Company of Heroes ISO Test
We need another tests - one that is not prone to high RAM usage. Generally, a game installation is basically a file copy operation involving reads and writes. There may be some decompressing or other processor intensive tasks, but usually not enough to burden the whole system. RAM usage for these tasks are usually very low. From experience, our Company of Heroes ISO tests generally responds very well to differences in transfer rates and processor overhead.The test involved mounting an ISO image of Company of Heroes, running the installation and measuring the time it takes for the installation process to finish. For today's tests, the ISO image is copied onto the RAID 0 array and mounted. We're going to focus on RAID 0 array performance alone this time around, so no single drive results. Because of I/O Prioritization in Vista, we ran the test two times - once with the installation as the active task (in the foreground) and then on the background.
So, let's see how Vista fare in this test.
| XP (Volume Write Back Cache Enabled) RAID 0 array | ||||
| Average | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | |
| ISO on the same drive | 148 | 149 | 149 | 147 |
| Vista (Volume Write Back Cache Enabled) RAID 0 array | ||||
| Average | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | |
| ISO on the same array (in the background) | 361 | 448 | 413 | 433 |
| ISO on the same array (in the foreground) |
|
197 | 223 | 235 |
(results are in seconds - lower is better)
Ouch.
Even when we 'forced' the test to run in foreground (the active task), there's no denying Vista in its present form is way slower than Windows XP. The differences are staggering - between 50 to 88 seconds or 30 to 50 percent slower! We believe this difference is caused by more than just processor overhead - its simply is too high. The situation gets worse if you're running the installation process on the background - be prepared for a very long wait (about 7 minutes or so - almost twice as long). Well, at least we know I/O Prioritization works.
Conclusion:
Originally, we set out to compare various RAID and AHCI SATA controllers and what kind of performance we can expect with Vista. But problems during testing lead us elsewhere - this article. These preliminary testing clearly shows that kind of comparison is just not possible right now - something is still definitely broken with Vista's I/O performance. Even with the performance and reliability updates installed, performance is way off from where it should be. This mean any benchmarks we do will not be able to show the hardware's optimal performance. Microsoft's recent performance and reliability patches may help some users, but it's still far from perfect.[Previous Page]
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