Of Vista gaming performance and driver woes

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).

Click on Full Article to read our take on compatibility and the driver base for the Vista “gaming platform” as part of the “Games for Windows” initiative.

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