Vista Gaming Performance Compared to XP

Ryan Shrout at PC Perspective has done a great review comparing the performance using the latest video drivers from NVidia and ATI for Windows Vista and comparing them to performance of the same cards on Windows XP. While AMD came to them to ask what their testing plans were, he said he had to pry a driver from NVidia and said you could tell AMD had been working on theirs longer.

Because of these dramatic changes to the graphics system, both NVIDIA and AMD have had to spend significant time redeveloping their graphics drivers to work with the new Windows Vista operating system. Both NVIDIA and AMD (and ATI) have been working on Vista development for YEARS and we have been hearing claims of having the best “Vista Support” from both camps nearly as long. But now that the day of redemption is actually here, who will come out on top?

I decided to take the retail version of Windows Vista Ultimate, got the latest drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA as of Friday and began to spend my weekend testing. What is important to note here is that my intention is NOT to compare the ATI Radeon cards against NVIDIA GeForce cards — rather it was to compare the gaming experiences provided by ATI and NVIDIA on both Windows XP and Windows Vista.

Should gamers worry about upgrading to Vista right away or should they wait for driver stability and performance to catch up with the Microsoft vision? Read on to find out. Source: Windows Vista Gaming Performance - NVIDIA and ATI Compared

The review says in conclusion don’t be scared by all the doom and gloom you have read concerning video gaming in Windows Vista, as the number are comparable to the XP numbers, and while NVidia had the edge in performance over AMD, this is mainly because NVIDIA has the GeForce 8800 series of cards available and AMD’s R600 has not been released yet, so the poor driver performance did not hurt them in this test, but will probably be a different story once the new card from AMD has been released.

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