New systems running Vista are heartier still, typically having a dual-core processor of around 2 GHz and 1 Gbyte of memory.

…By encouraging users to put systems to sleep rather than turning them off, the systems will seemingly boot much faster.

…The system, made by Polywell, contained an Asus M2 NBP-VM CSM motherboard with a 2.2 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ dual-core processor and 1 Gbyte of memory. Engineers benchmarked the system using PassMark Software’s PerformanceTest benchmark, which can be used free by anyone for up to 30 days.

The PerformanceTest software runs multiple tests on the CPU, graphics subsystem, memory and disk drives to generate composite average scores for each category.

…Running XP, the system earned a PassMark rating of 468.3; that’s 16.4 percent faster than Vista, not an insignificant difference. Race car drivers will go to great lengths to shave a few tenths off their elapsed times but rarely perform upgrades that hurt performance. Yet upgrading to Vista can lessen a system’s performance by as much as 58 percent, depending on what’s being processed.

…More specifically, Vista beat XP at CPU string sorting, 2D graphics shapes, simple 3D graphics, medium 3D graphics, memory writes and random disk seeks.

For CPU string sorting, XP processed 2064.8 thousand strings per second, while Vista processed 2080.1 thousand strings per second. For the 2D graphics shapes test, XP processed 29.2 thousand shapes per second, and Vista processed 30.4 thousand shapes per second. For the simple 3D graphics test, Vista processed 125.8 frames per second, and XP processed 134.0 frames per second.

In the medium 3D graphics test, XP processed 16.0 frames per second, while Vista processed 18.6 frames per second. For the memory write test, XP processed 950.5 MBps and Vista processed 954.6 MBps. And for the random disk seek test, XP processed 2.91 MBps, while Vista processed 3.88 MBps.

…For the 2D graphics lines test, Vista processed 76.3 thousand lines per second, whereas XP processed 138.3 thousand lines per second. For the 2D graphics rectangles test, Vista processed 39.7 thousand images per second, and XP processed 94.3 thousand images per second.

…In the 2D graphics fonts and text test, Vista processed 115.2 operations per second, while XP processed 172.7 operations per second. For the small block memory allocation test, Vista processed 1349.3 MBps and XP processed 1861.6 MBps. For the large RAM memory test, Vista performed 127.2 operations per second, and XP performed 229.2 operations per second. For the sequential disk read test, Vista processed 32.4 MBps, whereas XP processed 65.4 MBps. For the sequential disk write test, Vista processed 39.4 MBps and XP processed 60.6 MBps.

The significant differences in these individual tests resulted in significant differences for the overall 2D graphics mark and overall disk mark…. The differences in those two main categories greatly contributed to the 16.4 percent overall difference between the two operating systems.

After running PerformanceTest under Vista, engineers installed and ran Microsoft’s XML Mark 11 test to measure the .Net runtime performance…. The XML Mark 11 test can be downloaded from Microsoft’s Visual Studio Download Center.

…The XML Mark test was originally written by Sun Microsystems about two years ago to show Java’s XML processing speed relative to .Net 1.1’s XML parsing. With the release of .Net 2.0, however, Microsoft adopted the test and was able to show that C# code ran just as fast as Java code.

Because Vista includes .Net 3.0, engineers had to recompile the C# code using Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF & WPF), from the November 2006 CTP version. Microsoft does not have a finished .Net 3.0 framework out yet for Visual Studio developers.

…For XML Mark to compile and run properly on both operating systems, engineers added .Net 3.0 as an additional prerequisite to .Net 2.0, instead of eliminating .Net 2.0 from the compilation process completely.

…The XML Mark showed that XML applications run faster on XP than on Vista when both operating systems use .Net 3.0 runtime…. With the DOM parser test, XP ran about 20 percent faster than Vista. However, Vista ran about 3 percent slower with the stream parser (SAX) test.

…The DOM test provided a more precise view of .Net’s memory architecture because of the large objects it created and deleted.

…And unless it’s imperative that users have an operating system with a more exciting look and feel, XP will offer better performance than Vista.