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One of the big concerns with Windows Vista is that its high-powered Aero user interface will drag down overall system performance, causing Vista performance to trail that of XP on the same hardware. Also, Vista seems "heavier" from a functional standpoint: Surely all of that additional goodness will have an adverse effect on Vista's performance.
I'll leave it to better minds than my own to provide detailed benchmarks for Windows Vista. I've read that games, however, will typically run 10 to 15 percent slower on Vista than they do on Windows XP, and while that difference will likely be noticeable to hard core gamers, it's unlikely to affect normal users. And over time, of course, faster PCs--and Vista-specific hardware like DirectX 10-compliant video cards--should narrow, erase, and then eventually reverse that gap.
My own unscientific observation is that Windows Vista performs roughly as well on the same hardware as does Windows XP, with a few caveats. First, you shouldn't expect a PC with 512 MB of RAM to run Windows Vista effectively, unless of course your normal workload involves running a single application at a time. Second, you're going to get the best performance, believe it or not, with Windows Aero, and not with the lower-end Windows Vista Standard and Windows Vista Basic user interfaces, assuming you've got a compatible graphics processor (and again, you almost certainly do). That's because Windows Aero offloads a lot of the onscreen rendering and processing requirements from the CPU to the GPU, freeing your system's microprocessor for other tasks. Aero is also inherently more reliable than the software renderers.
From a performance perspective, multi-core processors appear to be a Macguffin of sorts. On both XP and Vista, multi-core processors like the Intel Core 2 Duo are certainly more efficient and speedy than their single core predecessors.
read the full article[http://winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_05c.asp]
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