Vista HAS OPTIMZED CPU GPU AND MEMORY SUPPORT.

I've finally figured out what is going on.

On a hunch, I tried playing my 6200le.

It's a pos, a athlon 1800+, 768 megs of ram and a 6200le :-X

LOL, you won't believe what I figured out.

This is HL2 on fullscreen. 15 fps. Crap, but a crap card.



This is HL2 in a box. 12 fps. Not a bad drop, would've been much worse in Xp.



Now this is the CRAZY one.

HL2 in flip 3d mode. tons of windows.



18 fps.

Yes my friends, it GAINED fps.

By using flip 3d.

My only explanation for how this happened, is that both the cpu and gpu are used in flip 3d mode, meaning vista is much more optimized not for gaming, but for multitasking.

Which is why gaming has sorta suffered.

I knew I had to get raw data, which meant the crappiest card I had.

Whew, my detective work is done.

EDIT: Something wrong with the way the 18 is displayed. I don't why it's showing up like that. I'll try and get a better shot.

 

that, and or that when in flip 3d its resolution is lower... and you know what happens at lower resolution..

 

No, same resolution.

 

No no what I mean is that in the Flip 3d mode, it obviously has to reduce the amount of pixels to fit in a smaller window... if you look at the desktop image for the flip 3d is looks a little blurred also, a result of lowering the resolution. I'm not saying what you are saying isn't possible...

 

I checked, and it's definately 18 fps.

You could be right, but I dunno, you're still running at 1024x768, and running the pixels no matter if they are shown or not.

If you turn off your monitor, does your pc not still run?

I get what your saying though, but usually programs that lower size while still keeping quality do so in a way that keeps the quality.

If Vista has somehow found a way to tell the game engine to not show those pixels...

 

I don't know, I think only the GPU knows (or people who know a lot about GPUs) the answer to this. I don't think that Vista is "telling" the game to not show the pixels, it is forcing it into a window smaller than it wants to be running... Perhaps the pixels not shown are not rendered maybe not...

But you may be right because I think that if you were to shrink your resolution that much IN-GAME the performance increase would be greater.. going from 1026x766 to 800x600 for example would probably net in more of an increase than just 3 fps...

hmm....

 

I may have reacted from my sleuthing a bit too early.

It does this with crap nvidia cards with crap nvidia drivers, but what about good cards? good drivers? or good cards and bad drivers? or bad cards and good drivers?

This will take a lot of studying.

 

I'd say the simple answer is that Vista "cheats" in flip3d. Why would it bother rendering everything at full detail levels, at regular resolutions and regular framerate, when you're only going to see a such a small almost thumbnail?
My guess would be that regardless of what the frame counter says, it skips frames, or performs other cheats that are only acceptable because it's running in such a small window.

Er, both CPU and GPU are always used. Not sure what you mean.

I think some variant of that is very likely. After all, under Vista, the OS has full control of the GPU. That means there are plenty of little tricks they could do. They could skip frames (just tell the game that you're done rendering, even though all you actually did was copy the last frame), maybe even skip every other pixel, or any of countless other possible hacks.
(I obviously don't know exactly how DX9.0L is implemented, but since Vista virtualizes the GPU, I'd say it's quite likely that it's able to transparently resize the framebuffer (which would in effect lower the resolution), or a number of other tricks, without even telling the game.

For a related effect, take a look at what happens when you alt-tab or minimize/maximize games under XP. The frame counter goes haywire, either going way down to 0-3, or rendering an insane number of frames per second. (I once made a little test app that turned out to run at something like 50k fps when it was in the background. I don't remember the exact reason, but it was related to the way Windows makes apps behave differently if they dont have focus. Suddenly each frame was rendered basically instantly (Because XP made it skip most of the rendering), and so it was able to run at insane framerates)
Something similar is most likely the case under Vista as well.

 

I differ from Detective Zellio's conclusion regarding the increase in fps.

My BS explanation is as follows. Since Vista's desktop interface is rendered ONLY by the GPU due to the new vector UI, and Half-Life 2 is a relatively old game designed to place it's resource load on the CPU and GPU, running HL2 as part of the desktop offloads CPU consumption to the GPU. Thus the fps increase...

 

The desktop of Vista is drawn on hardware, unlike XP, so yeah, like Jalf said, both the GPU and CPU are always used in Vista. Nothing special there.

During Flip3D, clearly the resolution of the game is decreased, as the HL2 screen takes up less pixels on screen and therefore the hardware only needs to render less pixels in the more advanced graphics mode of HL2, causing a performance increase. The increase is very slight because the GPU needs to render the rest of the screen for Flip3D.

Alt Tabbing in XP is totally different, as it shifts everything to the CPU, making it draw the whole desktop etc. Making your computer slow as hell.

 

It's gotta be something like what Jalf is talking about. Nothing else makes sense.

 

Of course it runs faster. It's in a window. Nothing special going on.
Smaller window = lower resolution = less to render = higher FPS.
Um, duh.
Same reason we'd run Quake 2 in a 800x600 window instead of fullscreen while working tech support. Welcome to 2000.