Windows Vista Update: Build 5472 Preview
by Ryan Smith on July 28, 2006 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Software
Performance Changes
One particularly sore point we had with Vista Beta 2 was that its performance was downright poor in some cases, as a result of a combination of beta code, debugging code, early drivers, and other factors that all slowed down the operating system. This is something that needs to be corrected by the time Vista ships in order to make it a worthwhile replacement for XP for most computing enthusiasts, and we're glad to see that some of these improvements are starting to happen.
Note: Vista 5472 shipped with a newer version of Nvidia's ForceWare drivers, 95.61. Since we can't install these on Vista Beta 2, only the tests on 5472 were done with the 95.61 drivers as a compromise to include the performance improvement offered by more mature Vista drivers.
The most immediate change is that the Aero GUI feels a lot snappier; while we didn't find Beta 2's Aero to be particularly slow, now that we've used 5472 there's an obvious difference between the two and only now do we realize just how slow Aero was in places. After running our composition engine test under 5472, the primary reason for this seems to be that CPU usage by the composition engine has dropped significantly between Beta 2 and 5472. While this isn't a perfectly repeatable test, and as a result there is a greater amount of uncertainty than with our usual benchmarks, the drop from 33% CPU usage to 15% clearly indicates there have been some improvements here.
Unfortunately, the rest of Vista doesn't show the same improvement. Looking at some of our gaming benchmarks, neither 3dMark 2006 or Half-Life 2 improved with 5472 and the newer Nvidia drivers under normal settings. However the catastrophic performance drop that previously resulted from using anti-aliasing with Half-Life 2 does not occur under 5472, which is great news that in spite of a general performance improvement progress is being made, one that particularly benefits the owners of high-end systems.
Last but not least, general performance is up very slightly. As debugging features are removed and optimizations put in, Vista has become slightly faster with non GPU-intensive applications. It's not the significant change we've been hoping for, but a couple more improvements like these will work just as well.
Conclusion
Although it isn't ready for a release candidate quite yet, Vista is showing some promising improvements as of this latest build. The UI changes seem minor at best - new themes and Flip3d anti-aliasing do represent and improvement, but they're not really Vista's weakness at this point. We would rather see more work go in to the internals of Vista, but with a large company like Microsoft, the "too many cooks" problem would likely apply. What we have seen of work done underneath so far is promising; the Vista UI is noticeably faster, overall performance is a little higher, UAC is finally becoming more friendly, and Microsoft/Nvidia have solved one of the major problems with gaming under Beta 2, anti-aliasing performance.
However, these changes still aren't enough to shift our earlier conclusions about how Vista compares to Mac OS X Tiger - Vista is still lagging behind Tiger - but this offers some hope that Vista will be able to pull ahead of XP by the time it is released. If Microsoft wants to launch Vista properly, Microsoft must continue working on UAC to make it more manageable, as what we've seen today is a good start but still not ready for widespread use and turning it off entirely is not a real solution. As we said in our Beta 2 preview, it doesn't need to be perfect, but it does need to be better.
The second area that still needs to be improved on before the launch of Vista is program compatibility. Build 5472 did not seem to be any more compatible with our testing software than Beta 2 did, and this will be a problem if it doesn't improve by the time the final version of Vista is released. Microsoft needs to make Vista more aware of programs that should be run with higher privileges out of the box, and 3rd party programmers need to better follow Vista's security guidelines so that programs don't unnecessarily need administrative powers.
Last, but certainly not least, performance still needs to improve. Between shedding some of its debug code and drivers maturing a bit more, we saw some respectable performance improvements, but it isn't enough. As far as general performance goes Vista still needs a couple more performance boosts along the lines of what we saw today, and gaming performance needs to pick up a good deal. If Microsoft can't meet this conditions before attempting to launch Vista, then it's going to be very hard to recommend Vista over XP as long as XP is still a viable operating system.
One particularly sore point we had with Vista Beta 2 was that its performance was downright poor in some cases, as a result of a combination of beta code, debugging code, early drivers, and other factors that all slowed down the operating system. This is something that needs to be corrected by the time Vista ships in order to make it a worthwhile replacement for XP for most computing enthusiasts, and we're glad to see that some of these improvements are starting to happen.
Note: Vista 5472 shipped with a newer version of Nvidia's ForceWare drivers, 95.61. Since we can't install these on Vista Beta 2, only the tests on 5472 were done with the 95.61 drivers as a compromise to include the performance improvement offered by more mature Vista drivers.
The most immediate change is that the Aero GUI feels a lot snappier; while we didn't find Beta 2's Aero to be particularly slow, now that we've used 5472 there's an obvious difference between the two and only now do we realize just how slow Aero was in places. After running our composition engine test under 5472, the primary reason for this seems to be that CPU usage by the composition engine has dropped significantly between Beta 2 and 5472. While this isn't a perfectly repeatable test, and as a result there is a greater amount of uncertainty than with our usual benchmarks, the drop from 33% CPU usage to 15% clearly indicates there have been some improvements here.
| Windows Composition Engine Performance | |||
| Windows XP Professional | Vista Aero (Beta 2) | Vista Aero (Build 5472) | |
| CPU Usage | 49% | 33% | 15% |
Unfortunately, the rest of Vista doesn't show the same improvement. Looking at some of our gaming benchmarks, neither 3dMark 2006 or Half-Life 2 improved with 5472 and the newer Nvidia drivers under normal settings. However the catastrophic performance drop that previously resulted from using anti-aliasing with Half-Life 2 does not occur under 5472, which is great news that in spite of a general performance improvement progress is being made, one that particularly benefits the owners of high-end systems.
| Gaming Performance (1280x1024) | |||
| Windows XP Professional | Vista Beta 2 | Vista Build 5472 | |
| 3DMark 2006 | 2749 | 2533 | 2540 |
| Half-Life 2 | 81.46 | 61.19 | 61.08 |
| Half-Life 2 4xAA | 76.25 | 49.73 | 55.72 |
Last but not least, general performance is up very slightly. As debugging features are removed and optimizations put in, Vista has become slightly faster with non GPU-intensive applications. It's not the significant change we've been hoping for, but a couple more improvements like these will work just as well.
| General Performance | |||
| Windows XP Professional | Vista Beta 2 | Vista Build 5472 | |
| Adobe Photoshop CS2 (seconds) | 220 | 243.7 | 238 |
| AutoGK Encoding (Xvid 1.1, seconds) | 1040 | 1141 | 1104 |
Conclusion
Although it isn't ready for a release candidate quite yet, Vista is showing some promising improvements as of this latest build. The UI changes seem minor at best - new themes and Flip3d anti-aliasing do represent and improvement, but they're not really Vista's weakness at this point. We would rather see more work go in to the internals of Vista, but with a large company like Microsoft, the "too many cooks" problem would likely apply. What we have seen of work done underneath so far is promising; the Vista UI is noticeably faster, overall performance is a little higher, UAC is finally becoming more friendly, and Microsoft/Nvidia have solved one of the major problems with gaming under Beta 2, anti-aliasing performance.
However, these changes still aren't enough to shift our earlier conclusions about how Vista compares to Mac OS X Tiger - Vista is still lagging behind Tiger - but this offers some hope that Vista will be able to pull ahead of XP by the time it is released. If Microsoft wants to launch Vista properly, Microsoft must continue working on UAC to make it more manageable, as what we've seen today is a good start but still not ready for widespread use and turning it off entirely is not a real solution. As we said in our Beta 2 preview, it doesn't need to be perfect, but it does need to be better.
The second area that still needs to be improved on before the launch of Vista is program compatibility. Build 5472 did not seem to be any more compatible with our testing software than Beta 2 did, and this will be a problem if it doesn't improve by the time the final version of Vista is released. Microsoft needs to make Vista more aware of programs that should be run with higher privileges out of the box, and 3rd party programmers need to better follow Vista's security guidelines so that programs don't unnecessarily need administrative powers.
Last, but certainly not least, performance still needs to improve. Between shedding some of its debug code and drivers maturing a bit more, we saw some respectable performance improvements, but it isn't enough. As far as general performance goes Vista still needs a couple more performance boosts along the lines of what we saw today, and gaming performance needs to pick up a good deal. If Microsoft can't meet this conditions before attempting to launch Vista, then it's going to be very hard to recommend Vista over XP as long as XP is still a viable operating system.
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Griswold - Sunday, July 30, 2006 - link
No, the bottom line is, you shouldnt look at a beta without taking performance figures with alot of salt.mechBgon - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Here's a potential reason for gamers to upgrade: if you have WinXP Home Edition, your support will be over two years after Vista comes out, just like Win98 support is now expired. Buying Vista in a pro-level version will get you another 10 years of product support.yacoub - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
what? that's just another reason even Home users have another two years before they'd be forced to upgrade. and for the majority of us on Pro, we'll likely be fine even longer.That said, I would anticipate drivers improving performance a ton within 6-12 months of Vista's release, and that's right around the time I think most of us would transition over to it.
You know, give it some time to get the worst bugs and vulnerabilities worked out and the performance improved.
TowerShield - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Well that depends on if it is actually up to Microsoft or Nvidia and ATI. They did afterall change the graphics driver structure. Didn't it even take a while for Nvidia and ATI to reach equal performance on 64-bitt?ChronoReverse - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
I agree, it's because of the new driver model that this is happening. The vista drivers from ATi and Nvidia right now are still pretty dismal.Zoomer - Sunday, August 6, 2006 - link
Plus, they moved it to userspace instead of kernel space. That's bound to cause some performance loss.Damn microsoft.
deathwalker - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
It's Microsoft..so we should expect something different?tuteja1986 - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Well , Not really M$ fault on gaming. If you look back when Windows XP was about to released , alot of older game ran better on windows 98. Same people said the same thing "Untill Microsoft don't gaming performance i am not upgrading to windows XP"I think the issue likes in Video driver where Nvidia and ATI tweak the crap out of it.
DerekWilson - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
Interestingly, back in the mid 90s, Microsoft did do something right.Memory management in DOS games used to be a crazy difficult thing to do. Some games would need a certain ammount of base memory free in order to run, which could be difficult. One of those games happened to be Wing Commander III.
Not only did WC3 run more easily under Windows 95 than under DOS, but it ran faster and with higher stability.
Of course it's all been down hill since then.
But please guys -- this is an interim release of Beta quality software with beta drivers all around. Let's hold off on passing any final judgements and just take this for what it is: a peak into where MS is with development so far.
Thanks,
Derek Wilson
PrinceGaz - Friday, July 28, 2006 - link
That is not true, compatibility with totally new Windows kernels has been down to Microsoft's desire to include backward compatibility.Around about the 1998-2001 era, most games ran poorly if at all on Windows 2000 unless specifically designed with them in mind as well as Win98/ME. Only a few developers included NT/2000 as a supported platform so you were out of luck if you expected games to run on it. But around when Windows XP was released, Windows 2000 SP2 suddenly increased compatibility with large numbers of games and the Application Compatibility Toolkit plus a command-line fix to enable selection of compatibility modes (something MS didn't automatically enable by default presumably because they wanted people to buy XP which included it by default) made Windows 2000 and XP run large numbers of older games. Although some games take a bit coercing, it's surprising just how many Windows games from the 1996-2000 era can be made to work properly under Win2000/XP despite being intended for Win9x only.
I imagine the same will be true with Vista and games designed for XP/2000. This time we shouldn't have the wait until Service Pack Whatever for the compatibility to arrive, but it will get there. We'll never get quite the same raw performance under Vista as with XP/2000 as there are additional overheads that can't be removed, but it'll be close enough in DX9 titles to satisfy most of us. A few hundred 3DMarks isn't going to matter in DX9 when we've already moved up to DX10. And emulation or however they implement DX8/DX7/DX6 and DX5 Direct3D is also irrelevant so long as it is 100% complete as the games which use those interfaces will run screamingly fast on even a low-end card.
Having said that, I won't be migrating to Vista anytime soon. I might download an unofficial evaluation copy of the final version (either Ultimate or Corporate depending on how I feel) to see what I think, but DX10 only games hold no sway with me. Chances are I'll migrate to Vista when SP1 is out and proven stable.