Microsoft Office 2013 needs 20% more ability to maintain VDI performance

Today, at TechEd Europe 2013 in Madrid Spain, Project Virtual Reality Check (Project VRC) aounced the discharge of the new white paper about the relative impact of Microsoft Office on the performance of VDI based user environments.

Microsoft Office is easily the most used application suite in the corporate environment. The goal of this new white paper ended up being to investigate and document the VDI performance impact of Microsoft Office 2013 as compared to the previous two versions of office 2010 professional , 2007 and 2010.

The comparison of Office 2007 with Office 2010, showed merely a 1% performance improvement in favour of Office 2007. The comparison of Office 2007 and Office 2013 showed a substantial performance decrease of over 20%. This can lead to the final outcome that to keep the same performance levels using the newest version of Microsoft Office, about 20% more infrastructure capacity may be required.

Office 2013 also consistently uses more CPU and over 272% more memory than windows 7 ultimate . In contrast, Office 2010 only uses 26% more memory. Optimizations for example turning animations and hardware graphics acceleration off did not influence the performance in any way.

Another key finding published within the white paper is that ruing x64 versions of Windows and Office will have substantial impact on Storage IOPS and memory footprint in comparison to x86 versions.