More Impressions and Test Setup
Application compatibility with Vista has been hit and miss, with the biggest problem being games. Regular applications tend to work fine in one of three security modes, though we have encountered some applications (including Java) that disable the advanced Aero effects on Vista, which is a bit of a nuisance since it changes not only the eye-candy but disables useful abilities like Windows Flip. It's also worth mentioning that with one application in particular (a DVD player), it nearly locked up the system no matter what we did, so there are going to be older applications that are simply not compatible with Vista.
For those of you interested specifically in the ability for Vista to run applications without administrative powers, our informal testing gives us an overall mixed feeling. Some applications are perfectly fine in a reduced permissions mode now thanks to the sandbox, while other applications simply can't get along without administrative permissions. With the applications we tried there's no specific pattern we can find indicating why some things work in the sandbox and other things don't, so the only way to know for sure if something will work under a limited account in Vista that doesn't under XP will be to try it out.
As we mentioned previously with the special case of games, the problems relating to them are a combination of driver issues and DirectX issues. For some reason, the version of DirectX included with Vista does not have a completely working compatibility layer for pre-DirectX 10 games, while some games can't correctly detect DirectX 10 as a superset of DX9.0c. This has resulted in games seeing Vista as only having DirectX 9.0(a), which in turn causes some games to fail and start believing the system is out of date. Other games will not enable certain features such as SM3.0. Some DLLs are also missing from the current version of DirectX, such as the D3DX DLLs that come with the seasonal DirectX9.0c updates, and these need to be installed before games using them (such as Battlefield 2) can be used. Also, most games will still need administrative powers to run, as the use of anti-cheat and anti-copying protections such as PunkBuster and Safedisc require administrative power to do their checks.
As for drivers, we'll cut NVIDIA and ATI some slack for how things are, since they have been busy preparing for WDDM compliance, but the situation is nonetheless rather grim at the moment. With both ATI and NVIDIA based cards, game performance can drop to levels well below where it is on Windows XP, and it's by a factor great enough that it's likely not just overhead from Vista still being in debugging mode. Additionally, each has a quirk going on at some level: NVIDIA's new Vista control panel is incomplete and won't let us turn on AF over 2x or AA at all (and doesn't even work at all on Vista x64), and ATI isn't even shipping an OpenGL driver with their current beta. For the most part, a lot of games will run, but there's a good deal of performance left to be desired.
The other driver situations tend to be better. Motherboard drivers seem solid, and a lot of on-board sound solutions have what appear to be fully functional drivers at this point. Creative is once again the lone holdout however; they only have a single driver set out that was released for beta 1 and is not close to being complete, so gamers using a high-end audio setup are going to be disappointed for the time being.
The Test
Due to the beta nature of Vista, along with program incompatibilities caused by the new OS, we are using a slightly different group of benchmarks than usual:
Test Configuration:
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ (S754)
Abit KV8-MAX3 motherboard
2GB DDR400 RAM 2:2:2
GeForce 6800 Ultra
120GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Hard Drive
Antec TruePower 430W Power Supply
Application compatibility with Vista has been hit and miss, with the biggest problem being games. Regular applications tend to work fine in one of three security modes, though we have encountered some applications (including Java) that disable the advanced Aero effects on Vista, which is a bit of a nuisance since it changes not only the eye-candy but disables useful abilities like Windows Flip. It's also worth mentioning that with one application in particular (a DVD player), it nearly locked up the system no matter what we did, so there are going to be older applications that are simply not compatible with Vista.
For those of you interested specifically in the ability for Vista to run applications without administrative powers, our informal testing gives us an overall mixed feeling. Some applications are perfectly fine in a reduced permissions mode now thanks to the sandbox, while other applications simply can't get along without administrative permissions. With the applications we tried there's no specific pattern we can find indicating why some things work in the sandbox and other things don't, so the only way to know for sure if something will work under a limited account in Vista that doesn't under XP will be to try it out.
As we mentioned previously with the special case of games, the problems relating to them are a combination of driver issues and DirectX issues. For some reason, the version of DirectX included with Vista does not have a completely working compatibility layer for pre-DirectX 10 games, while some games can't correctly detect DirectX 10 as a superset of DX9.0c. This has resulted in games seeing Vista as only having DirectX 9.0(a), which in turn causes some games to fail and start believing the system is out of date. Other games will not enable certain features such as SM3.0. Some DLLs are also missing from the current version of DirectX, such as the D3DX DLLs that come with the seasonal DirectX9.0c updates, and these need to be installed before games using them (such as Battlefield 2) can be used. Also, most games will still need administrative powers to run, as the use of anti-cheat and anti-copying protections such as PunkBuster and Safedisc require administrative power to do their checks.
As for drivers, we'll cut NVIDIA and ATI some slack for how things are, since they have been busy preparing for WDDM compliance, but the situation is nonetheless rather grim at the moment. With both ATI and NVIDIA based cards, game performance can drop to levels well below where it is on Windows XP, and it's by a factor great enough that it's likely not just overhead from Vista still being in debugging mode. Additionally, each has a quirk going on at some level: NVIDIA's new Vista control panel is incomplete and won't let us turn on AF over 2x or AA at all (and doesn't even work at all on Vista x64), and ATI isn't even shipping an OpenGL driver with their current beta. For the most part, a lot of games will run, but there's a good deal of performance left to be desired.
The other driver situations tend to be better. Motherboard drivers seem solid, and a lot of on-board sound solutions have what appear to be fully functional drivers at this point. Creative is once again the lone holdout however; they only have a single driver set out that was released for beta 1 and is not close to being complete, so gamers using a high-end audio setup are going to be disappointed for the time being.
The Test
Due to the beta nature of Vista, along with program incompatibilities caused by the new OS, we are using a slightly different group of benchmarks than usual:
Test Configuration:
AMD Athlon 64 3400+ (S754)
Abit KV8-MAX3 motherboard
2GB DDR400 RAM 2:2:2
GeForce 6800 Ultra
120GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Hard Drive
Antec TruePower 430W Power Supply
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Pirks - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Excuse me, what? How about this then: http://www.macworld.com/2006/05/reviews/osxfirewal...">http://www.macworld.com/2006/05/reviews/osxfirewal..."The emphasis is on incoming. As it ships from Apple, the firewall does not monitor traffic that may be originating from your own computer. If your Mac gets possessed by a malware application that then attempts to attack or infect other computers via your Internet connection (a not-uncommon trick), OS X’s firewall won’t, by default, pay any attention. And, there’s no way to change this default setting from your System Preferences. To force the firewall to monitor outbound traffic, you must use Terminal’s command-line interface."
See - IT CAN monitor and block outbound traffic, contrary to what you say. It's just a matter of configuring it properly. You should at least correct your article and stop saying OSX ipfw CAN'T track outbound connections. You can say this: it's SET UP not to monitor outbound connections BY DEFAULT but anyone can CONFIGURE it to monitor outbound connections either through third party GUI like Flying Buttress or via command line. Then you won't look like a liar to any Mac guy who cares to read your review.
Ryan Smith - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
I see your point, but I believe there's nothing in the article that needs changing. Tiger's firewall can't block outbound connections without having to drop to the terminal to muck with IPFW, I do not classify that as an ability any more than I classify Vista x64 as being amateur driver programmer friendly(since you need to drop to the terminal to turn off the x64 integrity check). When a version of Mac OS X ships with a proper GUI for controlling outbound firewalling(as is the Apple way), then it will be capable by a reasonable definition. Right now it's nothing more than a quirk that results from using the BSD base.Pirks - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Excellent point! So, when (and if) Mac OS X will see its share of virii and malware, THEN Apple will incorporate outbound connection settings in OS X GUI - right now it's not needed by Mac users, and the rare exceptions are easily treated with third party apps and command line.OK, got your point, agreed, issue closed. Thanks :)
bjtags - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Vista x64I have been pounding on it for 4 days never crash or even farted once!!!
Have all HalfLife 2 and CS running Just Great!!!
Had at one time 10 IE windows open, MediaPlayer, Steam updating, download driver,
updating windows drivers, and 3 folder explorer windows open, and tranfering
4gig movie to HD!!!
Still ran fine... I do have AMD 4800 x2 with 2gigs...
Poser - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Two questions:1. What's the ship date for Vista supposed to be? Q4 of 2006?
2. I seem to remember that speech recognition would be included and integrated with Vista. Is it considered too much of a niche toy to even mention, not considered to be part of the OS, or am I just plain wrong about it's inclusion?
It was a extremely well written article. Very nice job.
Ryan Smith - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
1. Expected completion is Q4 with some business customers getting access to the final version at that time. It won't be released to the public until 2007 however.2. You're right, speech recognition is included. You're also right in that given the amount of stuff we had to cover in one article it was too much of a niche; voice recognition so far is still too immature to replace typing.
ashay - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
"Dogfooding" is when a company uses their own new product (not necessarily beta) for internal use.(maybe even in critical production systems).Term comes from "eat your own dog-food". Meaning if you're a dog food maker, the CEO and execs eat the stuff. If they like it they dogs hopefully will.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_one%27s_own_dog_f...">Wikipedia link
fishbits - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
Yes, I know it's still beta, we'll see. The UAC and signed drivers schemes sound like they'll be flops right out of the gate. Average user will quickly realize he can't install or use anything until he adopts a "just click 'Yes'" attitude, which will reward him with a functioning device/running program. I've lost count of how many drivers I've installed under XP that were for name-brand devices, yet didn't have the official seal of approval on them. Again, get trained to "just click 'Yes'" in order to be able to do anything useful. Without better information given to the user at this decision point, all the scheme does is add a few mouse-clicks and no security. Like when you install a program and your security suite gives a "helpful" warning like "INeedToRun.exe is trying to access feccflm.dll ... no recommendation."As expected, it looks like the productivity gains of GPU-acceleration were immediately swallowed up by GUI overhead. Whee! "The users can solve this through future hardware upgrades." Gotcha. For what it's worth, the gadgets/widgets look needlessly large and ugly, especially for simply displaying things like time, cpu temp/usage. Then it sounds like we're going to have resource-hungry programs getting starved because of GPU sharing, or will have an arms-race of workarounds to get their hands on the power they think they need.
Ah well, I've got to move to 64-bit for RAM purposes relatively soon. Think I'll wait a year or two after Vista 64 to let it get stable, faster, and better supported. Then hopefully the programs I'll need to upgrade can be purchased along the lines of a normal upgrade cycle. Games I'm actually not as worried about, as I expect XP/DX9 support to continue for a decent bit and will retain an XP box and install Vista on a brand new one when the time comes.
shamgar03 - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
I really hope that will mean for BETTER GPU performance not worse. I would really just like to be able to boot into a game only environment where you have something like a grub interface to pick games and it only loads the needed stuff for the game.darkdemyze - Friday, June 16, 2006 - link
beta implies "still in developement". chances are very high performance will see an increase by the time of release. I agree with your seconds statement though.