Gameplay Stinks with RTM Vista and Current Drivers

Doom 3

In standard Doom 3 testing the in-game setting for high-quality mode is selected. This sets anisotropic filtering to 8x. The first set of tests is run with antialiasing disabled and then a second time with AA set to four times sampling.

Doom 3 shows a completely different picture for performance. It is obvious that AMD/ATI does not have an OpenGL driver in its current Vista RTM Catalyst build. I spoke with the driver team and they said that the current build indeed did not have an OpenGL component. Here is where we see the havoc that will arise if end users do not download a hardware vendor's OpenGL driver. AMD takes a beating at the hand of the "In-Box" Vista driver. AMD commented that there will be an OpenGL driver when Vista officially launches.

While under the control of the Vista driver, the Radeon X1950XTX could not even run Doom 3 at 2560x1600. This shows up on the chart as a 100% performance hit... Ouch! These limitations demand that the driver must be fixed for launch. While it looks bad now, not many users have access to Vista, but when they do, I expect OpenGL to run as smoothly as possible.

Nvidia isn't in the clear in these tests, either. While some came back within that expected 10% decrease range, there are losses to performance of up to 27%. This also needs to be fixed when Vista goes live.