FPSLabs : Life With Windows Vista: Issue 4

Windows Vista. Hesitant to make the switch? So are we, so we’ve sent a troop into the thicket of Vista to scout it out. Join Jason Krueger as he takes us along on his journey through the ups and downs of “Life With Windows Vista”.

Welcome to another edition of my Windows Vista blog. Today I am going
to take a break from the “what’s new” theme and the features of Vista
to take a glance at what everyone has been asking about: gaming in
Vista vs. XP.

Play or Be Played
The fact is that the majority of our readers out there are gamers. Many
of our readers have migrated from our very successful eSports site,
which explains why much of our hardware and tech coverage focuses on
the gaming aspect. The fundamental connection between gaming and
hardware boils down to one thing, the operating system. There just
aren’t massive quantities of hardcore gamers out there running Ubuntu
or OSX Tiger. Like it or not, when it comes to PC gaming, Microsoft’s
Windows platform is the place to be. Hence, any time a new version of
Windows comes out there is a transition period between the last release
and the newest; not just in a hardware support and software bugs aspect
but in the gaming performance aspect too.

I remember vividly when Windows XP came out and how few of the people I
played Counter-Strike and Quake 3 with wanted to make the switch. Many
gamers, justifiably, felt that Windows 98 and Windows 2000 were better
operating systems for gaming. And for a while they were on-point with
this train of thought. However, eventually the curve caught up and the
new kid on the block, XP, became the standard. Assuming Windows Vienna
isn’t rushed out the door, Vista will most likely become the next
standard in gaming - especially with DirectX 10 being a Vista exclusive.

So how is the transition going? Is Vista ready to game on? I will take
a look at some benchmarks on various games and benchmarking suites to
see how Vista and XP compare on the graphics front. Using this
information I will make some recommendations on what your OS of choice
should be.

I will be focusing on some of the current games that are quite popular
here on GotFrag, as well as some of my personal favorites. Tests will
include Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Oblivion, Call
of Duty 2, the always loved Counter-Strike 1.6, and a couple 3DMarks
thrown in for good measure.

Test setup is the following:

Processor: E6700 Core 2 Duo at 2.66GHz
Motherboard: eVGA 680i
Memory: Crucial Ballistix DDR2 1000 2048MB
Video: eVGA 8800GTS Superclocked
Power: Antec NeoHE 550W

Software Configuration:

Vista Driver: 101.41 WHQL
Windows XP SP2: 97.92 WHQL

{mospagebreak heading=Introduction&title=The Tests}
The Tests
We have a ton of Counter-Strike 1.6 players around here so I will
address that first. Numerous “1.6’ers” have asked me about performance
between the two operating systems and if they can switch and still get
good frames in 1.6.

As we can see from the graph, Vista sees a drop of about 23% in frames
per second. However, even at almost 200FPS in Vista it is very
playable. This is of course on very good hardware - those of you
running on your old Intel Celerons with 256MB of RAM would probably notice
a 23% drop in frames. However, you shouldn’t (and I don’t see how you
even could) be running Vista on a system like that either way. So, if
you have good enough hardware to run Vista well, your frame drops in
1.6 should be negligible.

Now we switch off to 1.6’s loved/hated stepsister Counter-Strike: Source, where we see a slightly different picture.

Source,
as we know, is much more demanding on the CPU and GPU than 1.6, and
getting solid and consistent frames per second in CS:S takes a fairly
modern rig. In Vista we see a drop of close to 35% compared to Windows
XP SP2. With Vista on my high-end system we see that CS:S is quite
playable at right around 96FPS. This is of course with high levels of
Anisotropic Filtering (16x) and Anti-Aliasing (8x multisampling). These
could be dropped down, as could the resolution for those of you looking
to get more FPS out of source or for those with lesser hardware wanting
to make the Vista leap.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a very demanding game graphically, which
is why I felt it would make for a great comparison between Vista and
XP. In this test we used High Dynamic Range lighting (HDR), as it is
more demanding in Oblivion than Anti-Aliasing is.

We see that Oblivion is 13% faster in XP SP2 than in Vista. Not a big
performance drop, but still somewhat noticeable; Something to keep in
mind for those who play Oblivion.

Next up we have one of my favorites: Half-Life 2: Episode 1. The
graphics and the eye candy in this game are top notch and rival that of
any game out. Evidence of this can be seen from the fact that with
nearly maxed AA and AF levels, as well as HDR, I get the lowest FPS out
of any game I tested.

Not only do we see the lowest FPS out of all the games I am testing,
but this is also the title that shows the biggest hit in performance
and illustrates that Vista still needs some under-the-hood gaming
tweaks. Vista is around 50% slower than XP in the Episode 1 tests.

{mospagebreak title=COD and Conclusion}

Lastly,
we have Call of Duty 2; a game that is played competitively and has a
solid following here at GotFrag. I actually just got into playing this
on Vista and found that the game is a blast on either operating system.
Let’s see how the two OS’s stack up.

These are interesting results to say the least. This game’s performance
is nearly identical on both operating systems. We can draw a couple
conclusions from this. The first obviously being that if you play COD2
on XP, you should expect to get about the same performance with Vista.
The second being that depending on how a game is rendered coded, it is
possible to have nearly equal performance on Vista and XP regardless of
driver differences. This also proves that not all games will face a
drop off in performance on Vista.

Now we will check the synthetic standards in game benchmarking with
Futuremark’s 3DMark05 and 06. While these show no in-game/real world
performance indications, we should still be able to draw some
conclusions from them.

First off, we see that neither operating system has a huge leg up in
these tests, and that 05 shows a bigger difference than does 06. This
demonstrates that in the modern features of 3DMark06 Vista seems to
compete on the same level as XP SP2.

Conclusion
So what can I recommend to my fellow gamers out there? If you want to
make the switch out of interest in Vista, DirectX 10, and have decent
hardware you should be ok. If your hardware is middle of the road and
you question the need for Vista then wait on it. You will be just fine
in XP for some time. Those of you with top of the lines rigs waiting
with baited breath for DirectX 10 games like Crysis and Hellgate London
should definitely consider giving Vista a look if you already haven’t.
We willll definitely keep checking back on tests like these later down the
road with new driver releases, faster graphics cards, and of course
DirectX 10 games which should be Vista’s bread and butter. It will be
interesting to see when the performance of games in Vista catches up
and or surpasses XP. Being a betting man I would say for many games it
will be sometime later this year. I do want to remind our readers that
XP and its drivers have had 5 and half years of tweaking and we are
comparing it to an operating system that has been on shelves for less
than two months. The improvements will come but it won’t happen
overnight.

There you have it, Vista vs. XP head to head in some of todays most
popular and demanding games. It is clear that Vista still has room for
improvement. New games obviously should see more improvements as
developers code for DirectX 10 and are able to harness more of Vista’s
graphical power. As far as current games most of the work comes in on
Nvidia and ATI’s (whom I didn’t have a chance to represent in these
benchmarks) part tweaking their drivers and pushing the most out of
Vista. It will take some time just as we saw years ago with XP which
was hated by gamers when it first came out. Hopefully this is a sign of
things to come with Call of Duty 2 and the 3Dmark tests which show that
Vista can have just as good performance as XP.

Thanks for joining me again for another of stop in my “Life with
Windows Vista” series. Come back for issue 5 when I show off some
interesting tweaks and tips for Vista and more of the new features I
have yet to scratch the surface of.

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