x1900xt performance in vista?

Cyber-Mav · 20 May 2007 at 15:06

whats ati's vista drivers like? would i see a massive loss in performance if i switched to vista x64? or should i just stick to my xp x64 still?

killer_uk · 20 May 2007 at 15:07

Cyber-Mav said:
whats ati's vista drivers like? would i see a massive loss in performance if i switched to vista x64? or should i just stick to my xp x64 still?

It's prity damn good really, I never really noticed much of a decrease in performance from changing to Vista.

Cyber-Mav · 20 May 2007 at 15:25

you seem to be correct, i just read the vista driver release notes for cats 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4:

cats 7.2:

Performance Improvements
Open GL performance improves for all ATI Radeon™ X1000 series products. Gains of up to 25% in Doom 3, 48% in Quake 4 and 21% in Prey can be seen on a variety of ATI Radeon™ X1000 cards. These performance gains are noticed under the Windows Vista operating system.

cats 7.3:

Performance Improvements
Dark Messiah Might and Magic performance improves 12.5% or greater on all Radeon™ X1000 series configurations when running in CrossFire™ mode under both the Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems. Larger gains of 60% or more can be seen on high end products.

cats 7.4:

Performance Improvements
OpenGL performance under the Microsoft Vista operating system improves for all Radeon™ X1000 series of products, in both single card and hardware CrossFire™ configurations. Typical Improvements of 15% or more can be seen in games such as Doom 3, Quake 4 and Prey, with enthusiast class of products seeing improvements of 30% or more.

looks like they really have been working hard, especially on opengl based apps.

on my system i currenty have these games installed:

Just Cause
Test Drive Unlimited
GRAW
Age of empires 3
battlefield 2
battlefield 2142
comand and conquer 3
company of heroes
toca race driver 3
starwars battlefront 2
dawn of war dark crusade.

anyone know if ati x1900xt in vista 64bit has any issues with the above games?

Tute · 20 May 2007 at 15:29

C&C3, DoW, and AOE3 (demo) running perfect here with the 7.4s in Vista Home Premium x64.

ATi have been more than fantastic with their drivers, it's at the point now where there's minimal difference between XP and Vista.

If only they could get the hardware end sorted eh?

Cyber-Mav · 20 May 2007 at 15:32

thats real good to know, final question is, does tray tools work in vista64 properly?

may wait for the 7.5 cats to appear then do full os change, that way less faffing around after main install.

Tute · 20 May 2007 at 15:35

I'm not sure, unfortunatly i'm a "heathen" and I use CCC!

I think the 7.5s are due Wednesday? Not sure what difference they will make to the X1900 series though, the main change with this release is 2900 support.

Dureth · 20 May 2007 at 15:35

It wont be that much fussing around as the Vista drivers update very easily. No need to uninstall old drivers before running the new driver install. I have to say my x1900xt runs as well in Vista as it does in XP. Slight drops in some games, slight gains in others.

Cyber-Mav · 20 May 2007 at 15:43

Dureth said:
It wont be that much fussing around as the Vista drivers update very easily. No need to uninstall old drivers before running the new driver install. I have to say my x1900xt runs as well in Vista as it does in XP. Slight drops in some games, slight gains in others.

thats good to know, and i guess performance should just improve over time in vista till it gets to the level of xp.

interesting you mention gains over xp there? are you sure? didn;t know that any game would perform better under vista then xp?

edit: forgot to add, any issues overclocking the gfx card under vista?

Tute · 20 May 2007 at 15:48

I seem to remember someone saying in a thread that World of Warcraft shows some noticable performance gains when running in Vista.

Personally I run with Vsync on though.

But it's nice to know, and if they can do it for WoW then surely they can do it for other games as well.

Cyber-Mav · 20 May 2007 at 15:51

interesting that, i thought only games that would see speed boost would be dx10 games under a dx10 gfx card. odd that. but i guess the vista driver model is more closer to the os so it probably is possible to exceed xp performance levels.

Cyber-Mav · 20 May 2007 at 17:34

what sort of score does an x1900xt get in vista in the performance section for 2d and 3d?

killer_uk · 20 May 2007 at 17:37

3D - 5.8
2D - 5.9

Lonz · 20 May 2007 at 17:55

I have an X1900XT on my Vista Ultimate partition.

It's by no means perfect, its better than I thought it would be. I still get a lot more FPS on XP with games like BF2 and CSS. But given that, it still rarely drops below 60, which is the minimum I accept when gaming.

Dureth · 20 May 2007 at 18:23

I think Vista might benefit from the 512MB of GPU RAM over 256MB as it uses the GPU RAM itself far more than XP. It would be interesting to see some benchmarks of this vs the difference in XP. (I'm not saying Vista will run quicker with more GPU RAM just that with Vista taking up some of the RAM itself other app's might see a benefit)

Cyber-Mav · 20 May 2007 at 20:48

some review site tested this out i believe by turning vista aero on and off and seeing the difference aero makes to games performance and it apparently does nothing to performance. something was said about the aero desktop being suspended when games were run or something like that.

Tute · 20 May 2007 at 20:52

Cyber-Mav said:
some review site tested this out i believe by turning vista aero on and off and seeing the difference aero makes to games performance and it apparently does nothing to performance. something was said about the aero desktop being suspended when games were run or something like that.

Vista is very efficient. I remember when people first noticed it was taking up most of their memory, and were quick to label Vista as bloatware. However it's just making use of idle resources, after all it does improve performance without any penalties as it can empty memory and disable things like Indexing and Windows Defender as soon as a game or equally intensive program is run.

There is no way i'd go back to XP now.

Cyber-Mav · 20 May 2007 at 21:05

Tute said:
Vista is very efficient. I remember when people first noticed it was taking up most of their memory, and were quick to label Vista as bloatware. However it's just making use of idle resources, after all it does improve performance without any penalties as it can empty memory and disable things like Indexing and Windows Defender as soon as a game or equally intensive program is run.

There is no way i'd go back to XP now.

i noticed that, on my laptop which has 2 gigs of ram, on xp when its booted to desktop thers over 1.6gig ram free. on vista there is around 20mb ram free when booted to desktop. and system response deffo seems to be faster on vista, less paging going on. hopefully it can make good use of the 4 gigs of ram i have im my main system so shoudl be good.

will probably upgrade it to vista when new cats 7.5 come out though.

Tute · 20 May 2007 at 21:07

Yeah but despite the fact that I love Vista, you might not, so i'd dual-boot until you're used to it and happy.

I dual booted at Vista release but found myself using XP less and less. Then my HDD packed up which forced me back to XP but when I got the replacement I only bothered installing Vista.

Cyber-Mav · 20 May 2007 at 21:58

hmm, iv used vista on 2 machines i got here, 1 desktop and 1 lappy. very nice interface i have to say.

here is what i use my pc for:

ms word
ms sharepoint designer/expressionweb 2007
web browsing
encoding to xvid (gordian knot)
encoding wav files to mp3 (i use lame.exe command line)
outlook for email
watching films and music.
games
cdwriting - alcohol, nero, ultraiso
paint shop pro X
adobe acrobat
cuteftp

thats all the pc is used for these days.

so would i get problems in vista?

Egosh · 20 May 2007 at 22:14

if i were to dual boot would i still be able to access my music, videos etc. that im using in xp and would i have to reinstall everything?