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Posted on May 6th, 2009 by Darien Graham-Smith
Windows 7: surprising benchmark results
Six months ago I benchmarked an alpha version of Windows 7. And I was surprised to find that, despite the new OS feeling much more snappy than Vista, application performance was actually identical.
Now Windows 7 has progressed all the way to Release Candidate status I thought it might be interesting to repeat the experiment with the almost-final code. So again I’ve been running our real-world benchmarks, this time on a Core i7-based system with 3GB of RAM, to compare performance in Vista to both clean and upgrade installations of Windows 7 RC.
This time the results surprised me even more:
As you can see, in most of our tests a clean installation of Windows 7 RC remains on a par with Vista, or at worst a few seconds behind. It’s faintly odd that, in the Photoshop and 3D tests, the upgrade installation was slower than a clean installation of either Vista or Windows 7, but the gap isn’t big enough to fret over.
But what sticks out like a sore thumb is Windows 7 RC’s dreadful performance in our Office test. This test involves extensive number-crunching and graphing in Excel, page formatting and printing in Word, database sorting in Access and slide creation in PowerPoint. Our Windows 7 alpha completed it in an identical time to Vista, but the RC took 70% longer in a clean installation. In an upgraded environment execution time was almost doubled.
(In case you’re wondering, the Multi-app test entails running the Office, audio and Photoshop benchmarks all at the same time, so 7’s relatively poor scores here are probably just another symptom of poor Office performance.)
I don’t yet know what’s causing the slowdown. It’s not unique to this particular setup: I repeated the test on an Athlon X2 system, which is architecturally pretty damn different to a Core i7, and saw a comparable slow-down on this benchmark.
But I’m continuing to investigate, and I’ll let you know what I find.
Tags: benchmarks, Windows 7
Posted in: Real World Computing, Software, View from the Labs, Windows 7
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20 Responses to “ Windows 7: surprising benchmark results ”
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May 6th, 2009 at 8:19 pm
That is suprising – Like many, I only have anecdotal evidence I’m afraid, but I downloaded the RC earlier today and installed it on old Dell D400 I had lying around with XP still on it. It’s basic specs are a 1.4ghz Pentium M with 512Mb and apart from a video driver issue I had to sort, everything else installed flawlessly including the wireless driver. I’ve been browsing fine all evening and I’m currently writing this on FF 3.5 B4 while BBC iPlayer installs in the background. I’d never have dreamed of installing Vista on this machine, but I now have a prefectly usable Internet laptop to use around the house. Thanks Windows 7!
May 6th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
I’d be very curious to see how xp performed at those benchmarks! any chance of adding the data?
May 7th, 2009 at 7:34 am
Just upgraded my vista business laptop to the Win7 RC and to be honest don;t know what all the hype is about.
So far it just seems like Vista slightly redesigned.
May 7th, 2009 at 7:53 am
I agree with Alan – I really don’t see what the hype is about regarding Windows 7. It looks worse imho, the menu bar at the bottom is flat and boring and I could go on…
If you give Vista more than 2GB ram and set it up right (remove some extra crap that you don’t need etc) it flies. I have a very similar core i7 spec PC as Darien who wrote this and am using vista 64 and it is flying so don’t think I will be upgrading to Vista SE (or should it be Vista ME?) anytime in the next 4 years or so
May 7th, 2009 at 8:02 am
I don’t have that experience. I timed it and Vista chugs along trying to load the sidebar and generally doing nothing whereas I can open the start menu in Win 7 in less that a second of the desktop showing. Each to their own but when I go back to Vista, it feels horrible to use
May 7th, 2009 at 8:36 am
Upgrade for free, no money down, pay nothing for 12 months. Er, you want to know the price, don’t worry about that sir its free for 12 months. You can always revert back to your old one later…
no-one would go for this if it was a washing machine from currys so why with an OS?
No way i would install this until I know how much it is.
Performance issue in office will be sorted when you upgrade to the next version of office. yep, more money….
How does open office perform on the different installations? Have they deliberately hamstrung office performance in W7 to help sell the next version, wow 40% improved!
Rant Rant
anyone who installs this as a primary os must be mug of the highest order.
May 7th, 2009 at 8:58 am
Dark,
it is a beta / RC version, so it is only for test machines. It shouldn’t be put on live machines anyway. This is just a “get out of jail free card” for Microsoft, for people who ignore their guidelines…
May 7th, 2009 at 8:58 am
Hang on, the data seems to show that the office tests take longer to run on their own than if your run them at the same time as all the other tests, that can’t be right?
or is the multi-app test just taking a sub-set of the other tests.
I haven’t tried Win7 yet, but I upgraded the RAM in my old dell D410 last night and have just burned the DVD so nearly there to see what all the fuss is about.
May 7th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Yeah dark hared lord, I think you’ve completely missed the point of an RC. It’s not a free upgrade at all. It is to test software that has not been released yet. Mainly aimed at IT pros
May 7th, 2009 at 10:27 am
It doesn’t suprise me that the office 2007 in Win 7 is not good as in Vista. I had a similar problem with Vista and Office 2003, they didn’t like each other. When I put Office 2007, that was a completely different experience, much better and more stable than 2003. Overall I think benchmarks are missing the point.
But I will agree with the posts above, I can see either what’s the hype with Win 7, Vista is much better than XP and it is very similar if not better than 7. I know it’s RC edition but Microsoft wants to get 7 out ASAP so I think RC edition will be similar (if not better) to the finished version.
It is like there is a conspiracy against Vista but supporting 7.
May 7th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Missing a trick as ever by not putting on the XP equivalent tests.
Isn’t the XP mode humbling of MS enough to hint to PC Pro staff that XP should always be considered on this type of testing…
May 7th, 2009 at 7:31 pm
I’ve installed the 64bit version to my HP 2730p. With a little bit of jiggling and one or two old Vista drivers for the graphics card & wacom digitiser and a beta version of the fingerprint recognition, I’ve got a pretty solid working machine that seems a *LOT* snappier than before (Vista 32 business).
However, How can this be a RC candidate with huge chunks of functionality missing?
Maybe I’m missing a trick here but where’s all the alternative keyboards and language IMEs that were in Vista Business? I know that the full ‘MUI’ is not ready yet and the virtual XP mode is also a separate download. All this just makes me wonder just what else is missing?
My main use of my tablet PC is document reading and as the device I use to learn (listen. read and write) Japanese. Without the Japanese IME, I’m afraid it’s back to Vista for me. This omission is surprising to me as Japanese is one the ‘core’ languages that has an RC release.
May 7th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
[...] I noted that our Office benchmark runs surprisingly slowly in the Windows 7 RC. Today I’ve been digging around for an [...]
May 7th, 2009 at 8:14 pm
XP4eva, nuffsaid.
May 7th, 2009 at 8:47 pm
Well its just another mugs game isn’t it, there really is nothing much new M$ have to offer but their pure need to earn money and drain what resources are left from IT departments in most companies. So many people are getting sacked and yet hey isn’t it amazing we can afford to upgrade to the latest ‘waste of money’ new looking OS and I really don’t know what is wrong with people today – we’re all way too greedy.
XP works – so why have XP mode in Win 7? Wake up and smell the coffee!
I’m a Human too
May 8th, 2009 at 8:24 am
Hi
Could the speed reduction be down to the clean install having not had the time for optimisations regarding pre-fetch and moving the files to faster parts of the hard drive?
Microsoft have a list of things that are required to happen before bench marking, just wondering if these were followed to compare like with like?
May 9th, 2009 at 11:22 am
So, I got the DL.But,I have a swedish notebook with Swedish Vista HP and would love to upgrade this with the English 7 RC. Anyone know if this is a ’safe’ exercise? Oh, and I love Vista anyway, never a security problem in all this time of using. Ain’t know use have a fast machine that’s stuck in the garage!
May 12th, 2009 at 10:25 am
>Windows 7 RC’s dreadful performance in our Office test
This is what happens when testing preliminary operating systems with even more preliminary display drivers. Hint: Win7 inttoduces some changes in the driver model (WDDM 1.1) and apps using GDI gets a performance hit, probably due in a large part to the fact that current 1.1 drivers are *far* from being optimized. Try a Vista display driver instead, or wait for final releases before publishing “benchmarks”.
Win7 also paves the way for 2D hardware accelerated desktop apps, expect *stellar* jumps in graphic performance from upcoming versions of certain applications…
May 19th, 2009 at 11:43 am
fancy user interface give the impression of speed but for
applications Windows 7 is dreadfully slow, particularly the 64-bit edition.
Let’s hope it’s only diagnostic stuff Microsoft have running in the RC version…
Or time to wait for Windows 8??
August 2nd, 2009 at 12:23 am
[...] My real world experience is similar. Cannot notice any increase in speed/performance 7 vs Vista. Bit less disk activity and less disk space used by 7, that’s all. I suspect it would be different on an average laptop. Here are some more tests, if you like that sort of thing : http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/05…hmark-results/ [...]