Gaming Under Vista: Nvidia vs. ATI

One major (if not the only) argument for upgrading to Vista is its new graphics system, DirectX 10, which will only be available on Vista and will power some upcoming games (including the awesome-looking Crysis) to unprecedented levels of detail and realism.

But none of those games are out yet. So how does Vista handle games today, and what should upgraders expect from the experience? PC World previously had some benchmarks which I discussed in this post, which showed some slowdown vs. Windows XP, but that didn't look at differing graphics cards. Good news: Now there's this update from PC Perspective, which tested a large variety of games on both AMD/ATI and Nvidia, and came up with some interesting conclusions.

Unfortunately there's no neat and tidy conclusion to offer: Both ATI and Nvidia had instances where gaming was improved on XP vs. Vista and vice versa. Nvidia's Vista drivers are not quite complete, and performance was a letdown for most titles. However, some games played perfectly well. Many standard features present in XP are totally lacking in the Vista driver from Nvidia today.

AMD/ATI had better overall performance in relation to XP, but it had its flaws, too. Notably, some games, like Prey, wouldn't run at all on Vista with ATI's latest drivers. FEAR, another major title, had disappointing performance of 46 frames per second, while it ran fan on Nvidia hardware.

Big changes are in the works: Nvidia will be working to improve its drivers and AMD/ATI has new hardware (the R600) coming out soon. Since gaming drivers tend to change on a daily basis (Nvidia is now on version number 100.54), this information will probably only be valid for a matter of weeks. But as a point in time it brings up an interesting issue about Vista and gaming: It's just not ready for most titles yet, but the outlook isn't completely grim. Hang in there.