I am still putzing around with Vista, though I am not using it for daily tasks due to performance issues with my 7800GT graphics card. I may do monthly “state of Vista” posts, as filtered through my gamer-centric view.
I installed the performance and compatibility packs for Vista. Can’t say I noticed a huge difference, though file copying is somewhat faster now.
The leaked SP1 “private beta” has been analyzed. It’s a good read. Apparently, SP1 speeds Vista up noticably. No release date for SP1 has been announced as of yet, although the author of the linked piece speculates that there will be a public beta towards the end of the year, followed by a release “sometime in 2008″.
EvE Online performs like a dog under Vista. For starters, instead of 40-50fps, I get around 30fps. This is actually behavior that others have noticed with older cards, too. The suggested workaround is to use (non-signed) XP drivers. No, thanks. Also, that wouldn’t work on Vista 64-bit, as driver signing is mandatory there.
Another odd thing that EvE Online does under Vista on my machine is that after flying around a bit, blowing a few things up, what have you, I get “sawtooth” performance. Every half-second or so, the screen freezes for just a moment, and an FPS graph shows a classical sawtooth. Really weird. I am speculating that this has to do with texture memory. One of the things Vista introduced is the idea of “shared” texture memory. Therefore, my aging 7800GT now shows 256MB of “dedicated” video memory (what’s actually on the card) and 768MB of “shared” video memory (that’s main memory). Apparently, Aero is quite hungry when it comes to video memory, hence that requirement. Somewhere in the shuffle between EvE’s aging engine, my aging graphics card and less-than-stable NVidia drivers, EvE comes to believe that it has more than 256MB of memory to shove textures in, which would then lead to textures being swapped back and forth over the PCI-E bus between graphics memory and main memory, leading to the sawtooth performance I see. That’s my current working theory, anyhow.
The driver situation continues to be less than ideal. I already detailed the performance issues with my graphics driver. Some driver is causing a BSOD upon (almost) every shutdown, though I haven’t bothered to check whether that’s sound, graphics, or the ramdisk. Creative is making noises about releasing updated Vista drivers for the Audigy series, but so far they have not done so.
The first reason to actually shell out monies for Vista (and hardware) is to be released tomorrow: Bioshock, which, if metacritic is anything to go by, is a masterpiece.
On the hardware side, the NVidia G92 65nm graphics refresh looks to be released in November. Intel’s X38 chipset should hit in October, and Wolfdale, Intel’s new 45nm dual-core desktop CPU, well, should “launch real soon now”. Initial benchmarks are promising for graphics / video creation apps that support SSE4, such as the Adobe suite or DivX.
Not Vista-related at all, but hardware-related, my PSU died. I took the opportunity to buy something a little more state-of-the-art (no more PCI-E and SATA adapters to molex), a Corsair HX520. I chose it over a Corsair VX450 because of its better support for multiple PCI-E (graphics) power adapters. In the end, a VX450 would likely have done fine – but given that I have to buy a PSU now, instead of waiting until I know which components my 2008 PC refresh would use as I planned, I chose to go with a little more oomph to be on the safe side.
I also took the opportunity to order a replacement for my Thermaltake X-Controller, which died shortly after having been installed. The replacement I chose is a Sunbeam fan controller. We’ll see how well that one fares.
August 20, 2007 at 2:45 pm |
Funnily enough I´ve been experiencing the same graphical issues as you. Though I´m running ultimate 32Bit.. but noticably the framerate drop. I agree that it´s probably a driver issue, as it currently reports the wrong memory size in Dxdiag reports and in game (I have a 1gb 7950gx2). Though recently I´ve been finding Vista is slowing down and down and down on my end to the point which it starts taking about 4 seconds to open a menu when I right click.. fneh.. I suppose I´ll get to the bottom of it sooner or later (he says.. waiting for the cursor to catch up with the keyboard).
Also spookily similar is that my PSU decided to die very very recently too, but I haven´t had the time yet to replace it (Well not the money to either) not to mention it´s a pain finding decent prices here in spain.
You´re quite lucky living in the USA with the current hardware prices
August 20, 2007 at 11:03 pm |
I’ve heard of a lot of people getting these problems with EVE but while I do have Vista I haven’t had any problems running EVE. I regularly get frame rates of 100-160fps.
August 21, 2007 at 7:39 am |
That actually makes perfect sense, and fits into the working theory I have about these issues. With those kind of framerates, you are most likely using an 8 series card (8800GTS or better), or the equivalent by ATI. Which would confirm that Vista on DX10 hardware works well.
What I didn’t state in this post, to not repeat myself unduly, is that the point of Vista to a gamer is DX10, and thus DX10-ready hardware. Attempting to run Vista on old hardware is more of an exercise in getting to know the OS than anything else. It is interesting to see where the limitations are, though.