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Summary

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For our look at Vista and gaming performance, the new DirectX 10 with a completely new graphics driver subsystem is the most noteable change.  DirectX 10 adds support for geometry shading (or rather working on geometry in the same way pixels have been for years) and requires hardware developers to move to a unified shader architecture.  You can get a LOT more detail on DX10 and the changes that NVIDIA has made to their GPU architecture because of it with the GeForce 8800 series of cards by taking a look over my GeForce 8800 GPU review.

What We are Watching For

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.

Testing System and Setup Configuration

The test setup was pretty straight forward -- run Windows XP and Windows Vista on the same system and see how performance varied in some popular titles.  Our NVIDIA rig consisted of the EVGA 680i motherboard and an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU to test both the GeForce 8800 GTX and the 7900 GTX cards.  The AMD X1950 XTX and X1950 CrossFire tests were run on an Intel 975XBX2 motherboard with the same X6800 processor.  Both boards sported 2GB of DDR2-800 memory and a PC Power & Cooling 1 kilowatt power supply.

Overall, in terms of performance, NVIDIA is lucky that they have the GeForce 8800 series of cards available and AMD's R600 is still behind closed doors.  The raw power of the G80 core is able to keep the 8800 GTX as our performance leader in Windows Vista even with the mentioned performance problems when compared to the AMD's flagship ATI X1950 XTX card. 

Final Thoughts

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.  AMD's driver development team is definitely a leap ahead of NVIDIA's as the initial release ATI Catalyst driver offered a gaming experience much closer to that of Windows XP in the new Vista OS than NVIDIA's initial Forceware release.  This may change as driver revisions are updated through the comings months, so we'll definitely be keeping an eye on both companies progress.

For now, gamers that were interested in running off to get a copy of Windows Vista, I'd caution you to take a minute and contemplate.  Gaming under Vista is definitely possible and if you're comfortable with some slight performance drops for now while taking advantage of Vista's other new features, then a move to Vista sooner rather than later should be considered.  If gaming and gaming performance is your only metric for your PC, then I'd definitely hold out on upgrading until AMD and NVIDIA have their software perfected.

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