Speed Test: Windows 7 May Not Be Much Faster Than Vista

[Broni]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/164485/windows_7_rc_benchmarks.html

Though Windows 7 edged out Vista in our lab tests, you may not notice much of a difference.

Improving performance is one of Microsoft's design goals with Windows 7, and many early reviewers (including ours) have said that the new OS seems peppier than Vista. But tests of the Windows 7 Release Candidate in our PC World Test Center found that while Windows 7 was slightly faster on our WorldBench 6 suite, the differences may be barely noticeable to users.

We loaded the Windows 7 Release Candidate on three systems (two desktops and a laptop) and then ran our WorldBench 6 suite. Afterward we compared the results with the WorldBench 6 numbers from the same three systems running Windows Vista. Each PC was slightly faster when running Windows 7, but in no case was the overall improvement greater than 5 percent, our threshold for when a performance change is noticeable to the average user.

The largest difference was 4 points--102 for Vista versus 106 for Windows 7 on an HP Pavillion a6710t desktop. Our other two test machines showed similarly minor performance improvements: A Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop improved by 1 point (from 138 on Vista to 139 on Windows 7), and a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop improved by 2 points, from 97 on Vista to 99 on Windows 7.



WorldBench 6 consists of a number of tests involving ten common applications, including Microsoft Office, Firefox, and Photoshop. On the individual tests, the benchmark results were generally within a few percentage points of each other. One notable exception, however, was Nero 7 Ultra Edition, where Windows 7 made significant improvements, ranging from a 12 percent speedup to a 26 percent speedup, depending on the PC we used in our tests. Although we have yet to confirm it, PC World Test Center Director Jeff Kuta notes that this difference may be due to updated hard-disk drivers in Windows 7. Any improvements to Windows 7's disk support will be more noticeable in an application like Nero, which uses the hard drive heavily. The test involving WinZip, another hard-drive-dependent task, also showed marked improvement under Windows 7.



We also measured a noteworthy 7 percent speed increase in our Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP3 (DirectX) test on the HP Pavillion desktop, which had an nVidia GeForce 9300GE graphics board. nVidia's drivers appear to be better optimized for Windows 7 than Windows Vista.

In contrast, however, each of the systems took slightly longer to perform the tests in Microsoft Office and Firefox when they were running the new operating system than when they were running Vista.

Of course, it's important to remember that we performed these tests with the release candidate of Windows 7. Though the operating system's features likely won't change in the final version, Microsoft’s engineers may still find ways to tweak the code to improve performance.

If these test results remain consistent with those for the final version of Windows 7, the news will likely be disappointing to many Windows users. One of the major complaints about Windows Vista was the fact that it was consistently slower than Windows XP. If Windows 7 doesn’t significantly improve that situation, it may fail to convince people to move away from Windows XP.

That said, there may be other areas we didn't cover in our testing--such as startup times--where Windows 7 may outperform Windows Vista by a wider margin. The best way for you to get a feel for Windows 7's performance is to download the release candidate and take it for a test drive on your system.

How We Test

We used three PCs in our testing: a Maingear M4A79T Deluxe desktop, an HP Pavillion a6710t desktop, and a Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop. The powerful Maingear comes equipped with a 3.2GHz AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU overclocked to 3.71GHz, 4GB of memory, and dual ATI Radeon HD 4890 graphics processors. The Pavilion, a mainstream desktop, features a 2.6GHz dual-core Pentium E5300 with 3GB of memory and an nVidia GeForce 930GE graphics chip. Lastly, the Dell Studio XPS 16 laptop packs a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 4GB of memory, and an ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670 graphics card. On all three systems, we ran our WorldBench 6 benchmark suite on a clean installation of the 32-bit edition of Windows Vista Ultimate with SP1 and repeated the process with the Windows 7 Ultimate release candidate (again, the 32-bit version). We made both operating systems current with Windows Update, and we installed the most current hardware drivers available.

[Geek-9pm]

Not FASTER. FATTER!   

Windows 7 May Not Be Much fatter Than Vista

[iamtonsoffun247]

The reason people think Vista was so slow in the first place was because of either:
1.) The upgraded and old machine that could barely handle Vista
2.) New computers come with so much bloatware(aka crap) that it seems so slow. After uninstalling all the extras and cleaning up the registry, Vista runs so much faster for me

[x2543]

but you still need to consider the GUI and features included with windows 7. Sure speed may not be that much different but how's the interface? How's the usability?

[patio]

I for one see a noticable difference in speed with 7 vs. Vista.

[Aegis]

Is speed even an issue for either?   

[patio]

File transfers in Vista can sometimes be painful...why this is i don't know exactly...
Ask Broni.
   

[BC_Programmer]

I know I know! Raymond Chen talked about it on one of his blogs! It's because XP used a Asynchronous transfer that occured during idle time, meaning the user interface thread could return control to the user faster- Vista used a synchronous transfer. It took the same amount of time to transfer the data, but the dialog didn't dissapear while transferring. they decided to do this so that once the dialog is gone- you know the file is copied. I hear they are reimplementing the XP behaviour in Windows 7.


I might also add that an important factor here is "percieved" speed Vs. actual speed. For example, if you have a task that takes more then about 5-6 seconds on average, it's advisable to have a progress bar. With the progress bar, "percieved" performance can shoot up- in fact, just adding the bar can often get comments about the speed improvement, even though, because of the bar, it is actually slower.

[x2543]

speed was not the case. It was memory hogging that people claimed and the feature set that was getting more of the problem. Those windows capable PC's deal was that vista ran slow onlyt cuz their PC's are at the brink of being drowned because it weren't set up to handle win vista at the acceptable level.

But win 7 probably takes care of those things, seeing how microsoft is designing it at the netbook level, hence making netbooks set the bar for performance.

[Broni]

I for one see a noticable difference in speed with 7 vs. Vista

Make sure, you have same number of programs installed, same number of startups, etc.
Then, we'll talk

Yep, file transfer is a pain...

[patio]

Identical setup on both...
Comparing 32bit Vista vs. 7 and 64bit Vista and X64 7.
Most noticable apps :
AutoCad
Photoshop
Dreamweaver.

Any maintenence/file magement utilities such as Auslogics defrag and clean up wizard the difference i sdramatic.

In summary the difference is actually more noticeable in the 32 bit versions as opposed to the 64 bit versions...exactly the opposite of what i expected.

[Computer Hope Admin]

Seems like this has been the story with all new releases of Windows, until a few months after release when Microsoft and all hardware vendors get everything patched up.

[x2543]

now, Microsoft has confirmed that they should be able to get the RTM of windows 7 out by Christmas so you can get it then!