Exclusive Interview: Microsoft Admits What Went Wrong with Vista, and How They Fixed It (Part2)

An Exercise in Angering Potential Customers: DirectX 10

 Vista was supposed to mark the launch of a new revolution in PC gaming, spearheaded by the full might of Microsoft as manifested in the Games for Windows initiative. With promises of everything from a fully fledged online matchmaking experience (a la Xbox Live), easier installations, and (most importantly) a host of killer AAA titles, Games for Windows looked poised to really challenge console dominance and modernize the PC as a gaming platform.

What Games for Windows actually did was tie the DirectX 10 API to Vista simply to drive sales of the OS. The first Vista-exclusive AAA Games for Windows title was a downright geriatric port of Halo 2, a game that originated with the first Xbox and doesn’t use DirectX 10! To add insult to injury, there was no technical reason for a three-year-old ported Xbox game to be Vista-only. True, the community quickly released a patch that opened the door for XP gamers, but we still can’t understand who possibly thought this was a good idea.

Microsoft continued down the suicidal Vista-only path for one more release, Shadowrun. Despite innovative gameplay and cross-platform support for its Xbox counterpart, the Vista-only release was enough to doom FASA Interactive, the studio that created the game.

The Benchmarks

We take a quantitative look at Vista and XP performance to determine exactly what penalty, if any, you pay when you upgrade to Windows Vista

 To test Vista versus XP performance, we built what we think is a fairly middle-of-the-road rig—an Intel Q6600 quad core with 2GB of memory and a GeForce 8800 GTS videocard. We then ran a battery of benchmarks in three different OS environments: XP with Service Pack 3, Vista sans Service Pack 1 (with modern Nvidia drivers installed), and Vista with SP1. Our tests measure everything from overall system performance to network speed to gaming prowess.

Overall Performance

Unsurprisingly, Windows XP remains faster in almost all of our standard system benchmarks. More noteworthy is how SP1 has improved Vista’s performance, narrowing the gap between that OS and XP in key tests and even allowing Vista to surpass XP in our MainConcept encoder test.

Unfortunately for Vista, our desktop benchmarks do reveal areas where Vista continues to suffer substantial performance hits compared to XP, namely in ProShow and Quake 4. We’ve talked to the ProShow developers, and they don’t know what causes the slowdown with their app in Vista, but they’re investigating. We attribute the Quake 4 performance hit to poor OpenGL drivers in Vista.

As we mentioned before, we’re perfectly willing to sacrifice a few percentage points of performance from an operating system upgrade. However, the difference between Vista SP1 and XP SP3 in ProShow and Quake 4 reaches a dismal 10 to 25 percent.

Gaming

We didn’t include any DirectX 10 games in our tests simply because DirectX 10 wasn’t around when Vista launched, and DirectX 10 graphics still aren’t supported on Windows XP. Our basic system benchmarks already include a pair of games, FEAR and Quake 4, but we tossed in an additional round of 3DMark06 to further assess Vista’s gaming prowess.

The results were informative. Aside from the already noted Quake 4/OpenGL deficiency, Vista performed admirably both with and without SP1, turning in scores equivalent to XP’s. This tells us that the poor gaming performance we saw in the early days of Vista was more the result of immature drivers than issues with the OS. Of course, Microsoft can still be blamed for shoddy coordination with the graphics-card makers at the time of Vista’s launch.

Network Transfer Speed

Our final set of benchmarks test networking performance. We set up the fastest NAS box we’ve ever tested, the QNAP TS-109 Pro, and ran our standard network storage benchmarks on it. While we saw the same stunning performance inadequacies from pre-SP1 Vista that we observed at the OS’s launch, SP1 and the subsequent updates seem to have solved most of those issues. The minor gaps of a few seconds that do exist between XP and Vista SP1 are explained by the fact that XP shuts the file transfer window before the transfer is confirmed, while Vista waits until it has checked the copied file.

The Takeaway

With the exception of a couple outlier applications, Vista’s performance is within striking distance of XP’s, for the most part. Thanks largely to a series of performance enhancements and SP1, Vista has closed the gap in many areas where it was deficient. We’re willing to overlook the poor OpenGL gaming performance simply because there aren’t very many OpenGL games coming out, and it seems the ProShow problem is an isolated incident.