Back in February 2006 (a month ago), I had the chance to visit a 3D Virtual Reality centre for a very big MNC over here in Netherlands and they did a comparison of the performance of 3D applications running on Windows, Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Linux. Guess which OS gave the fastest performance for 3D graphics and mind you, I saw this with my own eyes?
The winner (drum roll) was the Linux boxes running on HP workstations. It was superb and I always thought SGI boxes were fast. You could see the 3D graphics running so smoothly when they started the app on Linux. It was superb and one up for Linux supporters out there.
And why was Windows the slowest ? Here's the answer.
Windows 95 had 15 million lines of code. That grew to 18 million lines by the time Windows 98 launched, above. Windows XP, released in 2001, has 35 million lines of code. Windows Vista has 50 million lines of code.
Summary:
Windows 95 - 15 million lines of code.
Windows 98 - 18 million lines of code.
Windows XP - 35 million lines of code.
Windows Vista - 50 million lines of code.
As a result, each new version of Windows carries the baggage of its past. As Windows has grown, the technical challenge has become increasingly daunting. Several thousand engineers have labored to build and test Windows Vista, a sprawling, complex software construction project with 50 million lines of code, or more than 40 percent larger than Windows XP.
"Windows is now so big and onerous because of the size of its code base, the size of its ecosystem and its insistence on compatibility with the legacy hardware and software, that it just slows everything down," observed David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. "That's why a company like Apple has such an easier time of innovation."
Read on at Windows Is So Slow, but Why?
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