XP vs. Vista - A Tale of Framerates

XP vs. Vista - A Tale of Framerates / Seldom has the rumor mill turned faster than when gamers talk about gaming in Vista. Some folks are staying away from the new OS simply because they feel it doesn’t game well. We set out to put some hard numbers on those claims.

We have every confidence that gaming in Vista will come around. At the moment, however, if you’re concerned about squeezing every last framerate out of your system, there is not a compelling reason to leave XP.

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Please Digg to share. Thanks for the support.

me still thinks its the drivers...

http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/

benefits for both API's. its just gonna take more time to program for DWM before we find the benefits i guess. i just wanna get that article in here before the flaming starts.

good article though. i'm still gonna put it on the drivers for now. especially the nvidia ones.

EDIT: and i noticed you made no mention of which version of forcewares you guys used...unless I missed it. the 158.18's seem to be a lot better than the last set. were those used?

I feel that each new release of drivers is an improvement in vista. We should see how the ATI cards fare in the comparison.

There wasn’t much we could do with the driver situation. We waited what we thought was a reasonable amount of time for game publishers and NVIDIA to get their act together with regards to game patches and drivers, and went with the most current version of both. If a new driver was released, we’d install it and start all over. This happened more than once, which is why this article isn’t what we would call “timely.”

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It'd be nice, though, to have been told just which driver revision actually ended up being used. Your article claims that Vista is "the common factor", but many of us are continuing to see improvements and a lessening of the performance differential with each driver revision release.

Then there's the concept of "level playing field" to confront. A fresh, clean install of Vista is no longer necessarily the 'optimal state' as it was with XP. Wipe a hard drive, bung Vista and a game on it, and then run a few tests and you aren't necessarily getting a true indication of performance. Technologies not included in XP mean that it'll gain performance after it's been in use for a little while, and to date I've seen no hardware site accomodate that concern when conducting tests and producing comparitive reports.

Thirdly, there's the matter of whether or not we should even expect Vista to 100% 'match' XP for performance anyway. I've no doubt that time will prove the new approach to device drivers to be a major benefit of the new OS, eliminating much of the 'bluescreen' problems we've still been seeing under XP. Getting away from the audio driver/video driver shitfight is a big bonus, and if it comes at a small price then why cry about it? Surely the question should be "How small is the impact?" rather than "Can Vista match XP completely?"


The lack of indication about device driver revision is a real problem. I'm using 158.24 Nvidia drivers, for example, on older hardware. When I run my own tests on games and benchmarks which are suited to that hardware I now get no appreciable difference to the same tests run under XP on the same hardware. There's a very slight difference in some tests and titles, but nothing which drops average or minimum framerates to an extent where it'd actually impact on gameplay. In your own tests, even disregarding the fact that I'm unaware what driver has been used, the only title to show a result which would defintiely impact on gameplay is one which you reported having 'issues' with, and that could well be still a device driver or game patch issue.


Sorry, but this'n seems a tad toward the 'superficial' to me. I'd like to see more.

what were the driver versions used?

I guess the moral of the story is: if you want to show Vista in the worst light possible, use NV hardware/software.

Not everyone uses Nvidia video cards, so why did you only use Nvidia hardware?

None of these games were DX10, so why couldn't you test an X1900 series and an X1600 series to show if ATI has the same driver issues in Vista?

It's my fault that the driver revisions weren't specifically mentioned - sorry about that.

NVIDIA just released the 158's last week, which was AFTER we completed and locked this article. Bad timing, what can I say.

All of the drivers used were WHQL certified, and were the most recent drivers available (up to, but not including the 158's). For the 7600GT on XP, it was the 93.71's. For the 8800 GTS on XP, it was the 97.92's. For the both cards in Vista, we used the 100.65's.

Try 158.24 in vista, people are reporting decent increases and the release notes say that as well. Latest XP driver is 158.22, but it probably won't change much.

CaptNumbNutz said:

Not everyone uses Nvidia video cards, so why did you only use Nvidia hardware?

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Certainly a valid point. The reason is that we only had NVIDIA hardware available at our offices when I cooked up the idea to do an article like this. It actually would have been rather interesting to see what ATI is doing with Vista. As Kyle said in the Digg thread, a follow-up to this experience will definitely be explored. Adding ATI to the mix would be one thing that we could do. Thanks for the feedback.

shiznit said:

Try 158.24 in vista, people are reporting decent increases and the release notes say that as well. Latest XP driver is 158.22, but it probably won't change much.

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We would have loved to try the 158's. Unfortunately, they came out just as we were putting the finishing touches on the article. We'll definitely be interested to take a look at them when we work on a follow-up to this article.

When my Raptor arrives later this week I'm gonna dual boot and try 158.24. I went back to XP cause 158.18 was at least 20% slower than XP across the board, but I miss the Vista ui.

yeah...i kinda figured you guys weren't using the newest drivers lol. you wont see a HUGE increase with the 158's but it will bring it to a few fps gap rather than several or a lot. course that also depends on the game. i've had a fairly good experience with the BF2142 demo on my system and i have an OCed 7900GT. all settings on except for AA. same with the CoH demo and CnC3 demo. these are at 1280x1024 or my default 1680x1050. the latter games i played on the 158's and they got better framerates than i expected.

looking forward to the follow up to this article...hopefully some ATI hardware will be included for comparison and you'll have the better drivers to work with as well.

Like practically all Vista testes so far - it's always the drivers!!!

And why on earth was NV used?! It's like [H] has a boycott on ATI cards.

I have a 7900gtx 690/870. I tried 158.18, 165.xx, and 101.09 last week in vista. They were all slower than 94.20 in XP and all of them had this terrible bug where if you alt-tab out a source engine game and you tab back in, the framerate is cut in half or worse. I think the driver wasn't switching back to 3d-mode clocks and voltages when I would tab back into source, but I'm not 100% positive on this. Should have used the rivatuner monitoring to find out for sure but I didn't think of it at the time and I was in a hurry to go back to XP. I play a lot of CS:S and the bug was pretty much a deal breaker.

shiznit said:

I have a 7900gtx 690/870. I tried 158.18, 165.xx, and 101.09 last week in vista. They were all slower than 94.20 in XP and all of them had this terrible bug where if you alt-tab out a source engine game and you tab back in, the framerate is cut in half or worse. I think the driver wasn't switching back to 3d-mode clocks and voltages when I would tab back into source, but I'm not 100% positive on this. Should have used the rivatuner monitoring to find out for sure but I didn't think of it at the time and I was in a hurry to go back to XP. I play a lot of CS:S and the bug was pretty much a deal breaker.

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oh. hmm thats never happened to me. though, i have it bios overclocked (as there was no way to do it until nvidia fixed it). i actually haven't tried any source games on the 158's yet as i've been busy lately. if i have some time i'll try it. i know on the last drivers i was getting around 69fps with everything on, 2x MSAA and 16xAF @ 1680x1050. so we'll see.

EDIT: got 66fps with those settings. course i am at stock speeds right now...C2D E6300, 2GB DDR2-800 with very loose timings. the previous 69fps I got was when i was OCed to a little over 3GHz and had my ram at 866MHz WITH the older 100.65 drivers which happened to be really shitty. so i happen to think these drivers are A LOT better if i got that much of a kick with stock speeds. i was planning to OC my proc again this weekend but it didn't happen...guess i'll have to do it tomorrow.

I'd very much like to see this done with AMD/ATI cards as well... From what I've heard their Vista support is a lot better than Nvidia's and I'm actually considering getting a 2900XT for that very reason over an 8800 when they're released. Seeing a real comparison would certainly make the decision easier.

Did you guys happen to run into any issues with WoW like black screens or sudden FPS slow downs with Aero enabled? (I'm guessing not based on the result) I've had nothing but problems with my 7800GTX in that game under Vista - enabling certain things like AA or triple buffering seem to cause these issues where there are none doing the same thing in XP.

Any chance that a follow up article could include 4GB ram in a system to see what vista's (64bit version) memory management is like over XP?

Jason_Wall said:

It's my fault that the driver revisions weren't specifically mentioned - sorry about that.

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Thanks for that. A shame you had to use such an early revision, though. That's only a 'genuine' couple of tweaks beyond the initial Vista launch Nvidia driver, really, and the 158.xx releases are considerable improvements upon what was available then, IMO.

It'll certainly be interesting to see comparitive results using later drivers and also comparing with ATi based display card performance. But even that doesn't address the other two concerns I mentioned earlier.

You can niggle all you want about why Vista is slower, but there is no doubt that NVIDIA's Vista drivers leave a lot to be desired. Hell, until 158.24, display scaling didn't work. SLI is still a crapshoot, there's no PowerMizer, and there are plenty of other bugs and issues.

It's fair to say that if you have an NVIDIA card, you should probably hold off on purchasing Vista until NVIDIA gets their drivers in order. ATI's drivers, on the other hand, seem to be pretty solid and are within a few percentage points of their XP counterparts.

There is no excues for NVIDIA's poor drivers. They sucked during beta, they sucked at launch, and they suck 5 months later. NVIDIA had literally months to get their drivers working before RTM (hell, beta 2 came out 12 months ago, and it was largely feature-complete). There were TAP builds, CTP builds, and leaked builds - and I'm sure NVIDIA had access to them all.

Vista has an entirely new graphics subsystem. WDDM is worlds ahead of the old driver model. I can run 3D applications with desktop composition, I can run VRM9 and 3D at the same time, and running multiple 3D contexts at the same time no longer carries a performance penalty. There are many, many things which cause graphical glitches in XP that just work properly in Vista.

That said, the new model means new overhead. Vista may never be as fast as XP for 3D applications. But NVIDIA's drivers are getting better, ATI's are already pretty good, and both inch closer to XP in performance and (in NVIDIA's case) features every day.

Remember when XP came out? Remember how 98 required way less memory (64M vs at least 128M), how it was often faster, how XP had poor driver support, and how XP had new features that some people hated (Windows Firewall, for instance?

Vista is XP all over again. Vista feels strange and new. It's not 100% there from a compatibility standpoint. It has higher system requirements.

But, you know what? No one is going to care in two years. Vista absolutely flies on my overclocked 2.8GHz Athlon 64 X2 3600+, Radeon X1600 Pro (soon to be GeForce 8600GT), and 2GB of cheapshit ram. Is my system fast? Yes. Was it expensive? Hell no! I have a $40 motherboard, $50 graphics card, $65 CPU, and $105 DDR2.

The point is, today's Athlon 64 X2 is tomorrow's Sempron. Hell, at $65, the X2 3600+ is already deep in budget territory. Dual-core is going to be the norm soon, as is having 2GB of DDR2.

XP was a memory hog compared to 98. In an age where a high-end system had 256M of RDRAM (!), XP's eyecandy seemed like an excess. Many people turned it off. Many people still do.

I have more memory free right now than I had memory on the system I owned just 3 weeks ago. Yes, Vista requires more memory (about 60% more by my calculations). No, you won't care if you have 2GB of memory. You really won't care if you have 4GB.

The point is that, while Vista has higher system requirements, soon it just won't matter. CPUs keep getting dramatically faster (soon, quad-core will be mainstream), memory gets cheaper, and disks get bigger.

No one is forcing you to make the leap to Vista. Most people will wait until they buy a new PC. There's nothing wrong with waiting.

But, please, give it a rest. Some of us are early adopters. I've been running Vista betas for over 4 years now. I know about practically every new feature and improvement in the OS. I also ran XP for over five years - from RC2 until last month when I migrated my Media Center box to Vista. I understand that there are still issues with Vista. I understand that driver support is still spotty. Please stop telling me all the reasons why I shouldn't use the OS that I prefer.

Oh, come on already!

Yeah, we know this, we knew this before and we continue to know this in every gaming, hardware, software, and fan site on the web. Stop pestering with this damn Vista already, will ya? Yeah, Vista sucks, leave us alone. You are starting to nag. Really.

It's really all Microsoft's fault, in my opinion. They are trying to "lead" by changing the way the hardware communicates with the allocated resources of the system and the software, but the poor schmucks at Redmond messed everything up, and left the entire OEM market behind with a life-boat. Nothing works properly. NOTHING. Not just gaming, but network cards, sound cards, different USB adapters and devices, and so much more.

Either Microsoft will climb down from the damn tree they climbed upon and release a service pack that will divert back to the original way drivers used to work so XP drivers would work on Vista as well, or they should offer free seminars for each and every company that will teach the new way the hardware is supposed to communicate with the software in their new OS. Or simply go to hell with their new stinky OS and that's it.

P.S: Sorry about the temper, I'm really fed up with all that Vista talk, and Vista in general. Especially as a technical support person.

this article would have had relevance if you had done it with Ati cards. suffice it to say ... Just some advice if your going to make an educated statement concerning Vista. Don't use only 1 graphic platform. Because this does not prove anything. It just proves you guys still are hung up on Vista. Instead of doing a service to your readership you came off as a bit uneducated.
How can any IT site.. do a comparison on Vista and Xp and only use Nvidia cards?
everyone knows 99% of the complaining about Vista is coming from Nvidia card owners.

When it comes to any New os there is only one Statement that holds true..
"ITS THE Hardware DRIVERS STUPID!"

You guys dropped the ball with this article. I would never have released it. Disappointing.

I wish you guys would do an article on how sound operates in Vista gaming as well. This way you can take a look at the situation with Creative sound cards and what they have been doing or more accurately what they have not been doing driver-wise.

As to lower fps, with the most recent 158.24's its not that bad at all. Still some bugs but worlds away from even a few weeks ago. Can't say that about the sound card though

Regardless of whos at fault for the poor performance in Vista( well lower performance even in the best case scenerio) the bottom line is XP still runs games on the whole better. Ok, so Nvidia's drivers are pretty shitty and even though they are getting better they are still shitty overall compared to XP drivers. ATI's driver support for Vista, while better, isn't all that as of yet.

I think the point of the article as a whole is to just let, those who didn't already know, if your machine is primarirly used to game stick to XP for now. I mean thats common sense. If you dont HAVE to switch you really shouldn't, for the best overall gaming experience. That said if your building a new system today, its a tough call, but may bode better for Vista in that case.

As for me I will stick with XP on this box period. When I build a new machine in the fall I will (most likely) go with Vista. Heh, not out of choice but out of necessity, as I want to take advantage of DX 10 games to their fullest. I'm hoping Vista support and performance for gaming is alot better by then.

My final thought on this subject is this...
Many people make the comparison between 98 and XP, in that we had the same troubles and growing pains going from 98 to XP. However, I don't entirely agree. My own experience going from 98 to XP on several machines was much less eventfull than most of the experiences I have read to date going from Xp to Vista. For one thing, when we went from 98 to XP there was some big advantages, mostly the win2k/xp kernel and the stability that came with it. I think most will agree, when going from 98 to XP, gone were the BSOD's, random crashes for no apparent reason, frequent and necessary reboots a few times a day, and overall smoothness and stability of your every day computing tasks. Games as a whole were a bit slower at first, yes, but not as slow as the differences we see here imo. Did mention that stability difference from 98 to xp??
Whereby going from Xp to Vista does what for us exactly in the here and now? We already have a rock solid stable OS in XP. Games for the most part run great and without issue(mostly). It does all we need it to do and with hardware compatabilty across the board.

I'm not bashing Vista, hell in time I will migrate to it as well. As for now I have NO reason to make a change; and I suspect most people don't either. hence the lackluster sales figures for Vista so far. That's my opinion, flame away if you like.

I had little problems with the newest NVIDIA video card drivers. It could be that I have a beefy system. But I did begin to hate the X-Fi experience. Come on Creative. Time to catch up. I hated the minimal driver support for the X-Fi, so I reinstalled XP. I'll be keeping my eye on Vista but for now its XP.

Its why I went back to xp64 Like vista it just sucked into many departments.

Other than the Prelude spoiling any chance of a underdog surprise, it was a nice quick read. Dugg.

Jason_Wall said:

Certainly a valid point. The reason is that we only had NVIDIA hardware available at our offices when I cooked up the idea to do an article like this. It actually would have been rather interesting to see what ATI is doing with Vista. As Kyle said in the Digg thread, a follow-up to this experience will definitely be explored. Adding ATI to the mix would be one thing that we could do. Thanks for the feedback.

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You only had Nvidia Cards available when you wrote that article? An extremely popular and well managed hardware review site did not have any spare ATI cards sitting around for your other reviews?

So where did all the ATI cards you have been using for past reviews go to? You had an Asus card in review during March, or did you guys have to return that one?

Jason Wall said:

If a new driver was released, we’d install it and start all over. This happened more than once, which is why this article isn’t what we would call “timely.”

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Seems to me that you said yourself that there was plenty of time to atleast order a new one...
What is timely? 2 days, 2 weeks?
None of the HardOCP employees had a couple hundred bucks to spare to purchase an X1900 and write it off as a business expense?
The card would be used for other reviews I'm sure...like an upcoming 2900 HD review, to compare the new gen to the old, so it's not like it would be wasted.

I don't know exactly how you guys have everything setup, but it sure seems like either there was some odd coincidences in timing that kept you from using an ATI card...
-or-
you didn't want to put forth the effort to finish the rest of the article.

I love this site for the for all the real-world testing it does, but it seems like this review was completely opposite of the usual articles on this site.
If I'm wrong on any of these points, could someone please enlighten me?

Lots of good posts here, but I just want to second the opinion that it wasn't really a fair playing field for Vista. Plenty of reasons given, no use me repeating it

Catweazle said:

A fresh, clean install of Vista is no longer necessarily the 'optimal state' as it was with XP.

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There have even been benchmarks on same-hardware systems that show upgrading is actually FASTER compared to a fresh install. It gives you better performance. It wasn't much of a difference, but there was a difference nonetheless.

I would love for these tests to be re-run after a month. Install the same exact games on each system, and run them the same amount of times each system (Won't do much to the XP, but remember it keeps it "even"). Once superfetch starts kicking in and matures after a month, I can guarantee you Vista would be knocking the socks off the XP machine in terms of speed and loadtimes.

Framerates are really just the drivers. Why old drivers were used I have no idea, but IMO it was an uneven competition.

I got my Creative X-FI working but yeah it doesn't sound any better under Vista then any old mobo sound setup, pretty lousy since it should be at the same quality of what it is under XP.

Also on my dual boot system, my frames are at least 10fps or more less under Vista then XP, which seems to bring down the games to being unplayable in some instances. I find BF2 being pretty bad for that (even with a lower res under Vista it runs worse then a higher res XP) and at one spot in Shatrah in WoW the game becomes unplayable as the fps dives to under 1 while the same spot in XP takes a dive but nothing worse then 10fps. I'd say time to upgrade but other then my CPU being an AMD 3800X2 I have 2 gigs of DDR2 ram and a 8800 GTS 320meg! I really don't have much to upgrade to except maybe a 5#00X2 on sale!

I too have been using Vista since the Longhorn days, and I must say the current driver situation has me a bit pissed. IIRC, the WDDM standard has been in place for QUITE a while and we are still trying to get (fundamentally) working drivers? I can't speak for anyone else on a laptop, but I've LOST the PowerMizer Functionality on my laptop to save me battery life.

Last go I had with Vista I tested 2 games, HL2 and Test Drive Unlimited. Both at 1920x1200, No AA or AF, but Medium Settings on everything else.

What does Vista do? BLOW UP when HL2 is launched (Dual Core issue? Core2 Spiked to 50%+ and stayed that way until a reboot) and TDU is unplayable at 1920x1200.

On XP I can play TDU at 1920x1200, Everything on High and 2xAA; This with a 7900GS Go and a T2700 C2D

Doesn't take a Genius to guess what I'm running at the moment

Article typo:

In the table for the system specifications you list the 7600 as a Gigabyte 7600 GS and not a
7600 GT. 7600 GS also appears at the bottom of the table next to the price.

I'm going to chime in with the rest of the "extremely disappointed that ATI isn't featured" crowd.

It's been known for half a year now ATI is on the ball with the new OS, and you couldn't have kept some video cards around long enough to do a more complete comparison of the article?

The article rings incomplete to me. You've shown one platform that people know doesn't work as well on the operating system, using older drivers.

I'm guessing that given their timeframe, they decided to use the more popular Nvidia platform. You only have so many hours in a day. I got what I needed from the article and that is, Vista is getting there, slowly but surely. People just have a tendecy to complain too much. wah wah my drivers for <random game title> doesn't work properly. Wah [H] didn't use ATI cards.

And for whoever assumed that hardocp was rollin in the moola to just buy a couple ati cards as an "expense" has no idea of their current financial situation, which isn't great. I think they did well with the resources they had available. The follow up can easily resolve everyone's issues by including ati hardware, newer drivers, and adding creative soundcards into the mix.

But jeez, to say that nvida's vista driver sucks because it doesnt give you the same performance. Drivers that suck, are ones with much worse problems than a ~10% performance loss. With all that said, I won't be using Vista till my creative drivers are 100% and I actually see a difference between dx9 and dx10 games. (crysis and bioshock)

Agreed that the lack of ATI hardware makes this article incomplete.

If this article was titled, "XP vs Vista using NVIDIA Hardware," I would have lowered my expectations appropriately.

Next article should include ATI.

Also, SLI and XFire would be useful as well, considering how driver-dependent those technologies are.

IMHO you should of used an ATI card as well because i hear they have better driver support. but yes the crappy nvidea drivers make a hell of a diffreance

BrndNtrl said:

I'm going to chime in with the rest of the "extremely disappointed that ATI isn't featured" crowd.

It's been known for half a year now ATI is on the ball with the new OS, and you couldn't have kept some video cards around long enough to do a more complete comparison of the article?

The article rings incomplete to me. You've shown one platform that people know doesn't work as well on the operating system, using older drivers.

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Agreed (more or less). If nothing else, I think the title/front page blurb should be clear that it's really "XP vs. Vista - A Tale of Framerates (Nvidia)" I can understand the driver issue, especially since Nvidia isn't on a semi-regular driver production schedule and when publishing at some point you just have to cut 'em off, but to leave out one sizable chunk of the market leaves (for me) more questions than answers...

Hypernova said:

...why on earth was NV used?! It's like [H] has a boycott on ATI cards.

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And from the article..."gaming is not what it could be on Vista. Given all of the variables, it’s hard to dismiss the fact that Vista is the common denominator."

As others have implied in this thread, clearly the elephant in the room is the fact that not every variable was considered. The end result is that Nvidia is left looking like Oliver asking, 'Please, Sir,may I have more?', orphaned from the warm home of XP and misused by Its wicked step-Vista. Bad Vista, (swat on nose with rolled up article)! Bad, bad Vista (another article, another swat)! Granted Nvidia was on a roll there for a while. But "while"s are cruelly short in Hardware. And roll or not, now or over, the one variable that mustn't waver is the objectivity of those we've come to trust for our information. In a mind that only works with Nvidia, yes I'm sure every variable was considered. But in the market, there is yet an ATI. We your trusting auditors must live with and purchase from that same market, and as one friend needs another to be straight-forward concerning important matters, we feel that same relationship with [H]ardOCP. I do wonder what the lifting of NDA's might have to add to this article... if one were to delay their next purchase another week?

I take back part of my original statement and echo the agreement bubbling around the title change. If the title of the article mentioned that it was nvidia only, it would have helped. Being an nv user, I almost overlooked that. That small change would've made it easier to handle reader expectations.

This is the reason im still using WinXP64.