Vista Gaming Performance - nVidia and ATI compared

I have been doing some testing on my notebook with Vista Ultimate (promo from Intel )

The gaming performance is somewhat disappointing. I was going to do some heavy benchmarking and FRAPs testing in games, but someone has already beat me to it. And my suspicions were correct... mostly.
Nvidia cards seem to do the worst in the Vista environment, having a noticeable loss in overall performance... I especially noticed it in PREY, HL2

ATI cards seem to be much better, having almost little to no performance loss (granted that there is enough resources available... RAM)

Until the software/driver support gets optimized, a gamer should think about it twice before purchasing and using Windows Vista.

Article Here for PC Perspective

FEAR - Nvidia

FEAR - ATI


Half-Life 2: LC - Nvidia

Half-Life 2: LC - ATI


Conclusions

Judging frrom what we have seen thus far, the gaming performance available to enthusiasts is somewhat mixed on Windows Vista. Both NVIDIA and AMD have some areas where their cards perform well and others where they do not and features from XP to Vista haven't translated over quickly either.

Performance

First looking at the performance of the Forceware 100.54 driver and the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX and 7900 GTX, I very obviously was let down by the Windows Vista gaming experience. I didnt' get to test as many games as I would have liked for this review due to the tight time restraints put on me by the driver availability, but in the games that we did go through only one of them was what I would call a "win" for NVIDIA: FEAR. In FEAR the performance under Windows Vista was nearly at the same levels we had seen in Windows XP and didn't present any issues in compatibility or stability. I guess I'd have to say that Call of Duty 2 performance was also acceptable even though we had to use control panel AA settings instead of in-game AA settings.

The experience I had with AMD's first Vista driver was much more positive. Most of the games I tested showed to be on very close performance levels to those we expected from Windows XP; the exceptions here were FEAR and Prey. Obviously with Prey not loading at all on our Vista test system, that presents a BIG problem but AMD is confident they'll find the problem and fix it fast. I'll let you know when that happens. FEAR performance was let down as well, though with the maximum FPS at 46 across the board in our tests, chances are this can be fixed pretty easily as well.

Overall, in terms of performance, NVIDIA is lucky that they have the GeForce 8800 series of cards available and AMD's R600 is still behind closed doors. The raw power of the G80 core is able to keep the 8800 GTX as our performance leader in Windows Vista even with the mentioned performance problems when compared to the AMD's flagship ATI X1950 XTX card.

Driver Features

As mentioned on the first pages of this article, the driver features comparison between ATI and NVIDIA is pretty dramatic. AMD was able to get the ATI Catalyst 7.1 driver to not only be fully functional, but added some new features like Blu-ray and HD-DVD support and a new control center that loads faster and has better previewing capability. They full admitted that OpenGL performance was going to be lower than we expected in Windows XP (though not working wasn't in the books!) but with CrossFire working in the exact same way as it did under Windows XP the AMD ATI Catalyst driver seemed pretty refined and ready for the spotlight.

NVIDIA's Forceware 100.54 driver on the other hand was more or less a mess. SLI support was not enabled and as of 10am on the 30th, the day Vista was released, it still wasn't ready. That is a very big let down for any enthusiast gamers who put their stock in NVIDIA technology with their hard earned dough. TV output and HDMI support is pretty much a wash here and several bugs stand out as making this driver revision seem rushed and hacked together. As I complained about in the earlier segments, how can a driver for a product in development for 4 years (G80) for an OS in development for what seems like forever, NOT be ready on launch day?

Final Thoughts

It may seem like my testing with gaming performance in Vista all resulted in a feeling of doom (nope, no OpenGL support!) and gloom, but don't let that scare you off just yet. I think we all expected there to be some initial growing pains with the Vista operating system and PC gaming simply because of the dramatic shift in driver technology that had to take place; I just don't think we expected it to be this bad. AMD's driver development team is definitely a leap ahead of NVIDIA's as the initial release ATI Catalyst driver offered a gaming experience much closer to that of Windows XP in the new Vista OS than NVIDIA's initial Forceware release. This may change as driver revisions are updated through the comings months, so we'll definitely be keeping an eye on both companies progress.

For now, gamers that were interested in running off to get a copy of Windows Vista, I'd caution you to take a minute and contemplate. Gaming under Vista is definitely possible and if you're comfortable with some slight performance drops for now while taking advantage of Vista's other new features, then a move to Vista sooner rather than later should be considered. If gaming and gaming performance is your only metric for your PC, then I'd definitely hold out on upgrading until AMD and NVIDIA have their software perfected.

 

but gaming performance will suck on vista anyways because of MS decision to scrap OpenGl support in the OS correct?

 

Apparently those files were stolen from www.pcper.com.

Nice insight, you may have been beaten to the punch but I think your take was more concise than others.

 

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/

Vista is slower not only in gaming -

Oh yea - openGL - http://dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3760

 

That openGL is interesting. Microsoft really doesn't like competition lol.

There are going to be a lot of driver updates needed to get vista up to XP level in performance in all categories. Tom's hardware described it best: "we tend to believe enthusiasts will not switch to Vista".

 

I might point out that many gaming 'purists' did not leave behind their installs of 98SE until well into 2002...

 

microsoft can take their $299 p.o.s marketing scheme an stuff it, im not goin with vista or whatever else they come up with until i have to

 

updated, hosted the pics again

 

The HL Lost Coast chart is really shocking between XP and Vista for the 8800 GPU. It's quite obvious until better and stable Vista drivers are out, gaming will take a hit on that OS.

 

Vista is obviously not going to perform as well as XP with most software right now because... it is all optimized for XP! Once software designed for Vista starts coming out, as well as Vista optimized drivers, everything should be golden. In other words, don't get vista just yet.

 

Its just like breaking in a new pair shoes, you've got to give it some time.

 

i am going back with XP until the driver support is better and optimized for gaming

 

Very good article.

I think it is mainly the driver issue. Once the game is developed, tested and optimized for Vista it will be fast enough. It is always like that. Remember Win95. Remember 2000, and XP afterall.

OpenGL? Well I don't have anything against it. It can be fast, nice and everything. I think it is pure MS power of decision to remove it.

Good to know FEAR runs ok!

Ivan

 

OpenGL is not removed from Vista. It works as well (in theory) as it's always done. Of course, it depends on driver support as always, but Microsoft has not done anything to hinder OpenGL under Vista.

They did talk about this originally, some two years ago, or something. Lasted about a month, then they'd got so many complaints that they changed it again.

While it may seem odd that NVidia don't have drivers ready, consider that as late as RC2, the driver model for Vista was changed. Drivers that worked before then no longer work.

And obviously, NVidia has a bigger job because right now, they need to support DX10. AMD/ATI can wait a few months with that.

 

From more recent research, its seems that Vista, though it may not support OpenGL directly, can have its Aero UI optimized for OpenGL, which is speculated to outperform the D3D.



From DailyTech:

This week the Khronos group, which is responsible for developing and maintaining OpenGL, has released a report indicating that OpenGL support will now be natively supported in Vista without layering over Direct3D. Using standard Windows installable client driver (ICD), OpenGL will be fully accelerated and be fully compatible with Windows Vista's Aeroglass UI. In fact, Khronos says that by the time Windows Vista ships, Aeroglass performance on OpenGL will be superior to that of Direct3D. According to Khronos and NVIDIA:

* Hardware overlays are not supported
* Hardware OpenGL overlays are an obsolete feature on Vista
* ATI and NVIDIA strongly recommend using compositing desktop/FBOs for same functionality

However, the OpenGL ICD drivers must still be downloaded and will not ship on the Windows Vista installation disc. Khronos said that NVIDIA already has a beta 2 ICD OpenGL driver available and ATI will release its own soon. If no ICD is present, Windows Vista will rely on the layered OpenGL mode by default and only offer basic functionality.

 

Now that is interesting....