Benchmarking In Vista

There are several interesting aspects to benchmarking in Vista – many of them will be familiar to survivors of earlier benchmark wars. Obviously, the proper drivers are required. And, if it is a matter of comparing the performance of applications working on Vista to the same applications working on Windows XP, it makes sense to test some applications in Windows vista with the Display Manager turned off to make both situations more similar.

The following tests were performed by representatives of the OpenGL ARB. They were performed on a Dual Xeon 3.0 GHz system with an Nvidia Quadro FX 5500 graphics board. In the case of testing on Vista, the testers neutralized the role of the DWM by choosing the Windows Classic color scheme.

What happens if the tests are run in the full glory of Aero? The OpenGL ARB, with input from the graphics hardware vendors in its ranks says there is about a 10% difference.

Professional OpenGL Application Performance

The SPECviewperf 9.0 results demonstrate that there is very little difference in performance between Vista and XP.

Barthold Lichetenbelt, a member of the OpenGL ARB observes that these results should be all the more compelling because the new WDDM represents a radical departure from the Display Driver model on Windows XP and the new Vista drivers have not undergone the years of tuning and optimization that the XP drivers have undergone since its introduction.

All work and no Doom3

There are several games built on the OpenGL API and so there is also interest in OpenGL performance on Vista for games. Using a game rig, an AMD FX62 with an Nvidia GeForce 7900GTX graphics card with driver version 97.73 for Windows XP and 101.20 for Vista, the Doom3 (demo1) and Pre (move.demo) were run in full screen mode.

Because games are usually played in full screen mode, the DWM does not come into play meaning there is no performance hit from the Desktop Windows Manager.

To further compare application performance between Vista and XP, the same system was used to run Direct 3D games Half Life 2 Episode One (demo1) and Oblivion (Outdoor, HDR off). And again, the tests were run in full screen mode. If OpenGL and Direct3D access the hardware in essentially the same way, the performance of applications using Direct3D and applications using OpenGL should be about the same and that is reflected in figure 8.