Windows Vista Update: Build 5472 Preview

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.

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.