Windows Vista vs. Windows XP vs. Ubuntu Linux

There's a new OS in town, but can it compare to our comfy slippers, or even the diamond in the rough?

First and foremost, this is not an article to tell you to switch from one OS to another, more to the point, I am trying to show you, our readers, where the performance lies and MY level of pain in implementing a proper solution. Realise that I have used Windows XP for about 4 years now in work and home, Ubuntu Linux for about 1 yr on and off and Windows Vista for less then 30 days (granted the flow from XP will be an advantage). The test products are as follows:

The first question I am probably going to be asked, why did I chose Vista Home Premium? We at Viperlair feel that this will be the primary solution purchased by the majority of end users, especially since it also contains Media Center; the up-tick to Vista Ultimate only has the added security of Bit-Locker and the promised Ultimate only extras offering any tangible reason to go above Home Premium for the majority of home users. It certainly shouldn't affect performance in any tangible way. So now that we have chosen our operating systems, let's go over the hardware.

Test System : Asus P5W DH Deluxe, Patriot PC2-6400 2GB, Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (Stock 2.13GHz), Samsung 18x DVD+/-RW SATA Drive, Samsung 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA-II Hard Drive, Asus EAX1650XT

As you can see we are not going all out with this system. It is what I would call a highly likely system purchase by our average reader. Sure, you might go nV for your video or AMD for your processor but the system specifications, generally speaking, should be pretty common.

Installation was interesting; by that I mean that despite the fact MS have done wonders with the Vista installation routine, I would have sworn that MS Vista would be the slowest as it is the biggest install. Not the case by any means.

As you can see, Ubuntu installs slightly faster, not enough to warrant an issue even in my line of work, where re-installing is a bi-weekly thing. Poor XP Pro brings up the rear, by a significant amount mind you. Once installed, whats the time it takes to boot up (once the BIOS POST's)?

Vista is downright impressive, you barely have time to get a soda (or beer :p). If you think the boot time is impressive, you should see the wake time. I swear its instantaneous, you press the power button from Vista being asleep, and there is the login screen; VERY impressive.

Let's go over some random thoughts during the installation of the 3 Operating Systems shall we:

My overall impression of the installations themselves are rather immaterial. Ubuntu installed the fastest and included several packages that had to be added after the fact for the other OS's. Unfortunately, once installed, Ubuntu took the longest to get to the point of running the tests (once again, I am an XP user for the most part). Let's look over each OS as it relates to getting them test ready.

There are many many sites to assist you in getting all sorts of programs running on Ubuntu; the unfortunate thing is there are many many sites to get you going on Ubuntu. While information is great, too much information becomes time consuming as you have to filter out all of the information to find what fits your needs the best. Once you get Ubuntu going and you become comfortable with the interface, its actually not any harder then Windows. In fact when it comes to updating the OS you get a bonus; it updates all of your packages too (unless you tell it not to), this all with a few clicks, a password and boom, your done. Oh and no REBOOT needed...

There are a few hoops you must jump through to get games running on Ubuntu (as with any Linux Distro), OpenGL being the first and foremost of the bunch. While I have read many discussions on ATI's lack of support for Linux, I must say I was impressed with the ease at which I was able to get OpenGL working just fine with an ATI video card, one that ATI just got a Windows XP driver that included it (not to mention Vista and OpenGL are yet to be available). I did not get into any games outside of OpenGL as I felt it was not part of this article to see Ubuntu's performance in an emulation environment.

While XP was slightly behind Vista in that Vista installed quickly and I was able to “fumble around” Vista due to a somewhat similar layout to XP. XP's long installation time (in comparison to the others) and reboots that are required for joining your network domain etc (where the files live) is what hurt it here. XP is the old blue (background) that we are used to, when it came out it was flashy, that has since worn away (although there are pkg's you can get to alleviate that). Maintaining the programs you have installed and the OS is still somewhat cumbersome and by no means free. Any updates to the OS and most applications require the dreaded reboot...

Installing the games and applications needed for this article was painless and something we at VL are very accustom to, once again, most of the installations required some sort of reboot to make them active.

Vista was the 2nd fastest to install and overall the fastest to get to the point of Test operational. I confess that I have used Vista RC1 and RC2, so some of the mundane things like finding your download files and Network folder I already had in my bag of tricks. Things like renaming your workgroup to match mine were somewhat more difficult and time consuming. Also time consuming, and frustrating at times, was the very little bit of information on the web about Vista and resolving issues (kind of the opposite issue of Ubuntu). When I had a problem running a program I went searching, I found several answers for XP Pro, and of course none of those worked. I finally found the answer (in this case “run as administrator”) but not by a web search, by a friend who has been using Vista for a couple of months solid. This issue should alleviate itself as Vista is in the hands of users for a longer length of time.

Installation of the battery of tests was slightly harder then that of XP due to a few glitches here and there. The most difficult amazingly was UT 2004, in which I had to install the UT2K4 update 4 times before it worked properly. Adding to this pain was the only way to test if the the update worked was to go into the game and see if you could move, if not, exit and apply again. There are still reboots required (and even some recommended that I just ignored) for Vista though it is no where near as frequent as XP. Audio and NIC Drivers (which Vista actually had at build time but were not efficient by any means) did not require a reboot, just to name a couple.

Obviously not all tests run across all platforms but I tried to be as comprehensive as possible. I also realized that one program does not do the same thing across all platforms, so what was my solution? I did some research and I pulled the most popular program for the task at hand. For example, in the case of Video Encoding, Vista / XP we used TMPGEnc, a relatively popular and efficient encoder however this program is not built for Ubuntu. So what was my solution on Ubuntu? I used FFMPEG, a popular Encoder in the Ubuntu world. Different programs, same end result which is the core point of any benchmarking; to discover the final result.

One thing we can look at out of the box, is what does the system use just to run the GUI? While we can take Bill's or Linus's word for it, lets go to some real numbers shall we.

From what I can tell, Ubuntu is using the least amount of memory, with XP following closely behind and Vista chewing up the largest chunk. This same pattern follows for CPU utilization. While not much of an issue when you are running 2GB of memory and a C2D processor, it is something to think about if you are only at 1GB or less.

While Ubuntu is left out in this test (by no fault of its own mind you) it is a good comparison between Vista and XP. Also a good point of reference if you want to upgrade to Vista using your current hardware by seeing where it falls against our XP results.

With SiSoft Sandra CPU, Vista lost a few points, nothing drastic mind you but never the less, a drop. Moving on to memory we see, well, we see what looks like 2 completely different systems. I ran this test several times, each with a similar outcome. I don't know why, but apparently Vista is much more, not just a little but much more efficient in memory bandwidth then XP Pro. Finally there is Multi-Media, once again Vista shines, and outperforms XP Pro, likely due to the memory scores. So with the synthetic tests at least, apparently Vista is up to the task.

While we typically use PiFast at VL, I needed a program that worked for both Windows and Linux if it was available, and this one is. We calculated 1 Million digits of PI in our test.

Apparently Ubuntu is a touch slower then both XP Pro and the fastest, Vista. Surprised yet? In reality, the times are pretty close which is to be expected for a test such as this.

Obviously this is for Windows only, as several of the tests require DirectX 9C, don't see that on the distro list for Ubuntu.

The results actually shocked me a little as this is a synthetic benchmark. Remember how Vista performed in the SiSoft test? As you can see, XP Professional wins this one hands down. It isn't even close with exception of the CPU score which has been a recurring result througout all the tests so far. Of course this is quite expected since graphic drivers will need time to mature, a process that will happen more rapidly as the user base for Vista grows.

We ripped the War of the Worlds bonus feature off the disk at 100% and compressed the file from the hard drive to 70%. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better. We were able to run DVD Shrink on all three systems giving us a good snapshot.

Even with the above tests completed, Vista's performance impressed me here. While it did outperform XP Pro, the efficiency of Ubuntu shines here, taking both Microsoft OS's to task (not to mention DVD Shrink was running under WINE in Ubuntu).

We ripped Bad Company â€œDesolation Angelsâ€? to a single large wav file on our hard drive (this alleviates DVD ROM spin time etc), we then took that wav and encoded it to a 384Kbs MP3. We used CDex for all three with Ubuntu running it under WINE again.

Surprisingly again, Vista outperforms XP Pro, however not surprisingly, Ubuntu outperforms all of the above (is there a trend here?).

We took our original rip of War of the Worlds bonus feature, then we re-encoded it to an Mpeg2 file at 5000kbs. Times are in minutes:seconds, and lower is better.

While Vista outperforms XP Pro handily, Ubuntu once again shows its muscle. Vista and XP both used TMPGEnc while Ubuntu used FFMPEG.

This originally was the point at which I started to rip into ATI for not having OpenGL drivers for Vista, and then they ship them the day it is released (Beta drivers had no OpenGL support). I was of course going to then get into the whole not having CrossFire ability for Linux as well. Unfortunately for me, but, fortunately for you, they got them on the download just in time for first ship.

Vista is impressive, both in Time Demo mode and in actual play. You notice at first launch, Q4 is sluggish but by the time you count to 5 its moving smooth as butter. This is quite common with Vista and games on dual core CPU systems. The time demo gives the same attributes; if you simply go into Q4 and launch a time demo it will lag at first then go full steam ahead, the 2nd time demo will always be faster then the first due to Quake 4's caching. XP takes 2nd, albeit far behind, and just behind XP is Ubuntu.

Well, now UT2004 supports DX9 or OpenGL. I was glad to be able to show the performance of all 3 OS's, as well as show the difference between OpenGL and DX9.

Hrmm, look at that graph, is it descriptive enough to make your decision? Probably not, that doesn't mean that you can't look at it and say â€œVista is owning the gamesâ€?. I was surprised at this one as well. I would have laid money on Ubuntu before the test started (I would have lost). In fact, Ubuntu brings up the rear in this scenario.

While Microsoft owns the desktop space, we have noticed some chinks in the armor, and Apple is not the only other game in town. When you add the cost of the hardware and software together, Open Source solutions such as Ubuntu, Fedora Core and Suse (just to name a few) are appealing alternatives.

Suffice it to say, unless you have a relatively new system in hand or you are looking to upgrade your system, don't even pick up the MS Vista box; leave it on the shelf. MS Windows XP Professional is still a very viable OS, and apparently, outperforms or maintains pace with Vista in almost every test we have run with current hardware in place. Vista has the advantage of utilizing the performance a newer setup offers, XP is falling behind in that it is not as efficient with multiple processors or large amounts of memory. Other then the new hardware advantages, does Vista bring that much over XP? In a lot of cases there are still negatives for Vista, being that it is new and all of the quirks are not ironed out, you bet XP is a better solution, TODAY! Once that first Service Pack is released, you might just want to leave XP behind. That said, gaming performance was pretty high, higher than we expected Vista to have and in most cases beat out the other two contenders. Of course, ours is but one setup and as always, you should check out other sites with similiar articles and take an average before making a decision.

What about Ubuntu you ask? Well, my bias leans towards running Ubuntu (or any Linux for that matter) anyway, however I am a realist and I fully understand that DirectX games such as Flat Out2, BF2 and BF2142 will not run, or must be emulated to run on Linux. Thats not to say it would not be a good solution, because obviously you are getting a lot of performance out of older as well as new hardware, especially when you consider what you pay :).

In the end, obviously you the reader to need to make the choice of what is right for you. How much pain are you willing to endure in order to have an OS that fits your requirements? What reason would compel you to move to a new OS? Is it sexy to stay with XP Pro? Not so much. Is it sexy to move to Vista? Certainly. Is it sexy to move to Ubuntu? Maybe, no matter, it definitely is kewl.

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