Early Windows 8 performance tests
PC Magazine conducted a comparative test of the performance of Windows 7 and Windows 8. Measured boot time and shutdown time, the results of synthetic tests and benchmarks in browsers. Testers were not at all embarrassed that Windows 8 came out only in the form of a Developer Preview, so it’s too early to draw any conclusions.
According to the author of the test, he was annoyed for a long time that Windows booted slower than Ubuntu on the same machine. Microsoft developers have worked hard to eliminate this drawback: multithreading, a saved kernel image, selective driver loading, UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) and other tricks are used to speed up loading.
The table shows the boot time taking into account 15 seconds of loading the BIOS and Windows 8 multi-bootloader.
Testing was carried out on a PC with a quad-core 3.4 GHz CPU, 4 GB RAM in a "clean" OS installation with standard parameters, without installing additional software that could affect the registry size and download speed. In addition to PCMark 7, all tests were repeated three times, the average value in the table.
For web tests, Windows 7 used the IE9 browser, and Windows 8 used IE10.
Theoretically, system optimization to improve performance should be done at the last stage. Premature optimization is considered the "root of all evil . " If Microsoft adheres to these principles, then we can expect even greater improvement in the results of Windows 8 with the release of the final release.
According to the author of the test, he was annoyed for a long time that Windows booted slower than Ubuntu on the same machine. Microsoft developers have worked hard to eliminate this drawback: multithreading, a saved kernel image, selective driver loading, UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) and other tricks are used to speed up loading.
The table shows the boot time taking into account 15 seconds of loading the BIOS and Windows 8 multi-bootloader.
Benchmark | Windows 7 | Windows 8 | Relative improvement |
Download time (min, sec) | 1:32 | 0:32 | + 65% |
Off time | 0:10 | 0:11 | -10% |
Geekbench 2.2 | 8955 | 9014 | + 0.6% |
PCMark 7 | 2075 | 2221 | + 7% |
Google V8 v.6 | 2741 | Metro: 1874 Desktop: 3066 | Metro: -31% Desktop: + 12% |
Mozilla Kraken 1.1 (less is better) | 13897 | Metro: 14288 Desktop: 13385 | Metro: -3% Desktop: + 4% |
For web tests, Windows 7 used the IE9 browser, and Windows 8 used IE10.
Theoretically, system optimization to improve performance should be done at the last stage. Premature optimization is considered the "root of all evil . " If Microsoft adheres to these principles, then we can expect even greater improvement in the results of Windows 8 with the release of the final release.