[X4U] XP <> Vista benchmarks

[Thomas W Noel]

On Feb 1, 2007, at 4:21 PM, Neil wrote:

> The link worked fine for me too, but there weren't any benchmarks  
> on that page.  A couple pages into the report, the site started to  
> time out.  Can anybody summarize the 11 pages?  Is Vista faster  
> (when you turn off the new fancy stuff) than XP?  Is it slower than  
> XP when you enable all that stuff?

Synopsis is that Aero interface has little impact on performance  
(about 1 watt power draw increase with all effects active, nothing  
compared to a real challenge like rendering for a graphics card).  
Overall 15-20% decrease in speed. Mostly because of all the services  
running in background. No new version of Windows has EVER run faster  
on the same hardware than it's predecessor. Some applications had a  
much worse hit -- test before you leap if you make a living doing  
intensive computation. Huge decrement for apps and games that depend  
on the OpenGL framework, as you would expect.