Vista Beta 2 Performance Information | The Coffeehouse

Tyler Brown
Bullets change governments far surer than votes.

I've been running Vista for a couple of days now, and overall I'm impressed with how the operating system has come along. I have however noticed that the performance of this release lags far behind XP SP2. I realise that this is a Beta 2 release, but I find some of the issues to be perplexing given the fact that the operating system is based off of the Server 2003 code base.

For example, loading a burnt data DVD into the optical drive and attempting to navigate through the DVD is painfull. It takes roughly 10 seconds to load up a directory listing. Now I realize that this could all be attributed to driver problems what with the system being in Beta and all, and my system specifications (listed below) could also be a contributing factor.

I've done a rough search for blog postings or something from someone within Microsoft of a substantive position to comment on the performance levels of Vista Beta 2, but have come up with nothing. This could very well have already been discussed here, as I'm late to the party, but I haven't been able to find anything here either.

So basically, once you get down to it, I'd like to know what Microsoft has said that we should expect when it comes to performance from Vista Beta 2, and what kind of performance we should expect from Vista RC1.

System Specifications:
AMD Athlon XP 3200+
1GB PC3200 RAM
ATI Radeon 9600 XT All In Wonder
BenQ DVD Drive

maniac78

I believe the beta is compiled in debug so that could explain the performance issues.

Axyun

I'd say that you are having driver issues. I'm typing this reply right now on IE7 in Vista Beta 2 on a machine with the following specs:

Athlon XP 1800+
768MB of RAM (@ 266 MHz)
GeForce 5900 (non-Ultra and with the second power connector not plugged in. Too noisy otherwise for a test machine Tongue Out

)
Some generic DVD-RW drive

Popped in a burned image of Visual Studio 2005, right clicked on the drive and hit Explore and the files came up in 2-3 seconds.

Aside from that, Vista runs on this machine quite well. That might be attributed to the fact that I have gotten lucky with the drivers. It recognized all my hardware on a fresh install except for my sound card which Windows Update picked up on the first run. If my experience is any indicator, Vista is not going to be as slow as most people speculate once the release builds are made.

Of course it will be slower than XP, though. You can't expect to add more functionality to the OS and have it run faster too, unless Vista is shipped in a very unoptimized fashion and then later patched for performance reasons... like OS X 10.0 Tongue Out

Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

maniac78 wrote:
I believe the beta is compiled in debug so that could explain the performance issues.

I remember someone from microsoft saying that they did a clean build without all the debugging information and etc. in their beta drops.

LarryOsterman

maniac78 wrote:
I believe the beta is compiled in debug so that could explain the performance issues.

It's not. But the perf team isn't done with its scrutiny of the OS - if you compare Vista Beta2 and XP RC1, you'll find similar perf issues.

figuerres
???

LarryOsterman wrote:

maniac78 wrote: I believe the beta is compiled in debug so that could explain the performance issues.

It's not. But the perf team isn't done with its scrutiny of the OS - if you compare Vista Beta2 and XP RC1, you'll find similar perf issues.

BTW Larry and other MSFT folks:

I'd love to see/hear/read more info on things like drivers and stuff for Vista.

for example I have a USB WiFi key that worked with the CTP fairly well but with the new beta is not even recognised.

also it "looks like" PVR is better now, in the ctp my HP MC boxes with Happ' 150 based cards (HP bundled ones) did not work -- BSOD type screen with some CODEC error, with the new beta on the one I have tried MC f() are working very well.
but the RealTek HD audio setup is problematic
I have a Quad speaker + base setup that works fine in XP SP2 but
Vista seems to not have that setup in the list of speaker configs.
so I go to stereo mode and lose my base and rear LR speakers.

I know that all the vendors have to have time to build drivers
but with so many systems and hw vendors etc....
it would be good I think to get a kind of centeral clearing house of driver / hardware info for vista where for example I could list info like above and know that Msft and the vendors would both get that info.

HP for example has no info on my gear but it should all be "Vista Ready" as I got the stuff less than a year ago to about one year.
and the OEM's that give HP deals often will not list drivers for that card / board telling the users to go to HP
examples: ASUS MoBo sold in the HP MCE box I have.
and others are out but you have to figure out who built what.
my PVR cards are Happ' cards but this is based on my snooping and testing.... HP and Happ' do not tell the user this.

if we could all report to one DB then I bet we could speedup driver publising and simplfy upgrades.

at least that's my thought.

LarryOsterman

figuerres wrote:

BTW Larry and other MSFT folks:

but the RealTek HD audio setup is problematic
I have a Quad speaker + base setup that works fine in XP SP2 but
Vista seems to not have that setup in the list of speaker configs.
so I go to stereo mode and lose my base and rear LR speakers.

There are a number of OEMs that shipped HDAudio pin configurations that were not 100% per spec. If you file a bug describing what you're seeing, with the full PnP information, our audio hardware compat team will work with RealTek to figure out a fix.

In general, we list all the formats that the device claims it can support - if Vista isn't listing 5.1 as a format in mmsys.cpl, it's because the device doesn't support it.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Explorer is definitely the main component lacking in performance right now.

Somehow it seems like whenever you navigate to a different folder, it refreshes every explorer window you have open! Even when you have only one window open, it refreshes the icons for the quick links and the folder tree, which is just completely unnecessary.

It takes a good 1-5 seconds to switch folders in Vista's explorer, compared to 0 seconds in XP (although XP occasionally gets into a "I'm going to refresh every icon in this folder with 500 executables and I'm not going to show you the folder's contents till I'm done" mood). Explorer's performance must improve.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

LarryOsterman wrote:
In general, we list all the formats that the device claims it can support - if Vista isn't listing 5.1 as a format in mmsys.cpl, it's because the device doesn't support it.

Unfortunately, on all audio hardware I've tried (Realtek AC'97 under x64 and Audigy2 under x86), even if it does list anything above 2 speakers selecting it just cause horrible audio distortion from the front speakers (and still no sound from any of the other speakers).

figuerres
???

Sven Groot wrote:

LarryOsterman wrote: In general, we list all the formats that the device claims it can support - if Vista isn't listing 5.1 as a format in mmsys.cpl, it's because the device doesn't support it.

Unfortunately, on all audio hardware I've tried (Realtek AC'97 under x64 and Audigy2 under x86), even if it does list anything above 2 speakers selecting it just cause horrible audio distortion from the front speakers (and still no sound from any of the other speakers).

in my case it's not "5.1" it's "4.1" and XP Pro SP2 + realtek drivers do it.

with vista if I try different settings I can get sound from each speaker .... just not all 5 at one time Tongue Out

like I can get base + rear LR or
base plus one front and both rear

or left side plus base etc...

but thats due to my trying 7.1, 5.1,3.1 etc.....
but 4.1 is not listed at all in vista.

BTW: I plan on getting other speakers for this reason: 4.1 is kinda not supported in things even with most XP games they look for 5.1 or better...

Smiley

figuerres
???

LarryOsterman wrote:

figuerres wrote:
BTW Larry and other MSFT folks:

but the RealTek HD audio setup is problematic
I have a Quad speaker + base setup that works fine in XP SP2 but
Vista seems to not have that setup in the list of speaker configs.
so I go to stereo mode and lose my base and rear LR speakers.

There are a number of OEMs that shipped HDAudio pin configurations that were not 100% per spec. If you file a bug describing what you're seeing, with the full PnP information, our audio hardware compat team will work with RealTek to figure out a fix.

In general, we list all the formats that the device claims it can support - if Vista isn't listing 5.1 as a format in mmsys.cpl, it's because the device doesn't support it.

aside for my other info posted here:

filing a bug; ok now where can we see the stats on who has reported what??
when .Net 2 and VS 2005 were in beta I could go to Ladybug and see what others had reported and what items were "known issues" and had workarounds.

that's part of what I feel is missing right now. like the bit you said about the known issue with HDaudio pinouts...
it would be nice to have that listed and searchable for folks to use.

I know that MSFT can't just dump all the data they have...
but some of it could save us a lot of time out in userland Smiley

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Sven Groot wrote:
Somehow it seems like whenever you navigate to a different folder, it refreshes every explorer window you have open!

This got me thinking, and I set explorer to open folder windows in separate processes. And at first glance, it does seem to have sped it up significantly! Smiley