuned, vista can be quite enjoyable at 1gb

That is fine. All the little incremental migration for the entire world matters at the end. If most developers are still coding under XP, you will NOT see the benefit of Vista. The codes will probably run faster under XP. Ms made a huge mistake of waiting too much for each release. Now, the hardware migration for the world for Ms got a lot more difficult. In Linux, it is different, because they don't have to deal with the unification of movement of hardware, because the source of the kernel is open.
 
Actually, it does.

Actually it doesn't. You still fail to understand what bloat really means. Let's look at this definition from Wiki:

Software bloat... is a term used in both a neutral and disparaging sense, to describe the tendency of newer computer programs to be larger, or to use larger amounts of system resources than necessary for the same or similar benefits from older versions to its users.

The more than necessary part is the crucial bit. According to the benchs the OP has presented, XP performs essentially the same as Vista. Yet, Vista needs more far more system resources to do it. By definition alone, that means it is bloated.

Yes, XP has bloat too, but not as much as Vista. Bloat is expected, but Vista really went overboard, and is why it got such a bad rep. So some people still prefer XP. Even Ubuntu has bloat, (and is sadly becoming more bloated) but there some Linux distros that are very streamlined, has essentially no bloat, and manage to accomplish everything your average desktop PC should. That's powerful and really says something. Don't you ever wonder why our computers are becoming faster and more powerful, where we have a computer today running Vista that is 10x as powerful as a computer from 2001 running XP yet, (according to the benchmarks presented today) we are still computing at the same speed? Bloat is a big part of that answer.

You know, it's astounding that many people around here are quick to understand how many apps like iTunes, Nero, Adobe Reader, Norton, Quicktime, AIM, etc are bloated. They bash on them all day long, and use streamlined alternatives like VLC, imgburn, foxit, Avast, Pidgin, etc. Yet, mention bloat and Vista, and how quickly the fanboi blinders come on and all reason becomes futile.
 
That is fine. All the little incremental migration for the entire world matters at the end. If most developers are still coding under XP, you will NOT see the benefit of Vista. The codes will probably run faster under XP. Ms made a huge mistake of waiting too much for each release. Now, the hardware migration for the world for Ms got a lot more difficult. In Linux, it is different, because they don't have to deal with the unification of movement of hardware, because the source of the kernel is open.

well they didnt intentionally wait 6 years between the releases.... its just that the original longhorn ended up being completely unworkable, necessitating the rebot in 2004....

besides, the amount of (undeserved) good press that 7 is getting is really turning into a PR coup for MS......
 
Yes, XP has bloat, but not as much as Vista. Bloat is expected, but Vista really went overboard, and is why it got such a bad rep.
Then go back to Windows 2000. Or DOS for that matter. Most linux distros are more "bloated" than XP. Why? Because they aren't 7 years old!

Some increase in size is to be expected, especially when a new OS involves a lot of newer, higher-resolution graphics. Vista introduced much better memory management and uses your graphics card to render the GUI, thus it looks nicer without a performance hit. As I said before, add to that the increased security and new features and I don't see how anyone could call XP a "better" OS. It may take up more space, but in terms of the hardware available today and what was available to us in 2001 I might actually say that XP was more "bloated" at its launch. The Luna GUI sucked down RAM like nobody's business.

Feel free to run your own benchmarks comparing Vista and XP on a system with 1 GB of RAM. We'll be waiting. My experience and most others has been that Vista runs just fine in that configuration.
 
linux adoption has nothing to do with bloat (or lack or it) and everything to do with developer inertia. if there was a reasonable expectation that w/e industry standard application was offered as a Linux compatible binary, we'd see a much, much higher rate of adoption....

besides, linux has only *very, very recently* started to get *nearly* workable on the desktop for more than a few nerds.... give it time, netbook adoption + smartphone adoption + continual usability refinements *will* help fuel a good uptick in linux installations and trust (from corporations and OEMs).
 
Then go back to Windows 2000. Or DOS for that matter. Most linux distros are more "bloated" than XP. Why? Because they aren't 7 years old!

Some increase in size is to be expected, especially when a new OS involves a lot of newer, higher-resolution graphics. Vista introduced much better memory management and uses your graphics card to render the GUI, thus it looks nicer without a performance hit. As I said before, add to that the increased security and new features and I don't see how anyone could call XP a "better" OS. It may take up more space, but in terms of the hardware available today and what was available to us in 2001 I might actually say that XP was more "bloated" at its launch. The Luna GUI sucked down RAM like nobody's business.

Feel free to run your own benchmarks comparing Vista and XP on a system with 1 GB of RAM. We'll be waiting. My experience and most others has been that Vista runs just fine in that configuration.

I know you guys are really passionate about the technology, but let's think about few things here. Sometimes, 18volt drill isn't necessary or more efficient for every job. The issue with Vista was the slower migration plan. Developers who work for MS constantly going to code even the new OS has been released. Fact that they waited so long that migration paths are totally disastrous! Also, developers who code under MS OS aren't obiligate to follow their rules. There will be constant coding under XP, but maybe tested with VISTA environment. That means the latest way of benefiting the new OS will always fall behind.

Linux is open, so if I don't like the idea xyz distro is no longer supporting 486 computers, I could also rewrite the code and share with the world who needs it without getting arrested. That was his point.
 
Yes, XP has bloat too, but not as much as Vista. Bloat is expected, but Vista really went overboard, and is why it got such a bad rep.
You're 100% right, there is "bloat" in Vista/7, but it's not all just useless junk that nobody uses. I think you see it that way because maybe you don't need all the features. For people who use all that stuff, do you think they feel it's bloat? If it wasn't there, you wouldn't have the features to use.

XP had a good Windows Installer that allowed stuff to be uninstalled that wasn't needed. Maybe Microsoft should go back to that. Leave it in by default though but allow those who want less disk space to get it back.

I'm quite happy with a 12GB install on my 640GB disk. Plus it now tells you exactly how much space system restore is using and allows you to easily adjust it. I'm not worried about disk space and the program performs as well as XP, but is more feature rich. I feel that equals a winner.
 
Most linux distros are more "bloated" than XP!

Actually they're not. Most distros have a smaller footprint, have less memory usage, and need less horsepower than XP, and they do more with it, are completely customizable and yes, are free too. Even Ubuntu one of the more bloated distros has recommended system requirements only slightly above XP.
 
Actually they're not. Most distros have a smaller footprint, have less memory usage, and need less horsepower than XP, and they do more with it, are completely customizable and yes, are free too. Even Ubuntu one of the more bloated distros has recommended system requirements only slightly above XP.

I'm not TAKING SIDEs!
However, one correction. You can always recompile the kernel and Gnome. You can reduce up to 100mb of unnecessary Gnome features. OK. That is it. Sorry. Irrelevant, but I hate it when Linux is a skinny model whore with a size 0 dress and some people assume she wears size 6. XP size 6. VISTA... She is very healthy. I wouldn't touch her, but I know other guys will after few drinks.
 
The cost of RAM doe
sn't make Vista any less bloated.

You have to qualify bloated. Vista Home Premimum for comparison has a lot more in it than XP Home or Pro, like Windows Media Center, Tablet PC functionality, search, Aero and so forth. I've found that Vista Home Basic will run pretty well on older machines with less than 1GB of RAM.
 
Actually they're not. Most distros have a smaller footprint, have less memory usage, and need less horsepower than XP, and they do more with it, are completely customizable and yes, are free too. Even Ubuntu one of the more bloated distros has recommended system requirements only slightly above XP.

Small foot prints are great, but a lot of people want to actually DO things with their desktop
and as long as the machine runs well, memory footprint is irrelavant for a modern desktop.

If you want a small foot print, use a mobile phone since they now are serious challengers to desktops, especially OS'es like Linux, that are difficult for most users to setup for more advance uses like digtial media, gaming and natrual (voice, pen, touch) input.
 
Actually they're not. Most distros have a smaller footprint, have less memory usage, and need less horsepower than XP, and they do more with it, are completely customizable and yes, are free too. Even Ubuntu one of the more bloated distros has recommended system requirements only slightly above XP.

It's certainly possible to run Ubuntu on a very slow system by taking out some featues, but in my experience you need to have a system that meets the recommended requirements to have a useful computer (700 MHz x86 processor and 384 MB of RAM). Good luck using the Gnome desktop environment or even XFCE on a machine with less power than that.

I've run XP on a 90 MHz Pentium 1 with 64 MB of RAM (it was an old thinkpad). It was slow as hell if you turned on the Luna GUI, but it was usable once it finished booting up. I actually used that thing in high school, although it was a joke more than anything.
 
It's certainly possible to run Ubuntu on a very slow system by taking out some featues, but in my experience you need to have a system that meets the recommended requirements to have a useful computer (700 MHz x86 processor and 384 MB of RAM). Good luck using the Gnome desktop environment on a machine with less power than that.

I've run XP on a 90 MHz Pentium 1 with 64 MB of RAM (it was an old thinkpad). It was slow as hell if you turned on the Luna GUI, but it was usable once it finished booting up. I actually used that thing in high school, although it was a joke more than anything.

I OBJECT! Damn correction!
I can make it run at 96megs for Gnome!
XP on 90mhz? Are you insane?
 
XP on 90mhz? Are you insane?

As i said, it was a joke more than anything. :)

I was in Air Force JROTC and the local base occasionally sent us some of the computers they were getting rid of.

I can make it run at 96megs for Gnome!
I'm sure you can if you remove/turn off a bunch of stuff. But XP is so old and simple it required no configuration whatsoever on that old machine, and I could play Doom in class. :D
 
Here's some interesting little tidbits to put things into perspective:

Install Size
Win 95 (50 MB) -> Win 98 (250 MB) = increase by factor 5
Win 98 (250 MB) -> Win2000 (1 GB) = increase by factor 5
Win2000 (1 GB) -> WinXP (1.5 GB) = increase by factor 1.5 or factor 6 from Win98
WinXP (1.5 GB) -> WinVista (15 GB) = increase by factor 10!! wtf...

Here's a nice article detailing the history of bloat within Windows and Microsoft Office, sums it up pretty nicely I think. http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/14/16TC-winoffice-performance_1.html

The conventional wisdom regarding PC evolution, that Microsoft devours every Intel advance, continues to hold true right up through the current generation of Windows Vista and Office 2007. What's shocking, however, is the way that the IT community as a whole has grown to accept the status quo. There is a sense of inevitability attached to the concept of the Wintel duopoly, a feeling that the upgrade treadmill has become a part of the industry's DNA. Forces that challenge the status quo – such as Linux, Google, and Apple – are seen as working against the very fabric of the computing landscape.

But as Microsoft is learning, you can only push your customers so far before they push back. In the case of Windows Vista, the combination of heavy hardware requirements and few tangible benefits to IT has resulted in a mass rejection of Microsoft’s latest and greatest.
 
It's certainly possible to run Ubuntu on a very slow system by taking out some featues, but in my experience you need to have a system that meets the recommended requirements to have a useful computer (700 MHz x86 processor and 384 MB of RAM). Good luck using the Gnome desktop environment or even XFCE on a machine with less power than that.

no way.... im currently running gentoo with a full gnome desktop on my "netbook" (an ancient dell laptop), which runs a 300mhz pentium 2 and has 128 mb of ram .... and aside from not being able to run flash (which is really a plus to me anyway), there isnt much this little laptop cant do....
 
Here's some interesting little tidbits to put things into perspective:

Install Size
...
Win2000 (1 GB) -> WinXP (1.5 GB) = increase by factor 1.5 or factor 6 from Win98
WinXP (1.5 GB) -> WinVista (15 GB) = increase by factor 10!! wtf...

And in that same time we've gone from most people having 20 GB (or smaller) hard drives to most people having 250 GB or more. XP takes up 7.5% a 20 GB drive. Vista takes up about 6% of a 250 GB drive.

no way.... im currently running gentoo with a full gnome desktop on my "netbook" (an ancient dell laptop), which runs a 300mhz pentium 2 and has 128 mb of ram .... and aside from not being able to run flash (which is really a plus to me anyway), there isnt much this little laptop cant do....

Right, Gentoo is still pretty lightweight compared to Ubuntu. The problem is when you try to simplify a Linux distro to the point that it becomes usable for the less-computer-literate the hardware requirements balloon out.
 
I have few web servers. One is 100mhz 32megs of ram serving 10 friends. Also, some of you are forgetting the spec for OneLaptopPerChild. The spec is 433 Mhz, AMD i586 instruction set, 256MB (dual-DDR333-166Mhz), and 1024 MiB SLC NAND flash. These are irrelevant points. I know someone will say, I am trolling for talking about Linux in XP vs VISTA vs Win7beta1.
 
Anyway, it is very clear to see home and enterprise requirements for the OS usages are very different. That is why MS needs to rethink their product lines. They need to make Enterprise version very different than the Home version. Maybe, even come with the Gamer/MediaCenter Entertainment.
 
Here's some interesting little tidbits to put things into perspective:

Install Size
Win 95 (50 MB) -> Win 98 (250 MB) = increase by factor 5
Win 98 (250 MB) -> Win2000 (1 GB) = increase by factor 5
Win2000 (1 GB) -> WinXP (1.5 GB) = increase by factor 1.5 or factor 6 from Win98
WinXP (1.5 GB) -> WinVista (15 GB) = increase by factor 10!! wtf...

Here's a nice article detailing the history of bloat within Windows and Microsoft Office, sums it up pretty nicely I think. http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/04/14/16TC-winoffice-performance_1.html
Yeah, and in 1995 a typical $250 Hard Drive was 250MB. That means Windows 95 took 20% of disk space. Wow that's a lot of bloat compared to the 5% of disk space Vista took on a 400GB disk at launch, that cost a lot less than $250 :rolleyes:

And in that same time we've gone from most people having 20 GB (or smaller) hard drives to most people having 250 GB or more. XP takes up 7.5% a 20 GB drive. Vista takes up about 6% of a 250 GB drive.
I was doing research on the subject while you posted this so I give you credit for the idea, sorry.
 
Right, Gentoo is still pretty lightweight compared to Ubuntu. The problem is when you try to simplify a Linux distro to the point that it becomes usable for the less-computer-literate the hardware requirements balloon out.

but even ubuntu can run real well on a low end system. just fire up synaptic and start uninstalling, also, instead of going through the hassle, just installing a vanilla debian desktop (which is pretty much just ubuntu - the fluff), is enough to get an ancient computer kicking again, and quite nicely....

the point i'm making is, while i dont consider vista to be bloated, its pretty hard to argue against linux being the king of the very, very, very, *very* low end or old computers, especially when you consider that running older versions of Windows usually means sacrificing the latest in Microsoft's security enhancements, whereas with linux, you always have the latest, and best security that is available.
 
Once again, hard drive capacity and cost have no bearing on bloat. I can put Vista on a 15 GB hard drive or I can put Vista on a 1500GB hard drive, it makes no difference, it's still bloated.

Look at another example, regardless of cost of ram, or the size of a hard drive, or the price of Macadamia nuts in Spain, Nero Burning ROM is a fat, bloated piece of software. It's huge, unwieldy, inefficient, and offers little that can't be accomplished using less resources by better software. It makes no difference if I have 512 MB of ram or 16 GB of RAM, a 5 gb hard drive or a 500gb hard drive, Nero is still bloated and there are better options out there.
 
Anyway, it is very clear to see home and enterprise requirements for the OS usages are very different. That is why MS needs to rethink their product lines. They need to make Enterprise version very different than the Home version. Maybe, even come with the Gamer/MediaCenter Entertainment.

i can agree with that, microsoft needs to include setup options in their business/enterprise/ultimate versions of windows like they had in windows 98: where you could pick and choose what programs and services were installed. hell, something as in depth as vlite during the install process (that is officially supported) would be a breath of fresh air.

full disclosure, part of my vista tweaking to get it running so damn well on 1gb of ram usually involves quite a bit of vliting...
 
i can agree with that, microsoft needs to include setup options in their business/enterprise/ultimate versions of windows like they had in windows 98: where you could pick and choose what programs and services were installed. hell, something as in depth as vlite during the install process (that is officially supported) would be a breath of fresh air.

full disclosure, part of my vista tweaking to get it running so damn well on 1gb of ram usually involves quite a bit of vliting...

That is the right direction, many of the application calls such as service aren't direct calls to the kernel. There is loops and hops in Windows. The best choice is minor rewrite instead of subtracting utility like (n)-(v)lite.
 
Once again, hard drive capacity and cost have no bearing on bloat. I can put Vista on a 15 GB hard drive or I can put Vista on a 1500GB hard drive, it makes no difference, it's still bloated.
You're ignoring something though. You're assuming Microsoft does not consider hard drive capacity when designing their OS and just fill it with stuff regardless of disk they will be installed on. They fill it full of features because disk space is cheap. Why not use it? If they shipped a 15GB OS on 50GB disk then you would have a valid argument that there is to much. Or if they shipped a 100GB OS on a 500GB disk, to match the install size/disk capacity relation of 95, then you would have a valid argument. Neither of those are the case. Vista utilizes all the free ram, Vista utilizes idle time and Vista utilizes free hard disk space.
 
Does OSX let you pick and choose stuff during the installation? No? Wonder why... <hint, hint> (and yes I know some aspects can be customized during the install, but not what most people here are looking for or discussing)

Does any modern Linux distribution let you pick and choose during the installation precisely what you want? No? Wonder why... <hint, hint>

And don't play semantics here: I am speaking about modern common popular Linux distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, and others that have GUI installers - so they're compared with Windows and OSX - and they simply do not give the user the options that people seem to feel are their god given right to have). I ain't talkin' about Arch, Debian base, Gentoo, etc... those are hardcore and way beyond your average Joe (not me, I assure you).
 
Back
Top