Windows Vista Aero

Everyone hates Microsoft ay? Ay. Ok, so when Microsoft began showing off their upcoming operating system to succeed Windows XP, Vista, people were sceptical about the performance hit the preddy visuals would incur on a system.

Well all fears can be put to rest as it apparently has little to no effect on performance.

The comprehensive 47 page report of Vista’s performance hit on the test machines came to the following key conclusions:

1. After several common business operations, Vista was more responsive after rebooting as compared to Windows XP
2. Generally, Vista and XP were equally responsive on most test operations
3. Aero had little to no negative effect on the responsiveness of Vista

This goes perfectly inline with the claims made by Microsoft claiming the Windows Vista interface, Aero, will not incur a performance hit.

But wait, this is Microsoft, surely there has to be a catch.

I love these screenshots

Of course there is, the group who done the research used computers graciously provided by Microsoft and tuned by Microsoft, you’d think that would incur a wee bit of bias in the results shown.

Also all operations were ‘business’, Aero is hardware dependant, particularly on your computers Video Card, business operations are more CPU dependant, applications like Microsoft Word do not incur much burden on the Video Card.

Though this still shouldn’t be a problem, applications that are dependent on the Video Card tend to run in full screen (such as computer games). In fact the only way Aero could probably feasibly incur a performance hit if enabled would be if it is running Computer Aided Design (CAD) software which may need to utilize the Video Card in a windowed mode.

Vista Aero Interface Desktop more shots really nice 3D

Really, really, can't get enough of 'em

So all in all Microsoft’s dedication to making Aero smooth running on a PC seems to still be holding up, at least these findings re-confirm what we all have known already, that Aero isn’t very much CPU dependant at all.

Here are the System spec's of the PC's that ran Windows Vista without recieving any performance hit by having 'Aero' enabled (click to enlarge).