Windows 7: surprising benchmark results

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

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.

Follow-up: Benchmarking Windows 7

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

Well, my last blog post certainly kicked up a storm. I’m glad so many people found it stimulating: I’m always interested to hear your responses.

But a few of you have raised good questions about the tests I used to compare performance between XP, Vista and Windows 7. So let me explain them in a bit more detail. (more…)

Windows 7: faster or just smarter?

Monday, November 10th, 2008

If you’ve been following the PC Pro blogs, you’ll know that we recently received a preview build of Windows 7. Useful work has pretty much ground to a halt as we’ve all set about nuking our Vista installations and upgrading our work PCs to this unsupported pre-alpha OS.

And the net effect? Surprisingly little. At this stage of development, over a year from release, Windows 7 looks almost identical to Vista. There are some welcome new features, as already noted by our esteemed editor and deputy editor (see their blog posts here and here); but the high profile changes (such as the snazzy new taskbar that Barry Collins saw in California the other week) are yet to be plumbed in. (more…)