A couple of weeks ago I completed a whole stack of testing on Windows Vista and we published the results on Rain Recording's website - http://www.rainrecording.co.uk/vista/performance - well, the response has been amazing...

On the run up to the release of Vista there's been lots of conversation and discussion about the merits of upgrading or whether it will be any good for musicians or audio work - the consensus was a resounding NO! There were articles published about how Microsoft have crippled this and that and how all the nonsense and the interface are going to destroy performance and how no one should touch Vista for at least a year. No one, though, seemed to have done any actual testing.

At Rain Recording we like to deal with the reality of things rather than the theory and so we embarked on putting together a new, cutting edge system with Vista to see what sort of performance you would get compared to Windows XP. The results, as you can see, are quite surprising. I certainly didn't expect to see such a difference between XP and Vista - neither did anyone else and I was immediate branded a liar, a charlatan and in the pocket of Billy boy Gates - music tech people are such a friendly bunch :)

The problem here is that people don't read all the information, they take one look at the graphs and jump to a load of their own conclusions. The important thing to realise is that this testing took place on a very specific system, one that was as up to date and cutting edge as we could make it, one that would hopefully be perfect for Vista - it was a Quad core system. If you think about it, when XP was written, the idea of multi-core processors hadn't been conceived yet. There was dual processing with independent CPU's, and XP Pro allowed for a maximum of two CPU's, but multiple cores on a single CPU was something else. Also software than could run multiple threads was thin on the ground and it wasn't really until the troubled Hyperthreading was introduced that software makers started to take notice of the potential multithreading offered. So with our Quad core test system XP didn't really cope or manage the multiple cores properly resulting in CPU spiking that would glitch the audio playback - this is another key point. We weren't testing the speed of the processor or how many cycles it was doing, we were testing for stable playback from a large project in Cubase 4 - that's very different.

Vista, on the other hand, lapped up the Quad core and ran everything with a minimum of fuss and so outstripped XP by a large margin - but this should not be taken as a general rule for every system configuration. Single and dual cores are actually a different kettle of fish and although we haven't done the same testing yet some initial testing shows similar performance to XP.

The important conclusion to draw from all this first of all is that Vista can work for audio! After that then if you are moving or upgrading to a Quad core system then you really should consider Vista in order to get the best out of the technology. However, upgrading to Vista on your existing machine will probably not give you any benefits and may well just be a driver and compatibility headache. 

It has also been pointed out that perhaps the audio interface played a bigger role than we thought and I certainly take this on board. When testing XP the quirkiness of the CPU meter may have been down, in part, to the audio driver. Certainly if the CPU meter in XP had been stable then the results would have been closer - however, the Fireface drivers for XP and Vista are the same and so if there are supposed to be problems with the drivers in XP then there was certainly no problem in Vista, which, in some ways is another bonus for Vista!

Of course everyone is up in arms because we didn't test their configuration or we didn't use XP x64 or some other benchmark test - give us a chance! All this stuff will come in time. We published the Vista results because they were so surprising and it's certainly got people talking and maybe even thinking positively about Vista for the first time, which can only be a good thing.