Gaming Performance
Users expecting to use the current Vista beta as a gaming platform are going to be the most disappointed. The results of our gaming benchmarks largely speak for themselves.
The overall performance penalty on the current version of Vista depends largely on what the game is. Among the games tested, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some games do worse than others. The only clear pattern is that Vista gaming performance is almost universally worse than under XP.
With antialiasing off, with the exception of Black and White 2, everything takes a moderate to significant performance hit. 3DMark, which we normally shy away from but tends to make a good diagnostic tool in situations like this, shows Vista x86 only trailing XP by a small margin, whereas the x64 version is doing significantly worse. However, in the games that would work under Vista x64 (HL2 would not work; its 64-bit binary would not accept our benchmark), Vista x64 is doing no worse than Vista x86.
If this means that Vista x64 is only suffering under a fraction of games or if this is an issue with 3DMark isn't something we can determine, but we're leery of the x64 version of Vista at this point anyhow, due to other reasons (more on that later). As for the slightly more compatible Vista x86, half of our tests have it coming in 25% slower under XP when antialiasing is off, which doesn't bode well for the fledgling operating system at this point. How much of this is early drivers, an early OS, or the result of still-active debugging code remains to be seen.
Antialiasing seems to be a significant sticking point for Vista right now, as our entire suite of test scores dive hard with it enabled on Vista versus XP. Half-Life 2 ended up facing the largest drop, more than 30% off from its numbers under XP, and while Doom 3 actually suffered less of a drop than without antialiasing, it's clear that there's something holding up our test bed when antialiasing is enabled. This unfortunately is a double whammy for gaming enthusiasts using top of the line cards like the 7900 and X1900 series, as this kind of slowdown affects them the most since they're the most capable of using antialiasing in the first place. It's hard to recommend gaming under the current Vista beta given that these performance drops are the largest for those who are most likely to be able to cope with a beta operating system and the high system requirements.
It's also worth noting that with our OpenGL title, Doom 3, we did not encounter any issues other than the normal performance slowdown. There had been some concern earlier about how using a full OpenGL client driver will force Vista to disable the desktop compositing engine since OpenGL takes full control of the GPU, and that GPU makers may switch to a slower OpenGL wrapper for Direct3D to keep the compositing engine working. While firing up Doom 3 did indeed disable the DCE, it's not a problem since Doom 3 is a full screen game that doesn't even normally allow Alt+Tabbing. OpenGL engines may not be as popular as they once were (largely in part to the slower adoption of the Doom 3 engine), but between the gaming market and the professional workstation market, both of which desire a full-performance OpenGL implementation, it doesn't seem like OpenGL is going to suffer on Vista as much as earlier feared. We may yet see some issues with certain professional applications, but many of the workstation users we know are still running Windows 2000 anyway.
Users expecting to use the current Vista beta as a gaming platform are going to be the most disappointed. The results of our gaming benchmarks largely speak for themselves.
| Gaming Performance (1280x1024) | |||
| XP | Vista x86 | Vista x64 | |
| 3DMark 2006 | 2749 | 2533 | 2088 |
| Doom 3 | 79.3 | 59.5 | 60.5 |
| Doom 3 4xAA | 58.8 | 47.7 | 49.3 |
| Half-Life 2 | 81.46 | 61.19 | N/A |
| Half-Life 2 4xAA | 76.25 | 49.73 | N/A |
| Black and White 2 | 22.3 | 23.3 | 23.6 |
| Black and White 2 4xAA | 19.5 | 15.3 | 15.3 |
The overall performance penalty on the current version of Vista depends largely on what the game is. Among the games tested, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some games do worse than others. The only clear pattern is that Vista gaming performance is almost universally worse than under XP.
With antialiasing off, with the exception of Black and White 2, everything takes a moderate to significant performance hit. 3DMark, which we normally shy away from but tends to make a good diagnostic tool in situations like this, shows Vista x86 only trailing XP by a small margin, whereas the x64 version is doing significantly worse. However, in the games that would work under Vista x64 (HL2 would not work; its 64-bit binary would not accept our benchmark), Vista x64 is doing no worse than Vista x86.
If this means that Vista x64 is only suffering under a fraction of games or if this is an issue with 3DMark isn't something we can determine, but we're leery of the x64 version of Vista at this point anyhow, due to other reasons (more on that later). As for the slightly more compatible Vista x86, half of our tests have it coming in 25% slower under XP when antialiasing is off, which doesn't bode well for the fledgling operating system at this point. How much of this is early drivers, an early OS, or the result of still-active debugging code remains to be seen.
Antialiasing seems to be a significant sticking point for Vista right now, as our entire suite of test scores dive hard with it enabled on Vista versus XP. Half-Life 2 ended up facing the largest drop, more than 30% off from its numbers under XP, and while Doom 3 actually suffered less of a drop than without antialiasing, it's clear that there's something holding up our test bed when antialiasing is enabled. This unfortunately is a double whammy for gaming enthusiasts using top of the line cards like the 7900 and X1900 series, as this kind of slowdown affects them the most since they're the most capable of using antialiasing in the first place. It's hard to recommend gaming under the current Vista beta given that these performance drops are the largest for those who are most likely to be able to cope with a beta operating system and the high system requirements.
It's also worth noting that with our OpenGL title, Doom 3, we did not encounter any issues other than the normal performance slowdown. There had been some concern earlier about how using a full OpenGL client driver will force Vista to disable the desktop compositing engine since OpenGL takes full control of the GPU, and that GPU makers may switch to a slower OpenGL wrapper for Direct3D to keep the compositing engine working. While firing up Doom 3 did indeed disable the DCE, it's not a problem since Doom 3 is a full screen game that doesn't even normally allow Alt+Tabbing. OpenGL engines may not be as popular as they once were (largely in part to the slower adoption of the Doom 3 engine), but between the gaming market and the professional workstation market, both of which desire a full-performance OpenGL implementation, it doesn't seem like OpenGL is going to suffer on Vista as much as earlier feared. We may yet see some issues with certain professional applications, but many of the workstation users we know are still running Windows 2000 anyway.
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aeschbi99 - Wednesday, July 5, 2006 - link
HiI just loved your article about Vista....especially the comparison to TIGER...I am a big MAC fan! But what MS did with Flip3D it appears to me is a copy of SUN's "Looking Glass" - which was out I believe even in 2003.
Redmond --- start your copy machine.... the real invention starts somewhere else....
see link http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/J2...">http://java.sun.com/developer/technical...s/J2SE/D...
absynthe49 - Saturday, July 1, 2006 - link
I really enjoy anandtech but I didn't really like the style of this article. When I read it.. I was quite sad that vista was looking so bad at this stage... particularly the game performance.But then I remembered that I read in a few places that Vista would not support native DirectX 9. That it would be in a way.. emulated. So there was an expected decrease in numbers. My understanding was that new powerful hardware would be coming out and that it would run the older games fast enough to overcome the loss from emulation.
The article almost seemed to say that gaming looks doomed in a way.
So basically... the drivers are not tweaked yet... this is still a beta... there may still be a debugging layer running... and I think vista runs directx 9 through an emulation layer.
So unless this is false and it actually runs directx 9 natively... is it really a surprize at all that directx 9 games run from 20 to 30 frames per second slower? This did not seem to be addressed at all in the article and I thought it was kind of premature worry so much.
NullSubroutine - Monday, June 19, 2006 - link
they can say every hardware/software limitation they want. i dont buy that they 'cant' make dx10 for xp and they 'cant' have full opengl support. just too convienent for microsoft.mongo lloyd - Sunday, June 18, 2006 - link
Although Microsoft may not consider itself to be in direct competition with Apple, this is the match-up most people have been waiting for. Only people who give a shit about OSX, which is far from "most people".drewintheav - Sunday, June 18, 2006 - link
I thought the staged install method was supposed to be so fast?It took way longer to install than it does for me to install XP.
The Vista Media Center is not useable at this point...
The video stutters, the audio drops out, and it crashes all the time.
I had always heard Mac fanatics saying how much better OSX was than XP
I didn't really believe it could be "so much" better
I tried out OSX after I installed Vista.
And now it is very obvious to me where Microsoft has gotten most of its new UI ideas.
At this point I would say that Microsoft's has executed them very poorly
which is a little disappointing.
It is disappointing to me that even if everything worked perfectly in Vista
it would still lag behind OSX on a number of points
In fact if Apple sold OSX for Intel as a retail product
and added a Media Center application
I would switch to MAC and just run windows Windows apps with an emulator or a VM
and dual boot XP for games.
Microsoft really has a lot of work to do and I hope they get it together...
OSX is way more innovative than Vista at this point...
AndrewChang - Wednesday, June 21, 2006 - link
Well, after months of deliberation, it looks like my next personal computing platform will be a merom/leopard based mac book pro. I don't expect to be using a vista based pc until at least the first or second service pack. A fully intergrated bookcamp/virtualization in this next OSX release should take care of my legacy applications (games on xp). Thanks Anandtech, w/o your Macintosh articles I would have never considered all the wonderful options available to me. It'll be fun learing how to use a new OS, especially one that is already superior what us PC users have to look forward to.Pirks - Monday, June 19, 2006 - link
There's no point - since Dell with the same configuration as iMac and with the same set of basic apps (like DVD burning/mastering etc) costs the same as iMac - why would you buy Dell in the first place? To me it seems that if you spend $1500 on a Dell plus retail Mac OS X instead of iMac - you'll get lower quality product.
Hence no retail Mac OS X - nobody is interested because iMacs are priced on par with comparable Dells.
There is Front Row - check out decent Mac sites, read reviews - you'll be surprised how much you missed, hehe ;-)
nullpointerus - Monday, June 19, 2006 - link
Not everyone who wants to run Mac OS X wants to purchase a prebuilt computer for it. You should know that if you're posting here because this site is mostly made up of enthusiasts.Mac OS X w/ Front Row isn't comparable to Windows MCE. Show me the integrated program guide and automatic recording capabilities. You may as well compare Paint to Gimp or Photoshop.
Pirks - Monday, June 19, 2006 - link
Same can be said about the post of the guy above asking for the OS X retail version. If I should know this site is for enthusiasts - THEN HE SHOULD KNOW what OS X is and why it is so successful and generates lots of buzz in IT press - pecisely because it DOES NOT have a retail version. Hence asking OS X to give up it's number one advantage - smooth integration with hardware because hardware is NOT open - is not much smarter than my post above.Depends on what the user wants. I suppose some users are happy with limited functionality of Paint and don't need/don't want Photoshop.
nullpointerus - Saturday, June 17, 2006 - link
"We also tested the boot times for a clean install of each operating system, using a stopwatch to see how long it took for the OS to boot to the point where it presented a usable login screen."Um...you must have something seriously wrong with your system. I'm using a lowly Athlon64 3000+ Winchester and 2GB PC3200 RAM. I did a clean install of the x64 version and timed it with my digital watch; it took ~50 seconds to get to the desktop, not the login screen. I had to switch to the 32-bit version because of driver support, and I can tell you it doesn't take 48 seconds to get to the login screen.
Now, if you rummage around in the control panel's performance applet, you can look at services and drivers which are slowing the boot process down; USB audio and nVidia's drivers affected my system, and even so it starts nearly 30 seconds faster than your clean x64 system. Maybe there's something on your PC that's causing problems?
Also, something on my second boot will chew up large amounts of CPU time, making the login screen unresponsive. On subsequent boots this problem disappeared, and I was able to enter my password immediately and login fairly quickly. I have drivers for my Linksys WMP54GX and Creative Audigy installed now, too, so my PC should be worse than your clean system.
Maybe you could check these things out and retest?