I’m going to be doing a lot of Windows development over the next few months (WHS, Silverlight, ASP.NET) and would much prefer Vista so on Friday I spent some time doing a few benchmarks with both XP 32-bit and Vista 64-bit.

(Originally I also planned to test the 32-bit version of Vista, but I couldn’t face an additional two hours of installs and service packs. Plus I decided to do Vista 64-bit after XP incase of any problems).

Note that this is very rough testing using three averaged runs of GeekBench. The OSX timings are included to measure the impact of running the VM, not to draw any comparisons between OSX / Windows performance. I don’t know how Geekbench compares across platforms.

Details:

• System: 2008 Macbook, 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo, 4GB Ram, 7200RPM Drive
• VM: VMware Fusion 2.0, one VCore, 1.5GB Ram, running from bootcamp partition
• OSX: 10.5.5
• Windows: Windows XP Pro 32-bit SP3, Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit SP1
• Benchmark: GeekBench 2.0.19 for OSX and Windows (32-bit)

OSX Performance:

VM Performance

Note: The native times are running Windows via bootcamp which gives windows two cores with 3.5GB of ram under XP and 3.7GB under Vista 64 (~256MB are reserved for integrated graphics). Since the VM has one core and 1.5GB of ram I don’t expect the times to be close, I’m just interested in the performance differences between XP and Vista in each situation.

So what’s interesting about the results?

• The difference between XP and Vista-64 are approx 2% in both Fullscreen mode and Unity, whereas natively the difference is approx 6%.
• The difference in impact upon the host OS (OSX) appears to be even lower.
• Despite what I’d always assumed, Unity mode appears to be both faster than fullscreen and with a lower impact on the host. I guess it’s faster to skip the background than it is to separately overlay the windows.

So it looks like I’ll be sticking with Vista 64-bit for a while, or at least until I encounter some must-need program that has 64-bit issues which I’d pessimistically give a 50/50 chance.

And just to reiterate that this is extremely rough testing and many of these figures could be complete rubbish. It’d also have been interesting to test XP / Vista when both were under more load.