Windows Vista uses a whole new graphics driver system and this has put a lot of pressure on the graphics card manufacturers and their driver engineers. Now that Vista has finally arrived you may think the drivers have been completed and that all bugs have been resolved. This is not the case though and we’ve already seen Vista benchmarks which reveal that there are big performance drops with some games, but so far we don’t which of the graphics card manufacturers that have managed the best with their Vista drivers. At PC Perspective they’ve done their best to answer this as they’ve tested both NVIDIA ForceWare and ATI Catalyst in both Windows Vista and Windows XP.
The interesting is, of course, the difference you see between the two operating systems and the two manufacturers. Alas, it seems that none of them have done very well, but AMD/ATI seems have done the best. There are still bugs and considerable drops with many games for those choosing to switch to Windows Vista. A sorry fact which Microsoft most likely isn’t happy with.
“It may seem like my testing with gaming performance in Vista all resulted in a feeling of doom (nope, no OpenGL support!) and gloom, but don’t let that scare you off just yet. I think we all expected there to be some initial growing pains with the Vista operating system and PC gaming simply because of the dramatic shift in driver technology that had to take place; I just don’t think we expected it to be this bad.”
We can only hope that AMD/ATI and NVIDIA will put a lot of effort into their drivers the upcoming weeks and until then you can check out the benchmarks over at PC Perspective to see what games handles the best with the new operating system.
