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Of Vista gaming performance and driver woes

Posted Jan 29, 2007 at 06:19PM by Ceasar S. Listed in: Opinions & Analysis Tags: Asus, Microsoft, Bill Gates, nVidia, D-Link
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Windows Vista ain't your gaming momma - Image 1


It's January 29 folks! Bill Gates and his army from Redmond are gearing up for the Vista bash in 30 locations across the U.S. tomorrow. While we wait for the trumpets to flare, we at QJ decided to rake up facts about Vista's potential as a gaming platform, though MS claims that with Xbox Live coming to Vista it shouldn't be a different experience from the Xbox 360. What have we gathered so far? Bottom line: reviews are pretty disappointed.

Well, what we've got are reviews of performance on the Vista's latest RTM build, courtesy of Rob Williams at Techgage. How does it look? Nothing impressive. As a beta-tester myself, I say XP plays much better. But then it has a long way to go until the final release, so it's sure dressed to distress.

The late RTM build upped performance somewhat from the previous Beta, but that doesn't count for the bugs and crashes it still coughs up. Still, optimizations can be called in, although once again hardware combinations could cause stability issues for some setups. The tests were run on the following box specs:
  • Intel E6300 Dual Core @ 1.866GHz
  • ASUS P5N-E SLI 0307 BIOS
  • Corsair 2GB PC2-9136 @ DDR2-1066 4-4-4-12
  • ASUS EN7900GT 256MB (100.54 in Vista, 93.71 in XP)
  • Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB
  • Corsair HX620W Power Supply
  • Corsair Nautilus 500 Water Cooling
  • LG 18x DVD-Burner
  • D-Link WiFi Card
  • NZXT Apollo Case
Results of the CoD 2 and Half Life 2 benchies prove one thing: Vista still cannot hold it's own against the sheer maturity of XP. We're hoping that the final release smoothed out and beefed up Vista's game, but for now this is what we gamers can expect from the latest addition to the Windows family.

Oblivion was pretty smooth (but knowing how smooth Oblivion can be, that isn't saying much), although things could get jumpy pretty quick with only 1 GB of RAM installed. GRAW demonstrated a 5 FPS lead for XP, though Oblivion and Quake results stood side by side. The benchmarks proved that Vista's performance still lagged (and it's buggy at some points) from XP but it shows that Vista can play older games pretty well (though not better than XP can).

There's still a lot to gripe about compatibility, as some games like Battlefield 2 and benchmarks like 3D Mark '05 experience unusual Vista hiccups. Or maybe it's not compatibility, it's probably the software. But Vista did promise to provide compatibility support for older software...what's so hard about running a robust game delivered in DX9 glory? Perhaps patches would be needed to officially cure known issues, but while they remain unknown, what's a gamer to do?

Other disappointments will definitely arise from gaming enthusiasts who have slapped on bleeding edge tech on their machines and find out Vista trips over them. Others would probably just rant all day about how much they've spent and how poorly Vista performs on them. The test machine used isn't outdated. Sure, it has some bottlenecks that could be better off upgraded, but it more than compensates for Vista's requirements and is the envy of some less fortunate enthusiasts out there.

So why do some hardware still need workarounds to provide support for older games? Because Vista doesn't look back. It's do or die. Now if only doing made up for going through the trouble...

That and with nVIDIA's and AMD's race toward stable drivers chock-full of performance, the future of Vista gaming is still far from sight. After AMD bought ATi , they've been at hard work to deliver official Vista drivers for it's official release, and the latest 7.1 drivers aren't something to drool over either. Still plagued with OpenGL issues (a long-standing history of it) and lacking P965 Crossfire support (but still does have Crossfire support for other chips), the Catalyst drivers still have a long way to go to provide the stability and performance for the next generation OS.

nVIDIA performance? Well, the test used the 100.54 drivers for Vista (made available today). 93.71 outpaces the 100.54, but blaming 100.54 isn't wise: Vista is the engine after all, and it chokes more than it should. Enough said.

So it goes without saying that rushing out to grab yourself copy of Vista now for a better experience isn't at the top of the "bright ideas" list. But if you've got something to say, feel free to comment.

[Via Techgage] Permalink  |   Email this  |   Linking Blogs   |   Digg It!

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5 Comments


Sort by:
   by tRySt (Unregistered) - 2007-01-29
 » Got mine...
Got my retail version on Friday 01/26 haha


   Re: senjutsu (Unregistered) - 2007-01-29
 » so what?
got mine too because I bought my pc in early january, so they said I can change my contract so it's vista written it and they ship my version of vista in early feb.

But it's not like I'll install it soon!!! it's crap, I'm not even going to give it a shot, I mean, I have 1g of RAM and with XP it's great! but no with vista, vista is crap, it's only XP "looking better" but playing crappier...

You should let M$ at least a year to complete it fully before trying it...

And I still play conter-strike source, lol. So NO WAY VISTA!
   by Advertising -
   by Ceasar S. (QJ. NET Staff) - 2007-01-29
 » I couldn't agree more.
All the hype surrounding Vista became overrated. At first I was pretty impressed with Vista's interface improvements. It so happened to be just that: pretty stuff, new stuff, but no can do for the old stuff. When I applied for beta-testing (I know most of you have, too) and got to try it first-hand, it gave me more headaches than Windows 95.

Vista could have been great. But it isn't for me now. If the release version got Vista right back on track, good for it. But if it's just as bad as the RTM, I'm keeping XP. I am planning to get Vista Ultimate so I can review it firsthand, but I'm not expecting it to woo me anymore.

Soon we will be forced to go Vista. I hope by then somebody can get it to work right.

   by chris (Unregistered) - 2007-01-29
 » I beg to differ
like most I got an early copy at my local sams club yesterday, took about 22 min to install from start to finish on a clean install, this is the ultimate version. after playing with the functions for about 3 hours, I started installing the games. one by one installing with ease, and never once had to reboot. just before I started playing rainbow six vegas, it dumped the memory and gave it a quick refresh. loaded the game flawlessly. anything that uses DX 9.0 and above was about 15% faster than XP, and anything below was only about 5% faster. even loading an old multiplayer game Soldier of fortune 2, I found a dramatic increase in load times, this made me very excited about replaying some of my old favs. windows media player worked great, it even comes with a full version of a beefed up media center. The thing i love most about Vista tho, is the ease of switching from game to game, it dumps the memory and gives the system full atention to the game, makes the PC run smooth and looks like i wont have to restart my computer ever.

   by johny_not_so_happy (Unregistered) - 2007-02-06
 » I beg to differ with the fanboy
I bought home premium a few days back and have enjoyed it for the most part. I have a new system with 2GB RAM, core2duo and an 8800 gts. The gaming right now is horrible. I attempted to play BF2 with some friends and was sickened by all the hiccups and gitters. The load times got way worse too. Under XP I usually was in the game at least a full minute before my friends but now they are in before me. I eventually installed XP in a dual boot setup just to play games. Vista at idle uses about 800MB of RAM and XP uses 130MB. In Vista my frame rate sat at about 60 fps with tons of jitters and glitches and the game crashed about every 30 minutes. In XP my frame rate rarely goes below 90 fps and is usually 100+. Vista for now is a resource hog that is unusable for gaming. And another thing, installing XP after installing Vista is a pain the butt. Be prepared to boot from the CD/DVD and manually move files. Make sure you backup everything, it isn't as easy as it should be.



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