| Vista
Gaming: Yay or Nay? – Part 2: nVidia
Early
adopters of new technologies usually end up with
the short end of the stick. Hardware and software
issues are plentiful and it takes nerves of steel
to deal with all of them. Mobile phones, mp3 players,
DVD players and gaming consoles are known to have
major issues at launch. But all tech launches pale
in comparison to new OS releases. Linux is fairly
safe from them because the upgrades are gradual.
Windows being the complete opposite is prone to
some major start-up problems though.
Here
at Driver Heaven we decided to investigate how Microsoft’s
latest product handles the pressure of running the
latest and greatest games. In Part 1 of this ongoing
performance analysis we tested how Vista performed
on a high-end system running on ATI hardware - the
results were quite positive.
Test
system
For
the purposes of analysis we felt including both
ATI and Nvidia gaming comparisons in a single article
would somewhat detract from the main purpose of
the article, that being a comparison of hardware
and gaming titles on Microsoft’s operating
systems, rather than a frame rate battle between
competing cards.
Today we have Part 2 of this analysis: “nVidia
Gaming In Vista”. Make sure you read part
1: »ATI
Gaming in Vista« if you
haven't already.
For
this part of the article we didn’t use the
same system setup as in Part 1 so these figures
are in no way comparable to the ATI testing from
last week. In the end our test system was built
from the following components:
CPU:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 @ 3.10Ghz (overclocked to
alleviate CPU limiting as much as possible) Motherboard:
Asus P5N-E SLI
Audio: Onboard audio chip –
Realtek High Definition Audio
Memory: 2 x 1 GB OCZ Gold 800Mhz
DDR2 memory
Graphics cards:
XFX 8800GTX 768Mb – 100.65 ForceWare Vista
drivers and 97.92 ForceWare XP drivers
Operating systems
used: Windows Vista Ultimate and
Windows XP Professional, both fully updated
Where
possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and
the median result for each resolution/setting is
shown in the tables that will follow. All games/applications
had their latest patches applied.
A
very special thanks goes out to our good friends
at XFX
for sponsoring this article and for supplying the
hardware used in testing.
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