We recently published an article comparing framerate performance in XP versus Vista on NVIDIA hardware. Our readership wanted to see what ATI could do with the same task so that we could see if Vista was really to blame for what we saw.
Introduction
We recently published an article that compared framerate performance between Vista and Windows XP in multiple current gaming titles. We wanted to do this because there were many claims that Vista was a poor gaming operating system, or at least that it didn’t perform as well as XP on the same hardware. Up to now, it’s been claimed that poor
However, our scope was more limited than we realized. After the article, a consistent criticism was that we did not include ATI hardware in our evaluation, so any claims that we made were unqualified. Our readers were absolutely right. One of the reasons that our content is better than most publications is that because we have the best readership in the industry and we listen to them.
It wasn’t a conscious effort on our part to specifically exclude ATI hardware from the original article. It was merely the fact that we had NVIDIA hardware on hand at the time, so we used it. Given ATI’s track record lately, we simply did not have any ATI cards on hand in our former [H] Consumer offices in Austin. The original plan was to just use one
Another criticism was that we used "old" drivers from NVIDIA. This was mostly very bad timing. The article was in its very last stages when the new drivers were released and had already been written and approved for publish (not a quick or easy process). That said, it would definitely have been best to include the latest drivers in the article. We simply didn’t know that new drivers would be coming out. As of late, NVIDIA has been of little help as they don’t know when their own drivers are pushing out. To address this issue in this ATI article, we contacted ATI to ask them when their next driver release would be. They did us one better – they gave us the beta drivers that were going to be released as WHQL on May 23rd, which are now known as Catalyst 7.5. In this instance, we’re dealing with the latest and greatest. And just for good measure, we took a few of the games that performed extra-poorly with our NVIDIA hardware in our last article, and gave them another run on the new 158.18/158.22 drivers to see if there was any effect.
Test Set-Up
The test will be conducted essentially exactly as before, except that we now have an ATI X1950XTX 512MB as our video card. The rest of the system is as before, provided by Puget Custom Computers.
Battlefield 2142
We had no problems with getting this title to run on the new hardware. This game was a bit difficult to test because there is no save game option and the AI behaves differently every time. We did our best to stay in the same area of the map between sessions…and not die.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
Company of Heroes
We had no problems getting CoH to run on our system.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
We also had no issues with this title. In our 30 Days with Vista article, we experienced an anomaly where the floor of our opening sequence jail cell swallowed Uriel Septim and the game was unable to progress. Thankfully, we experienced nothing like that and the ATI hardware was able to play this title without any problems.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
Flight Simulator X
We experienced a strange event while launching this title. For a game that was designed with Vista in mind, it surprised us that the UI had to change from Aero to “Vista Basic” for the game to run. None of our other titles required this. Otherwise, the game installed and played perfectly fine.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
Need for Speed: Carbon
As in our previous article, we experienced some weirdness with this title in Vista. On the ATI
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
Prey
Again, Prey was a problem in Vista. We had to set the game to run as administrator and select XP SP2 compatibility mode for the game to run. We had to also set FRAPS to run as the administrator for it to function in the game. Otherwise, gameplay was smooth and we experienced no problems.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
The Sims 2
We had no problems running this title. Installation, patching, and gameplay went off without a hitch on either OS.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
World of Warcraft
We had some major problems getting this game to patch under Vista in our previous article, but we did not experience those issues in this case. After we successfully patched our game, the ATI blazed through the game without any issue.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
NVIDIA Hardware Revisited
As we stated in the introduction, we wanted to see if the new 158.xx
Battlefield 2142
Per our previous experience, we had no
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
Company of Heroes
This game also presented no problems.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
We also had no issues with this title.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
Need for Speed: Carbon
As in our previous article, we had to set Carbon to run in Windows 98 compatibility mode and FRAPS also had to be set to run as administrator.
Graphics Settings
Image Quality – Vista on Top
Conclusion
We presented each game individually, but here they are all together.
As a comparison, here are the graphs from our previous article with NVIDIA hardware.
The results for ATI were largely very impressive. On ATI hardware, we saw that there was generally only a modest difference between XP and Vista in performance. In our previous article, we noted dramatic framerate discrepancies between the two OSes and perhaps drew a bit too much attention to
We’ll make that distinction now – the implementation of the driver revision that we used for our NVIDIA hardware was woefully underperforming in a Vista environment. Again, NVIDIA recently released a new driver set, and we wanted to see if there was any effect in some of the games that were disappointing when run under Vista. From the graph above, we see that the new driver set has closed some of the gaps, while others remain wide open. This is interesting to see, as ATI seems to largely have its ducks in a row concerning Vista.
We were intrigued by the 158.xx revision of the NVIDIA driver set as some games showed marked improvement since our last go-around. However, some titles still exhibited large performance gaps - notably, Need for Speed: Carbon. It's important to note, however, that EA has not patched this title since before the retail release of Vista (about six months ago). Between the recent developer patches and perhaps the new driver revision, the performance gap for Company of Heroes closed to a much more reasonable interval.
It's still very interesting to see the overall trend, though. Even on ATI hardware, seven of our eight gaming titles showed a higher framerate in XP over Vista. In the one case where Vista outpaced XP, it was by an average of 0.9fps. Even on the new NVIDIA drivers, our panel showed the same trend.
Now that we've used new drivers and a more comprehensive panel of hardware, we're at a point where we have to look at this profound trend in the data as significant. Even though it's only by a few frames here and there, it's curious to see that Vista continues to underperform (albeit slightly in most cases) in 3D gaming applications compared to XP.
We hope that this follow-up has placated some of the curiosities about what ATI is doing to make sure that gamers are happy with their gaming experiences in Vista. It’s obvious now that ATI should have been included in our previous round-up as it would have been an interesting contrasting element and would have made the article more complete. In effect, NVIDIA got a pass while we put the blame on Microsoft. From our results, it looks like some blame still does go to Microsoft, but it's also clear that NVIDIA's previous driver revision was largely underperforming. We want to
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