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seeing Vista as only having DirectX 9.0(a), which in turn causes some games to fail and start believing the system is out of date.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