|
Battle Between Operating Systems |
|
|
|
Written by Djordje Kovacevic
|
|
Thursday, 26 June 2008 |
|
Page 1 of 4  When you look at operating systems market it’s quite obvious who dominates in this area. In all sorts of “windows” variants, Microsoft definitely leads. At the moment Microsoft is present on the market with two generations of OS, Vista and XP (XP can be categorize at this moment as “old school”). Both OSs are present in two basic variants: 32-bit and 64-bit. Vista also has several variants that don’t have differences in performances, the only differences are additional options that can satisfy users’ needs.
With appearance of first Vista service pack , Vista became much more interesting OS. Vista SP1 corrected so many “bugs” and left us convinced that Vista will, from now on, work much better. End users now have real dilemma what OS will suite them better. We are here to try to help you to solve this dilemma, reveling all essential differences and details.
For that purpose we tested four OSs from Microsoft and compared them according to performances they achieve for different programs.
Who needs 64 and who 32-bit?
It’s become very popular question lately, what OS edition user should choose. Even though in theory, 64-bit should perform better, in reality that’s not quite true. The biggest fault of 32-bit versions of “windows” is limit in recognized RAM memory. These versions very successfully handle 3.25GB RAM and can allocate 2GB per application without any additional settings. 32-bit Vista with service pack regularly recognizes amount of RAM memory and “see” 4GB but still has identical limitations while using it. So it actually stays limited at 3.25GB RAM memory. 64-bit operating systems have much better memory management and they will recognize as much memory as you can stick in DIMM slots and beside that 64-bit OS will handle memory much better with no limitations.
After all these kind words comes one big BUT… To use full potential of 64-bit operating systems you need to install 64-bit drivers and of course software. For most hardware devices it is possible to find suitable drivers, but you have limited choice of true 64-bit software. You have a possibility of using 32-bit software on 64-bit OS but you don’t have any benefits because 32-bit software is running through WoW64 (Windows on Windows64) emulator. This emulator works completely transparently (for end user) but in small percentage it degrades performances, as expected. Users that use professional software can hope that they will find same 64-bit software. That is usually software for 3D modeling and it will render scene much faster in 64-bit environment. 64-bit versions of these professional programs are for example AutoDesk programs. The rest of information about differences between 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Windows you will find in next few paragraphs.
Testing and Test Configuration
We run all tests on very powerful configuration based on Intel Core2 Quad processor which was overclocked at 3333MHz. We matched it with 4GB RAM memory (2 memory modules configuration at 1066MHz). This test rig guaranteed us high memory bandwidth that allowed us to comprehend limitations of memory subsystem of 32-bit versions of Windows. Of course, we also used for this test rig GeForce 8800GTS with 320MB video memory to measure performances that will surely interest all passionate hard core gamers.
For getting reliable results, we used identical drivers for every OS along with installation of all necessary software for every tested OS. As you will see from results we did a lot of benchmarks and also multithread tests. This actually means that WinRAR was running in background, while the rest of test programs were active. This way we can measure performance drops. Also, by performing tests this way we had insight on OS stability and agility in specific environment: how OS handles with processes that can overload all cores (WinRAR was used in multithread mode).
And the battle begins …
As you can see in table, one and only 64-bit test software that we had was CINEBENCH R10 that we used for 64-bit OS in 32-bit mode to perceive performance drop caused by WoW64 emulation and of course in 64-bit mode to perceive profit from 64-bit optimized software. The whole test in this program consists of rendering a scene with one core (1 CPU) and with multiple cores (x CPU) while measuring rendering speeds which can tell us what are benefits of using CPU with more than one core (SpeedUp). These operating systems don’t have competition in their 32-bit “counterparts”. Problem is, as we said before, the lack of optimized software. It’s logical that 32-bit applications simply work better on 32-bit OS than 64-bit application on 64-bit OS. By our opinion one of those who can be held responsible for this is Microsoft itself. Microsoft enabled further development of 32-bit applications when they made decision to launch Vista in both versions (32 and 64-bit). So, Vista did not force software developers to start 64-bit software development. As for performances of 32-bit software, good old XP is without any competition, but it also doesn’t have advantages that Vista does. Before we get on to that duel, we will explain to all home users of most interesting OS at this moment, why we excluded 64-bit editions from the race.
|
Software 
