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Conclusion
Looking over the performance results, it’s clear to see that both AMD and NVIDIA’s Windows Vista drivers have come a long way in the past seven months. NVIDIA in particular has made tremendous strides with their latest Vista driver, SLI support is fully functional for all GeForce card owners and it scales well in most cases. Unfortunately, CrossFire compatibility is still an issue for AMD. New games like BioShock and World in Conflict don't support CrossFire at this time, and Lost Planet and Quake Wars have graphical glitches. Let’s go over the results shall we?
F.E.A.R. and Oblivion were easily the best case examples for both AMD and NVIDIA. Performance with both of these games was largely similar regardless of the OS tested, whether we were running a single card or with two GPUs. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. didn’t scale quite as perfectly as F.E.A.R. and Oblivion under Windows Vista with the Radeon HD 2900 XT and GeForce 8800 GTX, but it was pretty close.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars ran similarly on all the AMD configs we tested with regardless of OS used, although as we noted last week we witnessed numerous graphical glitches when running this game with CrossFire enabled: basically it runs, but it doesn’t always look pretty. NVIDIA’s single card performance was excellent in Quake Wars, but under SLI we did notice a performance hit under Vista for the GeForce 8800 GTX and 7900 GT SLI configs. In the case of the GeForce 8800 GTX SLI, performance was off by 8% for 32-bit Vista compared to WinXP at 1600x1200. That margin shrinks to 4% at 1920x1200.
Company of Heroes took a hit of 4% at 1600x1200 with the GeForce 8800 GTX and 5% with SLI but this figure is reduced down to 2-3% at 1920x1200. Honestly though this is such an imperceptible difference that you’ll likely never feel it in game.
BioShock is the one title that AMD really needs to work on. As we noted in our BioShock performance articles, DX10 performance is significantly slower than DX9, and the game doesn’t scale at the moment with CrossFire. The Radeon HD cards also lack support for AA in BioShock. You have to rename the game’s executable in order to force AA, and as we discussed in our BioShock AA article, this disables all of AMD’s driver optimizations for BioShock. While we didn’t run specific performance comparisons, it seems like NVIDIA’s performance in BioShock has improved tremendously with this latest ForceWare driver. We’d guess performance has improved by over 10%. SLI also scales much better than it did previously. We’re seeing nearly 2X performance scaling with BioShock and ForceWare 163.69, whereas previously that number was a little under 1.5X. With all that being said though, Windows XP did run up to 8% faster than Vista in our testing. Still, we were very encouraged by these results.
If you were debating between the 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows Vista, fortunately it looks like performance is similar with either version. Both AMD and NVIDIA’s drivers for both versions of Vista perform practically identical to one another. And if you were concerned about game compatibility with 64-bit Vista, one of the guidelines Microsoft has required for Games For Windows certification is that games must be compatible with Windows Vista x64. This means if the game has a Games For Windows logo on the box, it’s been tested to run with 64-bit Windows Vista. Upcoming games like Alan Wake, Crysis, Fallout 3, Gears of War PC, and Hellgate: London are all Games For Windows compliant.
Considering all this, we’d recommend our readers opt for the 64-bit version of Vista if you’ve got a 64-bit CPU. It runs just as fast in games with the added advantage that it’s more secure and can address considerably more memory (4GB max in 32-bit Vista versus 128GB in 64-bit Vista Ultimate).
If you were holding off on Windows Vista due to the driver situation, it looks like the situation has largely been resolved for both AMD and NVIDIA. nTune functionality under Vista is still limited, and we’d like to see NVIDIA provide the option to adjust key settings like AA/AF via an icon in the system tray, but other than that, we really can’t complain. NVIDIA took a little longer to get everything resolved, but it appears they’ve delivered the goods just in time, as a slew of new DX10 games will be debuting in the next few months.
We wouldn’t be surprised if a few of these games ran faster under Windows XP at first, as Dwight Diercks reminded us in our last Vista vs XP performance article, NVIDIA’s WinXP drivers have benefited from years of optimizations. Game developers are also far more familiar with DX9 and WinXP and will obviously be testing their upcoming titles with this combination extensively, as DX10 and Vista are nowhere close to reaching the installed base of the WinXP platform.
In our opinion, AMD’s greatest issue isn’t their Vista driver performance, instead it’s optimizing for today’s upcoming (and present) DX10 games. Games like World in Conflict and BioShock have performance issues with Radeon HD 2000 series cards under DX10, and CrossFire support is nonexistent. AMD really needs to kick it into high gear just to get caught up in these newer games, which makes us worry about performance in games like Hellgate: London, Unreal Tournament 3, and Crysis, which haven’t been released yet. Hopefully AMD is already working with these developers on optimizations. As we mentioned in our BioShock Mainstream Performance article, the Radeon HD 2000 delay really hurt AMD. Not just from a financial standpoint, but also developer relations. Game developers just haven’t had access to AMD’s DX10 hardware for very long, and as a result, they haven’t had time to optimize for features in AMD’s architecture. Likewise, AMD’s driver team is still tuning the Radeon HD 2000 series graphics driver. It’s a situation that needs to get resolved ASAP for AMD.
After getting off to a less than ideal start, it looks like the graphics drivers from AMD and NVIDIA are finally shaping up well. A lot of people are probably still going to wait for the first service pack, but if you were holding off on upgrading to Vista due to the driver situation, the problem has mostly been resolved: AMD still has lingering scaling issues with CrossFire, particularly under newer DX10 games.
Now we just can’t wait to check out the latest DX10 games!
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