Date:
Tuesday , June 05, 2007
Author:
Jason Wall
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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XP vs. Vista - A Tale of Framerates: Redux

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 driver support has crippled Microsoft’s new operating system. We wanted to try to associate hard numbers to this issue and take an industry accounting of what users can expect from Vista. We even went so far as to test two different video cards and driver sets. Both were from NVIDIA, and included a 7600 GS and an 8800 GTS 320MB.

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 video card, but later we thought that two would be better. Who knew that three was actually the right number? We also wanted to keep the experiment as simple as possible. We wanted the article to be about operating systems, not hardware. For this reason, including ATI wasn’t at the forefront of our minds.

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.

Article Image

Again, we will be using the former [H] Consumer gaming line-up, which is what was used in the previous article. As before, we will be mirroring our gaming experiences between the two operating systems as closely as humanly possible. Some titles are easier because of saved games and consistent bot behavior. Others are more difficult because of the complexity of the AI in the game. More information on the test set-up can be found in our previous article.