Microsoft would have you believe that the future of PC gaming lies with Windows Vista, and with the advent of DX10 gaming there is some truth in these claims. The real question however should be, “is Vista ready to become the primary gaming OS?” After noticing that (the rig killing and impressive) THQ’s Supreme Commander frame rates seemed smoother in Vista we decided to investigate. Hopefully you will find this as interesting to read as it was for us during testing, as many myths are circulating about just how “useless” Windows Vista is.

Test system

For the purposes of analysis we felt including both ATI and Nvidia gaming comparisons in a single article would somewhat detract from the main purpose of the article, that being a comparison of hardware and gaming titles on Microsoft’s operating systems, rather than a frame rate battle between competing cards.
So today we have Part 1 of this analysis: “ATI Gaming In Vista”. Part 2 will be posted shortly which will concentrate on Nvidia game performance.

For the ATI article we settled on the following high end (yet not ludicrously priced) enthusiast gaming system:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
Motherboard: ASRock 755 Dual-Vista
Audio: Onboard audio chip – Realtek High Definition Audio
Memory: 2 x 1 GB of DDR 400Mhz memory
Graphics cards: Sapphire X1950XTX Toxic – stock Toxic speeds (695/1000 MHz) and PowerColor X1950Pro 256MB, 7.2 Catalyst driver-set for both cards in both operating systems
Operating systems used: Windows Vista Ultimate and Windows XP Professional, both fully updated

Where possible, each benchmark was performed 3 times and the median result for each resolution/setting is shown in the tables that will follow. All games/applications had their latest patches applied.