Windows XP SP3. Much better than Vista SP1

[x-scratch]

im sorry after using xp sp3 rc1 i perfer vista sp1 rc1 cant wait for the final so i can drop more ram into this baby

[Ravensky]

Because Microsoft's own reccomended hardware specifications mention 1GB of RAM.

Obviously, when Microsoft were making Vista, their goal was to make it look good because they know that it works for Apple's OSX. Their priorities weren't set on performance. If they were, why the hell would Vista run best at 2GB ram? OSX runs perfectly fine on 1GB and the same goes to the new KDE4 with Plasma on Linux. dwm.exe has a working set of memory of 60-100MB just for Aero's effects, and here I thought the videocard would be used to draw the effects.

I'd say though, that a fair comparison would be XP with/without SP1 with Vista with/without SP1. At least compare the first service pack's impact on the OS. Right, from what I remember, SP1 was mainly fixes, just like Vista's SP1. Bad comparison.

Good point but Microsoft's Required ram for XP is 256mb, good luck running XP with 256mb of ram and have it be anywhere near as fast as Vista running with it's recommended 1gb of Ram. Sure it's more, sure 1GB or ram these days costs less then 256mb of ram did when XP came out, sure more is better...

Doesn't Matter, what matters is what you like what you use, what your preferance is...

Your OS is like your woman, you are the one that has to look at it everyday, which one makes you happy?

If it doesn't make you happy...get a new one...lol

[Genius]

i hope i will never have to install vista on my PC machine

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Here's some interesting info about why XP apps run worse in Vista than XP.

It is because of GDI+. Vista no longer uses GDI+ for the GUI, it uses DirectX instead. That means the GUIs of XP-compatible apps must be remapped into DirectX in realtime. This causes all sorts of problems.

"Existing graphics interfaces, such as GDI, GDI+, and older versions of Direct3D, continue to work on Windows Vista, but are internally remapped where possible. This means that the majority of existing Windows applications will continue to work." - Microsoft

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173477.aspx

There's more info about it here:

http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/12/04/vista_vs_xp_tests/

That's not quite correct. Yes, with the DWM running, the desktop is rendered using Direct3D. But applications that render using GDI / GDI+ for their client areas still render with those technologies. The difference with the DWM is that they now render to an off-screen buffer, which is then composited onto the screen.

The performance issue that I think you're getting at is entirely unrelated to those things. That issue is the fact that in Vista, with WDDM drivers, GDI is no longer hardware accelerated. For the most part, this isn't noticeable to anyone, since today's CPUs are perfectly capable of doing that work with as much effort as it takes you to blink your eyes. That said, there are cases where it can make a slightly noticeable impact... mainly around resizing applications that make heavy use of GDI/GDI+ drawing and have complicated layouts.

You forgot the awful implementation of the principle of least privilege (a.k.a UAC). Why on earth do I have to click through 3 dialogs just to rename a exe-file and its extension in the Program Files directory? The last dialog even has to redraw the entire screen in order to shade everything but the dialog darker and unclickable.

Only one of those dialogs is UAC, the others are shell dialogs, and their numbers are reduced in SP1.

The UAC dialog doesn't redraw the entire screen in order to shade everything and make it unclickable. For security purposes, those dialogs are displayed on an entirely different desktop. The other windows are unclickable (and dimmed) because they aren't really there. It's just a screenshot of your actual desktop, copied to the Secure Desktop - where the UAC dialog is displayed. This prevents other applications/windows from messing with the UAC dialog or manipulating its rendering.

This makes trustworthy consent prompts possible, something that doesn't exist on other operating systems (Mac and Linux, for example, require you to enter a password to elevate - which is more work and more disruptive to the user).

[tomasarson]

it's a sp3.

i would hope it's better than a sp1.

i don't see anyone talking about how badass winxp sp1 was.

[The Right Guy]

i hope i will never have to install vista on my PC machine

I can bet you said that for XP...... please, if don't have something good to say just shut up please

[butterfly68]

I have used Vista, liked what I saw, love all the new features and improvements. My configuration just fits the recommended requirements, problem is ... no proper hardware/driver support for the X-Fi from Creative :crazy:

My next PC will contain a Vista ready 8 channel sound card :D Sorry Creative, you guys are just (insert own thought) ! Maybe the Asus one can do better ;)

[The Right Guy]

I have used Vista, liked what I saw, love all the new features and improvements. My configuration just fits the recommended requirements, problem is ... no proper hardware/driver support for the X-Fi from Creative :crazy:

My next PC will contain a Vista ready 8 channel sound card :D Sorry Creative, you guys are just (insert own thought) ! Maybe the Asus one can do better ;)

I have an X-Fi and have no problem with it.

I just had to download the audio console launcher seperately to make it work...

[butterfly68]

I have an X-Fi and have no problem with it.

I just had to download the audio console launcher seperately to make it work...

I've tried just about everything, maybe I'm doing something wrong, I've tried different PCI slots, reloading with lesser peripherals, tried different versions of drivers, including the audio consle, etc. I have to reboot at least 3 times a day as the sound keeps disappearing. On XP, my record is 3 weeks and 2 days, before rebooting. Surely this has to do with driver support?

I love doing all things audio on my PC :devil:

[Brandon Live Veteran]

You guys don't seem to understand. Macs use a Core 2 Duo just like a PC, they use the same memory, they use the same hard drives, they use the same chipsets (just a different layout on the motherboard) and they mostly use the same graphics processors (onboard or ATI).

No, you don't seem to understand. The point being made was clearly that ALL Macs run on the same hardware (Intel Core / Core 2) with the same Intel chipsets, etc. They don't have to support AMD chips. They don't have to support chipsets from Nvidia, Via, SiS, etc. They don't have to worry about other OEMs who may combine chipset A with processor B with sound card C with video card D. It certainly makes things much easier for them.

Compatibility rarely results in performance problems

Hahahahahaha. I'll pass that along to the Windows perf guys, they'll get a kick out of that one :p

It has now been about a year since Vista's release and SP1 is close, yet we are not seeing any performance improvements.

Are you kidding me? You obviously don't play games. Or copy files. Or have a computer on a corporate network.

I think it is safe to say by now that Vista's performance is not down to compatibility issues. If you take a look under the hood, it's performance issues are obvious. If you load a car down with a body that weights twice as much as another car with the same engine, the car that weights less is going to outperform it's competitor. Vista, while certainly having some improvements over XP, has alot more going on than XP. I honestly don't understand how people can dilute themselves into believing otherwise, there is nothing really to argue here. You can argue Vista's usefulness and features, since much of it comes down to personal taste and individual uses, but you cannot argue pure performance.

That's partially right. Yes, there is a performance penalty for new features and functionality. Heck, there are performance trade-offs for compatibility, security, and reliability as well. The new display driver model has a strong emphasis on quality and reliability (moving things out of the kernel, where they can crash and be restarted without bringing down the whole system), and that comes with a performance cost, albeit a small one in the grand scheme.

But there are countless compatibility problems that affect performance. That can lead to one system performing much slower than another with similar specs. Bad driver, bad add-in, misbehaving program, etc. Heck, there are some anti-virus programs (like outdated eTrust versions) that can bring a system to its knees, just because the USN change journal is enabled by default on Vista (and compounded by the indexer monitoring the journal). Their app would go nuts just randomly flipping attributes on every file in your system endlessly. On XP (without WDS and with the USN journal off) it's not terribly noticeable, even though it's still a terribly wrong and evil thing for the app to be doing. And that's just one of countless examples. Adobe Reader before the latest version included an IFilter that would return a success code when queried for functionality that it didn't actually support. Then it would crash when you tried to use it. Worse yet, I've seen some OEMs ship Vista machine with Reader 7.0 installed (though I can't imagine why they'd do that). We put a check in the indexer that prevents the busted version from ever being used, but unfortunately there are some situations (PDFs that come as e-mail attachments, mainly) where it still gets invoked and causes performance problems because every time it tries to index a PDF attachment, it crashes the protocol host and it needs to be restarted.

So yeah, compatibility issues can and do impact performance. And probably always will, in some way.

[rajputwarrior]

hey brandon, do you guys use vista as your main OS or XP?

[Windam]

Your expectations are too damn high.. all of you

[The Right Guy]

I've tried just about everything, maybe I'm doing something wrong, I've tried different PCI slots, reloading with lesser peripherals, tried different versions of drivers, including the audio consle, etc. I have to reboot at least 3 times a day as the sound keeps disappearing. On XP, my record is 3 weeks and 2 days, before rebooting. Surely this has to do with driver support?

I love doing all things audio on my PC :devil:

Maybe you have a faulty card in your rig or maybe a Nforce chipset......

Your expectations are too damn high.. all of you

Sooner or later ALMOST ALL of us will have Vista installed in their PC....

[TINman]

Note: As with our Vista SP1 testing, we used the identical Dell XPS M1710 test bed with 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 1GB of RAM and discrete nVidia GeForce Go 7900GS video.

With only 1 GB of memory, no wonder XP was that much faster... Maybe try using the correct "recommended" amount of memory in each test. If you are going to quadruple XP's minimum ram amout, then quadruple Vista's to 2gb and run it again.

[butterfly68]

Maybe you have a faulty card in your rig or maybe a Nforce chipset......

Hmmm. Ok, some research by me regarding Nforce shipsets won't hurt ;) As for a faulty card, I never considered that, being that it doesn't fault under XP :blush:

[bobbytomorow]

Maybe you have a faulty card in your rig or maybe a Nforce chipset......

Sooner or later ALMOST ALL of us will have Vista installed in their PC....

What makes you say that? Thats not true at all. Vista is ME reloaded whether you like it or not. It can easily be skipped until the next Windows release. Especially as Vista doesn't really offer anything over and above xp aside from a newer GUI and dx10 (which so far has been a joke).

[The Right Guy]

Its because everyone said something like that for XP and look where we are now :p

[SnowRanger13]

Sooner or later ALMOST ALL of us will have Vista installed in their PC....

I doubt that... I doubt that even Vista can hit 60% usage before Windows 7 comes out. They said no more 5 year releases. It's likely to see Windows 7 in 2009 or 2010.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

hey brandon, do you guys use vista as your main OS or XP?

Vista.

Or newer.

[toadeater]

That's not quite correct. Yes, with the DWM running, the desktop is rendered using Direct3D. But applications that render using GDI / GDI+ for their client areas still render with those technologies. The difference with the DWM is that they now render to an off-screen buffer, which is then composited onto the screen.

The performance issue that I think you're getting at is entirely unrelated to those things. That issue is the fact that in Vista, with WDDM drivers, GDI is no longer hardware accelerated. For the most part, this isn't noticeable to anyone, since today's CPUs are perfectly capable of doing that work with as much effort as it takes you to blink your eyes.

Under a standard Vista install, you have GDI apps that are "remapped" to DirectX through software rendering instead of hardware acceleration and buffered off-screen using system memory instead of GPU memory. Are you saying GDI can be hardware accelerated in Vista if WDDM drivers aren't used? But then won't Vista revert back to DX9?

But, if as you say, the GDI to DirectX remapping doesn't cause a noticeable slowdown of XP apps and increased RAM usage in Vista, what is causing the slowdown in so many apps?

[Windam]

People will buy Vista alright but they won't flock to it due to the claim of Windows 7

How much time will you let loose to release your Operations System

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Under a standard Vista install, you have GDI apps that are "remapped" to DirectX through software rendering instead of hardware acceleration and buffered off-screen using system memory instead of GPU memory. Are you saying GDI can be hardware accelerated in Vista if WDDM drivers aren't used? But then won't Vista revert back to DX9?

GDI apps aren't "remapped" to DirectX. If they were, they would be hardware accelerated. The off-screen buffer for a window exists in both system memory and GPU memory.

My understanding is that if an XDDM driver (XP driver) is used, GDI will be accelerated. But the DWM won't run, and DirectX 10 won't work. Basically you'll be running XP as far as display and window management goes.

But, if as you say, the GDI to DirectX remapping doesn't cause a noticeable slowdown of XP apps and increased RAM usage in Vista, what is causing the slowdown in so many apps?

Still not sure what DirectX remapping you're talking about. Direct3D is responsible for getting things onto the screen, but not for drawing the client areas of GDI apps into their respective window buffers.

[NEVER85]

I find it funny the way some people in this thread have bashed Vista. Their asinine views of how the OS works is downright laughable, while they cling to an outdated OS like XP.

[:: Lyon ::]

Well it's kinda like Windows XP before SP1 compared to Windows 98 Second Edition? :)

[kazuyette]

geez ! I'm sick of all those tests comparing Vista to XP and saying that XP is faster than Vista on the same rig . I say let's go back to DOS coz it's the fastest OS M$ ever brought to us !!!! And all those dudes saying that Vista=Win Me should shut their mouth !

I'm using Vista since Beta3 and I'm never going back to XP !

My 2 cents

P.S. : Brandon you rocks :D