Windows Vista Beta 2 Performance Reports

[Rob Williams]

Windows Vista is system intensive, as we knew it would be. We set out to find out just -how- system intensive it is. We run a slew of benchmarks and gaming runs on both the 32-Bit and 64-Bit versions to see how they compare to XP.

After reading the article here, you can discuss it here.

Were you using Nvidia's new 88.61 drivers for the tests? Pretty lame if you were not.

[Rob Williams]

Yes, they were the latest drivers available. For some reason I had forgot to edit that in.. will do now.

a good chunk of the Vista code is running in debug mode, and most of the driver sets are not optimal.. not to mention the programs used to do benchmarking are not written with the system in mind..

this article is utterly and totally stupid and pointless and shows that people will do anything to be "first" with the news..

congrats

Originally Posted by Unregistered

a good chunk of the Vista code is running in debug mode, and most of the driver sets are not optimal.. not to mention the programs used to do benchmarking are not written with the system in mind..

this article is utterly and totally stupid and pointless and shows that people will do anything to be "first" with the news..

congrats

I think not, the arthor clearly states this is a preliminary test with well described test methods what works and what does not.
To be fair Id said as a whole a nice test of a "BETA" piece of software with 4 mouths left to get this OS in shape Id say early adopters maybe in for the same treat as XP, that is if you remember the problems with that OS at release which where exspecialy bad for gamers.

Needless to say i wont be rushing out to buy Vista at realese rather waiting as i did with XP until most of te bugs where ironed out.

Good day Bone43

Win XP never was exeptionally bad for games, however like with vista, the core of the OS is drastically different from the last.
In that respect it does not run OLDER games or older software designed with another OS platform in mind at 100% efficiency, as is to be expected.
XP was usable as a work (it was rock stable and fast for graphics/publishing work) OS from the very first day it went retail. Hell i remember not turning my work computer off or rebooting it for just over 100 days after I had installed and set it up the first time. Without badly written 3rd party "tweek" or "utility" software XP just worked and still does.

Benchmarking this build of Vista, which btw is a few months old already with minor tweeks for public release and comparing the performance to another OS is still absolutely pointless and it is meaningless to build any sort of opinion on Vistas final performance; game or otherwise, on any number shown in this article, since as said, a good portion of the OS is running in Debug mode still, which in turn means its using alot more memory than it will be, and running drastically slower than it will in the end.

It is similar to comparing a half cooked meal to a fully prepared one and asking people to make a serious judgement call on which it would like to eat in the near future.

Going over Vista and pointing out what the author likes and dislikes about the beta is one thing, but trying to benchmark it at this stage is just plain futile.

[Rob Williams]

this article is utterly and totally stupid and pointless and shows that people will do anything to be "first" with the news..

Apparently you skipped over the "beta" tag in the title of the article. I had no idea that I should have waited to become the second to publish such an article. Man, I am dumb. Why would I want to be first at something? I think it speaks for itself that people wanted to know the state of Vista -now-, or else people, like yourself, would not have read it.

Benchmarking this build of Vista, which btw is a few months old already with minor tweeks for public release and comparing the performance to another OS is still absolutely pointless

Once again, this is something that people wanted to know about. Possibly not yourself, but if you read it, I think that speaks for itself. Is it foolish to benchmark a beta OS? Possibly, but Microsoft released it as a public beta for "millions" of people to download. To me, that says that they firmly believe it's quite stable.

As I said in the end of the article, once a new major build becomes available, I will re-visit the benchmarks. I didn't expect Vista to run everything perfectly, and this article proves it. It will be interesting to see the improvements made as the months go by.

I can honestly say, if you read the article and were pissed off... what did you expect?

Yeah I wouldn't knock the article off just cause its for a beta. Its pretty cool and thanx for the article too. Anyways that's great your using the 88.61 drivers.

I had tested HL2-Ep1 with Vista and it just doesn't feel much different in performance. Same thing with shadowgrounds. Though in the article the fps differences in games look different from what I experienced... I had also disabled certain services and such that I didn't want or need. They have some running you just don't want running all the time depending on your needs.

Ordered a 2GB USB key for testing the flash memory being used for cache and speeding up of Vista. You need at least 256MB free. Anyone try that yet?

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Ordered a 2GB USB key for testing the flash memory being used for cache and speeding up of Vista. You need at least 256MB free. Anyone try that yet?

I have heard of that, but never looked into it further. Happen to have a link that discusses it?

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvist...rformance.mspx

Right from Microsoft - located under "Windows ReadyBoost" heading.

You just plug it in and right click on the new drive then select properties. Its there in those menu's where you can find the option.

I understand that this beta may not be indicative of where Vista ends up, but this article did answer and important question: should we run the beta for our day to day needs? The answer is clear for gamers at least- No.

Thanks for a good article.

[os008]

Hi,
For a BETA i think the system works great, if u have tried XP BETA, which u couldn't even find drivers for it, u wouldn't say that about this BETA, at least now i can "play" games on a BETA OS, that's a huge improvement from what used to be a pointless BETA in the old days, anyway, any feature u don't like u can disable very easily, especially that stupid thing called UAC, which is a MUST to disable .

Thanks for the article, though u might criticize it, i'm very optimistic that a year before the official release the system is working this good (for a "BETA").

Try installing Cole's CoDec pack, it might solve some playback issues u're having.

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by os008

Hi,
For a BETA i think the system works great, if u have tried XP BETA, which u couldn't even find drivers for it,

Yes, but there wasn't a widespread public beta of that OS. There IS a public beta for Vista, which is why I expected it's performance to be better.

[os008]

Originally Posted by Rob Williams

Yes, but there wasn't a widespread public beta of that OS. There IS a public beta for Vista, which is why I expected it's performance to be better.

You have a point there , anyway, i'm very pleased with it, and i doubt the final release will be anything but astonishing, thx for the article.

[Jakal]

Nice work Rob. Good to see someone getting the skinny on what Microsoft is up to. I'd just like to emphsize what you mentioned at the end of the article, and I won't be getting Vista until it's necessary. The whole "benchmarking a beta" arguement is silly. It shows the expected performance of an OS that's been released for widespread, general use. What's been revealed is certainly useful for people's decision making.