Windows Vista: Beta 2 Preview

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seeing Vista as only having DirectX 9.0(a), which in turn causes some games to fail and start believing the system is out of date.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