Do you have anything of value you'd like to bet on my little Vista vs XP
test capin' crunch?
Well...?
Frank
Lets see, should we listen to a crude butt sniffing little rodent
named Frank or go to Tom's Hardware and see what actual results show?
You decide: The details have many more pages, following is their
summary
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xp-vs-vista,1531-11.html
Conclusion:
Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to
executing single applications at maximum speed. Although we only
looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not
expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit
applications).
Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly
slower than under Windows XP. The synthetic benchmarks such as
Everest, PCMark05 or Sandra 2007 show that differences are
non-existent on a component level. We also found some programs that
refused to work, and others that seem to cause problems at first but
eventually ran properly. In any case, we recommend watching for
Vista-related software upgrades from your software vendors.
There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance.
Unreal Tournament 2004 and the professional graphics benchmarking
suite SPECviewperf 9.03 suffered heavily from the lack of support for
the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista. This is something we
expected, and we clearly advise against replacing Windows XP with
Windows Vista if you need to run professional graphics applications.
Both ATI and Nvidia will offer OpenGL support in upcoming driver
releases, but it remains to be seen if and how other graphics vendors
or Microsoft may offer it.
We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video
transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264
Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark
scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP.
There aren't newer versions available, and we don't see immediate
solutions to this issue.