XP (x64) -vs- Vista (x64) Actual Benchmarks

DeathFromBelow said:
I can't tell the difference in performance between XP and Vista. Vista has more features, looks a lot nicer, and never crashes.

I'll stick with Vista.

I guess that's why its real world performance is pretty much identical to XP? :rolleyes: If anything aero feels snappier and search is much faster.
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You need to work on that comprehension. I didn't say the bloat caused lackluster performance, I just said Vista is bloated, and you can't honestly say that's not true. SuperFetch does balance out the performance equation over time but... XP takes up less than 1.3GB when installed fully (not counting Hibernation file requirements if enabled, the pagefile depending on RAM installed, nor System Restore points that are created during the installation - I'm talking about the bare metal space required to get the OS itself on the drive). Vista tops out at nearly 7GB for a basic installation.

So my point is Vista is bloated in extremes and it offers essentially the same basic OS functionality out of the box that XP does. Explorer for file management, Notepad for text files, Wordpad for simple word processing, etc - why is everything so much bigger and requires more space? And please, I'm making general statements because Vista takes more space than XP does (and XP Pro x64 also) after a clean installation - don't come back to the table of discussion with comparing the size of Explorer.exe and Notepad.exe in each OS; you're missing the point if you do. I'm talking about the entire OS as a whole.

That's where I'm speaking from in terms of bloat. It truly is amazing that considering Vista is ~6x larger when installed that it DOES still perform as well as it does, but with today's high powered "Godboxes" with dual, triple, and quad core powered CPUs, ridiculously high speed RAM and video cards, the differences don't really matter.

I'm not nor did I state Vista was slower, but it is after the installation - Vista gets faster over time but is slower than XP Pro x64 for the random period of time where it self-tunes on the hardware it's installed on, whereas XP starts off fast but gets slower over time. But XP Pro x64 isn't XP - it's Windows Server 2003 technically, and as such it doesn't suffer from the slowdowns that XP Pro x86 suffers. It's not the same codebase, it doesn't manage resources the same way, hence the fact that someone - including myself - is still interested in how XP Pro x64 compares to Vista x64.

As far as how it looks, that goes back to my function over form statements - I could care less about the GUI features in Vista, and I did state those were my personal desires and opinions, as yours are. If you like the way Vista looks over XP, fantastic, congrats - I'm just saying that means nothing to me whatsoever. And when I run Vista, I don't disable Aero, I just leave it alone and let it do its thing, not that I even notice.

Regarding crashes, I can really truly honestly say I have no idea what that means anymore. I have "quality" hardware - ok, let's just say it up front: I use Intel hardware, period, for the CPU and chipset - and I don't nor will I ever experience the small issues that many people do by choosing non-Intel based components. Some people out there get really lucky, far luckier than they realize, if they don't have issues with AMD CPUs, Nvidia or ATI chipsets (the old ones pre-AMD buyout), or some-higher-power forbid... VIA or SiS stuff. It's just how things go...

Some people throw the word "stable" around like it means something, and honestly the majority of folks out there don't know what it really means. Running Prime95 for 48 hours with some crazy overclock doesn't mean "stable" to me because most any PC can handle running a single program that just crunches numbers over and over for days, that's a piece of cake.

Now, if someone comes out with a benchmark that does 50 different things at the same time - applying Photoshop filters in random orders, creating/printing/calculating Word/Excel/PowerPoint documents, crunching video files, creating mp3 files, playing movies, music, etc and a whole lot more stuff at the same damned time including the number crunching and the overclocking too then I'd be impressed. But just running Prime95 with ORTHOS or something similar... that doesn't mean stable. It just means stable running that application, which is a snap. I've had machines that do 24 hours of ORTHOS crash in 5 minutes when running a combination of various programs at the same time, so much for stability.

I haven't seen a BSOD on this workstation of mine since I built it in the summer of 2007, and I've had probably 175 different OSes installed on it at one point or another, from Win95 through Win98SE (and yes, I mean installed on the bare hardware, not VMs although I use those as well), through 2K and XP, through Vista and 2K8, through Windows 7 build 6801, Linux distros galore (Arch Linux ftw!), and of course OSx86 over 50 times for testing new "hacks" of all sorts. Acronis True Image... a true lifesaver and timesaver if there ever was such a software product. Indispensable, without a shadow of a doubt. :)

So yeah, Vista gets the job done and is more compatible with more hardware out of the box (and after hitting Windows Update) than all previous versions of Windows, I'll be happy to agree with that. But it is more bloated to get basically the same job done, also, as most people should be happy to agree with, that much is a fact. As I said before, it's an amazing thing that considering its size it actually works as fast or faster than XP (meaning the 32 bit version), but in my own testing and experience, XP Pro x64 on this workstation has the edge, even after Vista has self-tuned, in day to day application performance, straight number crunching, and responsiveness.

Of course, I haven't spent the amount of time tweaking the hell out of Vista that I have with XP Pro x64 either... that could have something to do with it because I practice my own motto of leave it alone where Vista is concerned. But bring me an XP 32 bit or XP Pro x64 box and when you get it back you'll be amazed at just how fast it can really go...

Yes, I write long posts, sue me. And of course, I'm not your average Joe... :cool:
 
Joe Average said:
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Bloat - Every single OS produced by Microsoft has been described as "bloated" in one way or another.

Most users only use a handful of features in a particular piece of software, and we all use different specific features. Software, whether it's something "simple" like Firefox or an OS like Vista, will always appear "bloated" to someone.

The fact that Windows Vista is virtually identical in performace to XP shows that it isn't "bloated" in a bad sense (other than requiring more space), it just has more features that many people wont use. I like the new version of Movie Maker and the new DVD Maker tool, but I doubt most people use them.

Stability - I've never had a blue screen under Vista. I've been using it regularly on all of my machines since the consumer launch. I can't say that about XP. Microsoft's crackdown on bad drivers is working.


Now, I'm not saying 64-bit XP is a bad OS, and I know its not XP, but I wouldn't take Vista off a new machine and replace it with 64-bit XP or encourage people to buy 64-bit XP. Vista looks nicer, has similar performace, has more features, and in my experience is easier to get drivers for. All of that outweighs the larger disk space requirement, disk space is cheap.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Bloat - Every single OS produced by Microsoft has been described as "bloated" in one way or another.
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That's because every single OS produced by Microsoft IS bloated in one way or another. ;)

My personal contention is that the architecture is so closed and dependent, that in many cases it is difficult to remove the unwanted/unused bloat without problems or borking system dependencies, something open platforms such as Linux handle much, much better. My sincere hope is the Windows 7 will change this, they're already talking about how to cut back on bloat, but I'm not holding my breath.
 
I think you guys are forgetting something. You're in hardforum.com where most users aren't average Joes.

- If you think that everything will work right out of the box, uninstall everything now.
- If you think that you shouldn't tweak an OS right after you install it, uninstall everything now.
- If you think the so called stable drivers' supposed to work for every single bit of hardware out there, uninstall everything now.
- If you think an OS is bloated and that it shouldn't be. Because you firmly believe you shouldn't have to trim it down right after an install, uninstall everything now.
- If a hardware doesn't work, and you think that it should work right of the bat and that you shouldn't have to figure out how to make it work, uninstall everything now.

I'm using Vista x86_64 right now. did I run into problems? Fuck yeah. I used to run XP x86_64, did I run into problems too? Fuck yeah.

Did I manage to fix them all in both XP and Vista? FUCK YEAH.

One thing that I don't do is tell people that my OS is better than their OS because blah blah blah.

Both OS have problems, if you can't stand dealing with the problems that come up, and you think you have butt loads of experience to prove your point then I think you're missing something. Because experience should tell you SHIT HAPPENS, either deal with it and fix it, or cry.

EDIT: If a mod thinks I'm being harsh, mean and tactless. Fell free to PM me.
 
bonsai said:
That's because every single OS produced by Microsoft IS bloated in one way or another. ;)

My personal contention is that the architecture is so closed and dependent, that in many cases it is difficult to remove the unwanted/unused bloat without problems or borking system dependencies, something open platforms such as Linux handle much, much better. My sincere hope is the Windows 7 will change this, they're already talking about how to cut back on bloat, but I'm not holding my breath.
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As I just said, a feature you don't use isn't bloat unless it affects the performance of the product as a whole. Vista and XP have nearly identical performance despite Vista being larger.

The standard versions of common linux distros like Debian and Ubuntu are far more "bloated" than XP and have higher system requirements. What's the point of Microsoft breaking Windows down into a modular operating system if it provides no tangible benefit to the average user and they already have a seperate product line for servers?
 
DeathFromBelow said:
The standard versions of common linux distros like Debian and Ubuntu are far more "bloated" than XP and have higher system requirements.
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Yes, but the difference is in that in Debian and Ubuntu you can remove what ever you want, replace packages, fully customize, even change kernels with relative ease.

What's the point of Microsoft breaking Windows down into a modular operating system if it provides no tangible benefit to the average user and they already have a seperate product line for servers?
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The point would be a product marketed for power users and performance enthusiasts who want the most out of minimal resources, possibly earning back some of those in the Linux camp who switched for this very reason.
 
bonsai said:
The point would be a product marketed for power users and performance enthusiasts who want the most out of minimal resources, possibly earning back some of those in the Linux camp who switched for this very reason.
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Yeah, all 1% of them. :rolleyes:

I'm a power user and I wouldn't go tearing my Windows installation apart for an extra 1 FPS, just like I don't mess around with the standard packages in Ubuntu. There are no tangible benefits to making Windows modular like that.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
There are no tangible benefits to making Windows modular like that.
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So computers that boot faster, load programs quicker, shutdown faster, recover quicker, have less fragmentation, and saves consumers money on hardware have no tangible benefit? :rolleyes:
 
bonsai said:
So computers that boot faster, load programs quicker, shutdown faster, recover quicker, have less fragmentation, and saves consumers money on hardware have no tangible benefit? :rolleyes:
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Only if the benefits are significant enough and don't hurt the user too much. I could get great performance on my machine if I ran Ubuntu server and didn't install a GUI, but I'd rather not.

You're not going to get any significant performace gains by not installing minor programs and features you don't use. Maybe you never use a printer, but removing the services associated with printing won't improve performance in any measurable way.
 
bonsai said:
So computers that boot faster, load programs quicker, shutdown faster, recover quicker, have less fragmentation, and saves consumers money on hardware have no tangible benefit? :rolleyes:
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Saving consumers money is pure conjecture. Having one product on the shelf is cheaper than having 100 products.

I.e. Let's say Windows was arbitrarily made of 10 parts. Windows Whole is $200. That doesn't automatically mean that each Part is $20. Having ten times the production lines is far more costly to MS than one production line, and that cost will be passed down. Whether this will add up to an overall average product that is more expensive than the Whole is pure conjecture. Afterall, 4/5 Windows might end up being more expensive than if there was just one solidified product, but 2/5 might be cheaper. Where would that lead 3/5? How much would the average consumer use anyway? Lots of variables there, and no answers.

MS did an ingenious thing by making the DVDs more or less the same thing, but even then there are minute differences that do end up costing them slightly more, production-wise. There's still 32 vs. 64 bit discs unless you get Ultimate. There's still different packaging. There's still different marketing and more complex support.
 
I have run both xp x64 and vista home preimum/ultimate x64. Xp x64 wins speed wise HANDS DOWN. Xp x64 wins stablity wise HANDS DOWN. It is a WAY better OS than vista will ever be. M$ knows it fucked up bad with this which is why they are hurridly pushing out windows 7 (which I hope and pray will fix all the issues with this crappy ass OS). I've beyond pissed right now because I bought a new laptop for school which I needed badly and I'm forced to only use vista on it. It is incrediably slow compared to my coreduo xp x86 laptop I had. I also have good hardware on this laptop (p8600 @ 2.4 Ghz/ 4 gigs of ram/ 9600M GT). This laptop beats my old one in every single hardware aspect, but my old laptop was still faster than this. It is unfair how M$ pays millions to Dell and HP so they only push Vista with they're comptuers and don't support XP at all. It's times like these that I hope M$ goes bankrupt.


/rant
 
I'm going to go out on a limb and say mobusta1, something isn't right on that computer. It may be minutely slower but it shouldn't be noticeably slower than XP. I have Vista x86 and XP x86 installed on my crappy laptop and there isn't much of a difference and this is with a Turion single core and 2GB of RAM on X200 graphics.
 
mobusta1 said:
I have run both xp x64 and vista home preimum/ultimate x64. Xp x64 wins speed wise HANDS DOWN. Xp x64 wins stablity wise HANDS DOWN.
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Either something is seriously wrong (missing drivers, illegal copy full of malware) or you're lying. Its hard to take you seriously when you say M$. :rolleyes:

This is why it's impossible to have a real discussion about Vista. All the noobs come in and start saying OMG Vista sucks!!!!11 Even though its obvious that most of them have never used it.
 
silent-circuit said:
A couple of issues here:

1. They're all synthetic benchmarks. [...]

2. Vista's caching system means you need to give a Vista system at least two weeks to reach its full potential (cache fully built, no longer running in the background almost constantly) whereas an XP based system is at its fastest immediately after a wipe of the HDD, new install and defrag. On one hand it's true that your test is 'fair' because they're done at the same time in the OS's lifespan, on the other you're testing a fully prepared OS against one still sorting itself out.
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First point is valid.

Second point, not so much. The "caching system" as you refer to it (and I think you're talking about superfetch) should not affect runtime performance of an application like this in any significant way.
 
Vista provides things that XP doesn't (you can argue the merits of what it provides all you like, but you can't dispute that it does provide things). New features generally come at the cost of performance, but with the ever-increasing speed of computer hardware, a new OS is almost always "fast enough" on mainstream hardware within a year of launch (a point which we are well beyond.) Sure you can get slightly better performance in XP under certain circumstances, but is it really worth it? Some people think yes. I think no. XP is as old as dirt and the few truly Vista-related issues I had have all been resolved since SP1 or earlier, so I no longer see the need to run XP.
 
lol at these threads......

Windows NT 3.51
Windows NT 4
Windows 2000
Windows XP
Windows Vista

each one is more useful than it's predacessor and quess what? each one is more bloated

based upon my experience with each OS I would rate them as follows

Windows NT 4 was a significant improvement over 3.51
Windows 2000 was a significant improvement over 4.0
XP was not a significant improvement over 2000
Vista was a significant improvement over 2000

with each release since 2K everyone has complained about the next os is too bloated.

Vista is very nice and I like it over XP for the most part. I never had any problems other than the intel driver that was incompatable with a particular update. booted into safe mode and updated the intel hdd driver and all was well
 
Using Xp x64 here. I had Vista x64 before and it wasn't that great. It used more ram and i lost a few frame rates in my games. Lots of things were just slower. I remember hearing about xp x64 so i decided to give it a shot and it ended up great. Xp x64 is the most stable OS i ever used from microsoft. better than vista and 32bit xp and win2k and all that. I haven't reinstalled in a couple years already no problems. Its just so robust. It use to be on vista and xp 32bit where if your computer got a blue screen of death then sometimes it would erase a important file but on Xp x64 rarelly if ever gotten a blue screen of death. Xp x64 is based on windows server 2003 so you know its made to last days and months on end without problems. I remember having xp 32 installed and after leaving the computer on for awhile over few days torrenting the computer would get slower. My cousin got a copy himself and said it was way better than vista64 and 32bit xp also. Its just overall better. You may not have dx10 but it has everything you'll need without the bloated interface. Dx10 is still too slow anyways on all the cards. Drivers isn't a issue anymore with xp x64 since almost all manufacturers have the drivers now. If theres drivers for vista64 then theres bound to be drivers for xp x64. Who would want all the bloat of vista64 anyways. All i can say is that i've never had a windows OS this solid ever..and thats going back before windows 3.1.
 
Conker said:
It used more ram and i lost a few frame rates in my games.
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DX 10 uses about 500MB less ram in Far Cry 2 and DX10 has higher FPS than DX9, a Vista only feature. DX10 in Crysis also uses about 300 MB less ram than DX9 mode.
 
XP is way bloated. Windows 98 is so much faster. I get 400 fps in Quake III as opposed to a meager 250 fps in XP. :rolleyes:


You XP fans are talking out of your ass. What do you think Windows 7 is based off of?
 
Jon55 said:
XP is way bloated. Windows 98 is so much faster. I get 400 fps in Quake III as opposed to a meager 250 fps in XP. :rolleyes:


You XP fans are talking out of your ass. What do you think Windows 7 is based off of?
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You forgot to put the </sarcasm> tag in your post someplace so we'd know you were kidding instead of blowin' smoke outta your ass. ;)
 
Joe Average said:
It's amazing that you people still look at the only indicator of PC performance as some fucking synthetic graphics or game benchmark as the fucking ruler that all OSes and hardware platforms should judged by.

It's pathetic.
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That bit of it ever and always amazes me too, to be quite honest. It's kinda like 'pin dick compensation' run wild. And it's all so pointless and senseless.


Yes, there is a demonstrable 'difference' in 3D performance between the two OS's, as it pertains to 'gaming' activity. But get this:

Amidst all the testing and replication of results I've done, I've never yet encountered a situation where that 'measurable' difference translated to a real-world situation which saw me needing to reduce graphics setting to run the same game under Vista. The converse has always been true too. Running a game under XP rather than Vista has never allowed me to make the jump to the 'next level' of graphics detail.

Same old, same old. Same as it ever was. If you want 'better' gaming, go get 'better' gaming hardware. Don't look to the OS or the tweaking to get it. That generally (for most games anyways) means grabbing the next product up in the graphics card line, or the equivalent product in the next generation of the graphics card line. The differences talked about here really only impact on the height of the e-peen erection. In relation to the actual 'gaming', it comes down effectively to the simple circumstance of:

THERE'S NOT REALLY ANY FUCKING DIFFERENCE!
 
All versions of 3DMark prior to Vantage were developed and tested on XP. Anything released in 2007 and 2008 should run at least as good under Vista, not to mention DX10 support.

What's your 3DMark Vantage score in Windows XP? ;)
 
Joe Average said:
You forgot to put the </sarcasm> tag in your post someplace so we'd know you were kidding instead of blowin' smoke outta your ass. ;)
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OK, but then I'd be making a joke (which I wasn't). Enjoy your dinosaur of an OS.
 
Careful folks, the n00bism around here gets kinda thick at times, what with all the kids running around... but it's ok, my dinosaur of an OS will stomp the shit out of 'em with raw bare metal performance, no worries. :D
 
Joe Average said:
Careful folks, the n00bism around here gets kinda thick at times, what with all the kids running around... but it's ok, my dinosaur of an OS will stomp the shit out of 'em with raw bare metal performance, no worries. :D
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Let's see em.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Either something is seriously wrong (missing drivers, illegal copy full of malware) or you're lying. Its hard to take you seriously when you say M$. :rolleyes:

This is why it's impossible to have a real discussion about Vista. All the noobs come in and start saying OMG Vista sucks!!!!11 Even though its obvious that most of them have never used it.
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Ya good for you speak for yourself when you talk about nubs. I've given both OS's plenty of time and XP impresses me more than vista.

As mentioned plenty of times vista is full of bloat and hogs everything down. XP has always been faster. M$ is pushing windows 7 out this fast for a reason. It's the ME fix that XP was 8 years ago.
 
No really, you have something set up wrong, sure it has more stuff but the performance is ~100% of XP's performace so really all it does is eat some more hard disk space. So 98 is faster than XP, why are you using XP?
It's not like 1TB drives are $100. :rolleyes:
And it is hard to take you seriously when you say M$, is it really that hard to say MS or Microsoft?
 
mobusta1 said:
As mentioned plenty of times vista is full of bloat and hogs everything down. XP has always been faster.
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That's probably the most overblown argument ever devised. Vista has a wee bit more overhead, sure, as is only to be expected from a release built to run on hardware which is incredibly more capable than what we had back in 2001. I'd be kinda upset if the additional built-in functionality was restricted just so the thing could still run on machines which should've been consigned to the bin years ago. Vista does some stuff better than XP does, some other stuff a wee bit slower than XP does, but doesn't really do anything so much slower than XP that it's worth really remarking upon.

M$ is pushing windows 7 out this fast for a reason. It's the ME fix that XP was 8 years ago.
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For a reason all right. To get back on track with the release schedule is the reason.

Windows XP wasn't the 'ME fix' by the way. Win98SE was that. WinXP was the '2000 fix'. It was the one which contained the goodies designed to make the NT product line attractive to personal consumers as well as to business consumers.
 
DeaconFrost said:
If you truly, honestly believe that, you have an issue somewhere other than the OS.
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Circumstantially what he said can be quite true. Trying to play Crysis on a Vista machine with 1GB of ram was unbearable; on XP it was fine.

So yes, on the same set of hardware, Vista has the potential to run applications significantly slower. Once you get past the overhead of what the OS requires the difference should be fairly negligible, but it hardly changes this fact.
 
I wouldn't expect XP to run very well on a system with 128 MB of memory, where as Windows 2000 would run much better on that same system. You are right, but there should be some amount of common sense going into the OS choice as well. Unfortunately, many OEM systems have shipped, in the past, with even 512 MB of memory and Vista, so I guess that could be an option. However, I'm always going to go on the assumption that the readers of this board aren't using under-powered systems.
 
I've made posts in the past that show my own testing results with XP Pro x64 on a Q6600 @ 3 GHz with 8GB of DDR2 800 3-3-3-9, if someone wants to see 'em, start searching. I don't play games, so those benchmarks are useless, and the stuff I do is the actual performance of the machine itself overall and how it performs with the given OS and not some synthetic bullshit benchmark that looks to test one specific thing, most notably games.

I do tests like purposely fragmenting a hard drive partition for testing defraggers (take a 1GB VOB file and shotgun-blast it into 256,000 fragments) and then see which one can put it all back together the fastest (PerfectDisk ftw!). I also do testing of how the OS handles reading in metadata from 2,500 mp3 files, fully tagged, and adding them to WMP's library across the OSes I'm testing - XP Pro x64 is nearly twice as fast as all the competition save for Win2K3 x64, but it is Win2K3 at heart anyway so no surprises there.

My testing is for my own purposes, and if I can do it, so can anyone else. I post my results from time to time, easily repeatable each time I do 'em. Only thing I haven't tested in Windows 7 so far, but considering I'm sitting here running build 6956 and it's fucking fast I'm actually considering an XP Pro x64 vs pre-beta Win7 at this point. :)

So, those that know me are content to just sit back and laugh at posts made by *some other folks* around here, whereas *some other folks* around here just get this jollies pushing buttons.

Unfortunately for them, I've been pushing buttons since before "personal computers" even had keyboards... ;)
 
what people still crying about how vista sucks......why not take your sorry asses back to the launch of XP..........now that was a shittay launch.......

this crap reminds me of the Pentium Pro vs Pentium days


A pentium runs Win 95 faster than a PPro does.....leaving off the part were the performance delta was up to 40% better for the PPro when you ran NT versus a Pentium running Win 95.......
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
what people still crying about how vista sucks......why not take your sorry asses back to the launch of XP..........now that was a shittay launch.......

this crap reminds me of the Pentium Pro vs Pentium days


A pentium runs Win 95 faster than a PPro does.....leaving off the part were the performance delta was up to 40% better for the PPro when you ran NT versus a Pentium running Win 95.......
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Ahhh... the venerable Pentium Pro, still quite possibly the finest 32 bit processor Intel ever manufactured. ;) Fond memories of those things, I still have one laying around here in a drawer someplace as a "keepsake" of sorts. Amazing things for their time.
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
what people still crying about how vista sucks......why not take your sorry asses back to the launch of XP..........now that was a shittay launch.
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Amen. It's amazing how people so quickly forget XP got the same crap as Vista is getting when it was still in its early days (pre-SP2).

Joe Average said:
Only thing I haven't tested in Windows 7 so far, but considering I'm sitting here running build 6956 and it's fucking fast I'm actually considering an XP Pro x64 vs pre-beta Win7 at this point. :)
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I think you'd be interested in Windows Mojavie.
 
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