XP vs. Vista - Testing

Our goal here is to compare the gaming performance of the two different operating system environments. One very important aspect of this testing is determining what drivers to use. In XP, drivers won’t be as critical as in Vista. Most of the development for the past few months has been for Vista. Using old drivers on Vista would seriously change the results of our benchmarks, but would prove nothing.

I will be using the most recent drivers I can get for both XP and Vista. nVidia has the tendency to release drivers as “beta” and only release official drivers as the official drivers. Because it could be some time between official releases, I will be using the newest beta drivers I could find. The computer being used has the following:

• Intel Pentium E2140 at 3.2 GHz

• 2 GB G.Skill DDR2

• (2) 8600 GT in SLI

• EVGA 680i LT SLI

• ePower Tiger 1200 watt PSU

I will be testing both single card and SLI configurations. It should be fairly interesting to see how well SLI does. When Vista was released, SLI was nonexistent. Now we have it, but how well does it perform?

Also, I will not be testing 3DMark06. Why is this? It is the most-used benchmark and is one of the first priorities for ATI and NVIDIA.

Super Pi

I will start off with Super Pi, the 1m test. This is a quick and easy test to see how quickly a CPU can compute pi. XP is still champ in this test. Vista requires much more computing power just to run, so it takes away from the processing power for Super Pi. This isn’t a driver issue here; it's bloating from the OS.

WinRar

This test compresses files. It shouldn’t really show much of a difference, since the same compression methods are used in both tests. I used the built-in benchmark in WinRar to compare the two operating systems.

XP put the spanking on its younger brother. I don’t know why we see such a great drop in performance. I’m guessing that the nVidia driver for the motherboard still needs some work.

Next: Testing continued >>
 

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