Vista vs XP: Performance tested, and Vista is slower

Posted at: 11:18am 22nd October 2007 by Custom PC staff

There's plenty of negative press about Vista, but how much of it is fear of change and trendy Microsoft-bashing? We put Vista head-to-head with its biggest rival - XP - to see how Microsoft's new OS performs

It’s been more than six months since Windows Vista has been released, and it’s not been plain sailing for the new OS. Saying anything more definite than that has been tricky though – for every report claiming Vista uptake is sluggish, Microsoft has its own sales figures which it claims to be happy with.



Looking at sales figures might be interesting for people wanting to assess the whole PC market, but if you’re an individual wondering if it’s time to go out and buy a copy of Vista, is far from the most relevant benchmark. Linux – particularly Ubuntu – might be getting a lot of positive press at the moment, but for most PC builders, especially gamers, the key question for Vista is how it compares to its predecessor, Windows XP, particularly when it comes to performance.

We decided to put Vista head-to-head with XP, performing the same tests on each OS using the same hardware. We looked at our own benchmarks, as well as DVD ripping and encoding, file copying and 3D rendering. We also tested a whole range of games – from new titles such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. to older ones such as Far Cry, along with some of the best looking games available on the PC today, including Oblivion and Company of Heroes. When gaming, we tested with both ATi and Nvidia hardware, in order to see not just how Vista compared to XP, but how the Vista versions of the Radeon and GeForce drivers differed.

The full results and discussion are available in our 7-page feature, and they don’t do Vista any favours. In all but a few exceptional cases, the new operating system was equalled or bettered by Windows XP. Using TMPGEnc to encode a DivX video to MPEG-2 was around 6 per cent slower under Vista compared with XP. Our Media Benchmarks 2007 were 6 per cent slower overall with Vista – and again, it was in video encoding that Vista was weakest, being 10% slower than XP when encoding using the H.264 codec. Even file copying was slower with the new OS.

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.

However, in gaming, the results were less decisively in XP’s favour. Now that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. actually works in Vista, it positively flies – it was faster with both ATi and Nvidia hardware when compared to XP, its average leaping 50% with the Radeon and 47% with the GeForce. In Oblivion, the GeForce averaged 71fps in Vista compared to 57fps in XP – as long as you remained outdoors. Indoor environments saw a slight drop, from an average of 66fps to 58fps. It’s seems that under Vista, the unified shaders of the GeForce 8800 GTS card we used for testing dealt with the increased vertex demands of the outdoor scenes better than they do in XP.