Gaming Performance
Users expecting to use the current Vista beta as a gaming platform are going to be the most disappointed. The results of our gaming benchmarks largely speak for themselves.
The overall performance penalty on the current version of Vista depends largely on what the game is. Among the games tested, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some games do worse than others. The only clear pattern is that Vista gaming performance is almost universally worse than under XP.
With antialiasing off, with the exception of Black and White 2, everything takes a moderate to significant performance hit. 3DMark, which we normally shy away from but tends to make a good diagnostic tool in situations like this, shows Vista x86 only trailing XP by a small margin, whereas the x64 version is doing significantly worse. However, in the games that would work under Vista x64 (HL2 would not work; its 64-bit binary would not accept our benchmark), Vista x64 is doing no worse than Vista x86.
If this means that Vista x64 is only suffering under a fraction of games or if this is an issue with 3DMark isn't something we can determine, but we're leery of the x64 version of Vista at this point anyhow, due to other reasons (more on that later). As for the slightly more compatible Vista x86, half of our tests have it coming in 25% slower under XP when antialiasing is off, which doesn't bode well for the fledgling operating system at this point. How much of this is early drivers, an early OS, or the result of still-active debugging code remains to be seen.
Antialiasing seems to be a significant sticking point for Vista right now, as our entire suite of test scores dive hard with it enabled on Vista versus XP. Half-Life 2 ended up facing the largest drop, more than 30% off from its numbers under XP, and while Doom 3 actually suffered less of a drop than without antialiasing, it's clear that there's something holding up our test bed when antialiasing is enabled. This unfortunately is a double whammy for gaming enthusiasts using top of the line cards like the 7900 and X1900 series, as this kind of slowdown affects them the most since they're the most capable of using antialiasing in the first place. It's hard to recommend gaming under the current Vista beta given that these performance drops are the largest for those who are most likely to be able to cope with a beta operating system and the high system requirements.
It's also worth noting that with our OpenGL title, Doom 3, we did not encounter any issues other than the normal performance slowdown. There had been some concern earlier about how using a full OpenGL client driver will force Vista to disable the desktop compositing engine since OpenGL takes full control of the GPU, and that GPU makers may switch to a slower OpenGL wrapper for Direct3D to keep the compositing engine working. While firing up Doom 3 did indeed disable the DCE, it's not a problem since Doom 3 is a full screen game that doesn't even normally allow Alt+Tabbing. OpenGL engines may not be as popular as they once were (largely in part to the slower adoption of the Doom 3 engine), but between the gaming market and the professional workstation market, both of which desire a full-performance OpenGL implementation, it doesn't seem like OpenGL is going to suffer on Vista as much as earlier feared. We may yet see some issues with certain professional applications, but many of the workstation users we know are still running Windows 2000 anyway.
Users expecting to use the current Vista beta as a gaming platform are going to be the most disappointed. The results of our gaming benchmarks largely speak for themselves.
| Gaming Performance (1280x1024) | |||
| XP | Vista x86 | Vista x64 | |
| 3DMark 2006 | 2749 | 2533 | 2088 |
| Doom 3 | 79.3 | 59.5 | 60.5 |
| Doom 3 4xAA | 58.8 | 47.7 | 49.3 |
| Half-Life 2 | 81.46 | 61.19 | N/A |
| Half-Life 2 4xAA | 76.25 | 49.73 | N/A |
| Black and White 2 | 22.3 | 23.3 | 23.6 |
| Black and White 2 4xAA | 19.5 | 15.3 | 15.3 |
The overall performance penalty on the current version of Vista depends largely on what the game is. Among the games tested, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some games do worse than others. The only clear pattern is that Vista gaming performance is almost universally worse than under XP.
With antialiasing off, with the exception of Black and White 2, everything takes a moderate to significant performance hit. 3DMark, which we normally shy away from but tends to make a good diagnostic tool in situations like this, shows Vista x86 only trailing XP by a small margin, whereas the x64 version is doing significantly worse. However, in the games that would work under Vista x64 (HL2 would not work; its 64-bit binary would not accept our benchmark), Vista x64 is doing no worse than Vista x86.
If this means that Vista x64 is only suffering under a fraction of games or if this is an issue with 3DMark isn't something we can determine, but we're leery of the x64 version of Vista at this point anyhow, due to other reasons (more on that later). As for the slightly more compatible Vista x86, half of our tests have it coming in 25% slower under XP when antialiasing is off, which doesn't bode well for the fledgling operating system at this point. How much of this is early drivers, an early OS, or the result of still-active debugging code remains to be seen.
Antialiasing seems to be a significant sticking point for Vista right now, as our entire suite of test scores dive hard with it enabled on Vista versus XP. Half-Life 2 ended up facing the largest drop, more than 30% off from its numbers under XP, and while Doom 3 actually suffered less of a drop than without antialiasing, it's clear that there's something holding up our test bed when antialiasing is enabled. This unfortunately is a double whammy for gaming enthusiasts using top of the line cards like the 7900 and X1900 series, as this kind of slowdown affects them the most since they're the most capable of using antialiasing in the first place. It's hard to recommend gaming under the current Vista beta given that these performance drops are the largest for those who are most likely to be able to cope with a beta operating system and the high system requirements.
It's also worth noting that with our OpenGL title, Doom 3, we did not encounter any issues other than the normal performance slowdown. There had been some concern earlier about how using a full OpenGL client driver will force Vista to disable the desktop compositing engine since OpenGL takes full control of the GPU, and that GPU makers may switch to a slower OpenGL wrapper for Direct3D to keep the compositing engine working. While firing up Doom 3 did indeed disable the DCE, it's not a problem since Doom 3 is a full screen game that doesn't even normally allow Alt+Tabbing. OpenGL engines may not be as popular as they once were (largely in part to the slower adoption of the Doom 3 engine), but between the gaming market and the professional workstation market, both of which desire a full-performance OpenGL implementation, it doesn't seem like OpenGL is going to suffer on Vista as much as earlier feared. We may yet see some issues with certain professional applications, but many of the workstation users we know are still running Windows 2000 anyway.
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stash - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Sleep is more effecient in the long run. Shutting down and doing a cold boot every day uses a lot more electricity than sleep. When the machine is in sleep, it uses a fraction of a single watt. Yes, this is obviously more than zero (completely off), but when you cold boot a system, it uses many times more power.As a side benefit, you get back to where you left off almost instantly because sleep combines standby with hibernation.
Griswold - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Oh so wrong. Why would a cold boot use more power? Because the HDDs spin up? Going from sleep to full on does the same. Because the OS has to be loaded from the HDD? Sleep mode also writes to disk. And thats actually it. This is a computer, not an engine that uses more fuel at startup than when it runs.stash - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
When you can resume from sleep in a few seconds compared to 45-60 seconds from a cold boot, then yes, a cold boot uses much more power.johnsonx - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Stash, your logic is faulty. Please give up.stash - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Why should I give up? How is my logic faulty.smitty3268 - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
<I>Is Expose the same as the new compiz and XGL?</I>No, that is more like the Aero interface or OSX's Quartz Extreme. Expose lets you hit a button and then automatically scales and moves every window so that you can see them all and pick out which program you want to use. Think of it as a replacement for ALT-TAB. There is a plugin in compiz that does the same thing.
Locutus465 - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Not sure what your issues with 3D were, I only skimmed the artical so I'm sure which video card you used... But it's possible that if you're using ATI you experienced problems due to their drivers. I've seen many more ATI issues in the MS groups than nVida. My 7800GT has no problem with 1600x1200 (full 3d acceloration, no apparent crashing). My only concern wth Vista 64 is drivers... As of right now there's no driver avaailable for the Promies Ultra100TX2 controller card which is a huge issue for me as I have my secondary drive (used to store installers and as my page file drive in XP). I hope MS manages to convince to support 64b as well as 32b is supported. When I do upgrade to Vista, it will be to 64b.JarredWalton - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Page 10: using 6800 Ultra card.The problem is both with drivers (64-bit are still being worked on), the OS (still being worked on), and resource requierments are increased under 64-bit mode. Compatibility with various hardware is already worse with Vista, but 64-bit mode is even worse still. Can they fix it before shipping? Hopefully, and one way or another we're going 64-bit in the future.
It could be that other test systems would be more or less stable, but with a preview of Vista Beta 2 that's really too much extra work. The article was already over 12000 words, so trying it out on five other platforms would make this monolithic task even more daunting. The bottom line is that Vista is still interesting, but it's definitely not ready for release. There's a good reason it has been delayed until 2007, just like the XP x64 delays in the past.
DerekWilson - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
We have tested Vista with both ATI and NVIDIA drivers and see similar issues between the two. While the numbers were gathered under NVIDIA hardware, we are confident that the same patterns would emerge with ATI at this point in time.Locutus465 - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Well, weird... I've had my share of beta issues but thus far Glass + 3D acceleration hasn't been one of them. I have noticed that installing QuickTime 7 on Vista (at least in my case) renders Vista Ultimite 64 unbootable.