It seems everyone has an opinion on Microsoft's new VISTA operating system released officially today. I have read articles from journalists over the last two months condemning Vista as a "disasterous backwards step" with many claiming that very little seems to work. Let's get this out of the way right now. These claims are nonsense. It is still not perfect, but it is shaping up well and it is certainly in a better state of play than Windows XP was on initial release.

I have been beta testing Vista with my colleague Stuart "Veridian3" Davidson via MSDN accounts since the summer of 2006 and in RTM form it is a very stable and capable operating system. Does it require a higher specification machine? Well yes and no. I have installed Vista on a celeron laptop with 512 megabytes of ram and it is perfectly usable. But if you want to game I would recommend at least 1 gig of ram and a decent AMD dual core or Intel Conroe. This is hardly out of reach for most enthusiast gamers and I feel in the currently stagnating market that we need a kick up the pants. Bring on DX10 and forthcoming games like Alan Wake, because 2006 was a terrible year for PC gaming.

Which leads me into the meat of this article. ATI's new Vista driver. Yes I said ATI and not AMD because it appears I am not the only one in a slight state of confusion over the naming conventions. In the whitepaper PDF press files it appears the PR guys in AMD are as confused as me. With comments such as "Delivering the best Windows Vista experience requires both great graphics hardware and a highly stable, high performance graphics driver –AMD delivers both " followed by "ATI Catalyst™ 7.1 for Windows Vista delivers ...". I am sticking with ATI for the time being, at least until AMD PR make their own mind up.

So what exactly is 7.1 bringing to the table for the new Microsoft OS?

• Blu-ray and HD DVD support
• CrossFire™support
• Performance
• Stability
• Catalyst Install Manager
• New Catalyst Control Center

ATI Catalyst 7.1 delivers full support for playback of Blu-ray and HD DVD protected content when used in conjunction with an ATI RadeonX1000 graphics accelerator (with HDCP support) it also Performs load balancing between CPU and the GPU and with support by Cyberlink and intervideo, the two major players are already supported (PowerDVD and WinDVD).

It is worth pointing out that this is only supported in 7.1 with the 32bit version of Vista. As usual 64 bit OS support is lagging and ATI plan for this to be implemented into Catalyst 7.3.

For the purposes of this review we are using two systems to test performance, features and stability:

System 1:
Dell 2010 XPS
Intel Core 2 T7600
2GB RAM
ATI Mobility X1800
Vista Ultimate Edition 32bit

System 2:
Asus A8R32-MVP Deluxe (Bios 602)
AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400+
ATI Crossfire Master Card - X1900ATI + X1900XTX
4x Seagate 7200.10 SATA 2 16mb Cache Hardrives in RAID 0 64k Striping (using onboard ULi M1575)
OCZ GamerXStream 700watt PSU OCZ
2gb kit (2x1gb) PC3200 Gold XTC ram rated 2-3-3-8
Vista Ultimate Edition 32bit

Catalyst 7.1 for Windows XP and Vista.

Taking a look at the single card mobility system we were pleased to see a painfree and relatively fast installation.

There is also a new Download Manager which updates software components that have changed since the previous ATI Catalyst release (manually or automatically, this is a user controlled option) however if components do not change from one release to the next they will not be updated, this helps in reducing download time and size.

The new 3D preview options should help new users ascertain the changes they are making, certainly the car preview was not much help in prior versions of the panel. Instead of posting every single driver panel page, I have included a video showing you the new panel in operation.

It would be fair to say that ATI came under some criticism for the .net framework based Catalyst Control Centre, however as .net framework is natively supported within Vista additional installations of this package are no longer needed.

•Merging the 3 CLI.exefiles into one .exe
•Taking advantage of the .NET 2.0 architecture
•Re-designed initialization process so less work is done during CCC start-up
•Eliminated redundancy
•Re-designed help architecture

But is it more responsive?

ATI claim start up time with the "optimised" Vista 7.1 CCC is improved from 8.7 seconds to 1.5 seconds (from 8.31 driver), this is with their reference X2 3800 dual processor with 1 gig of ram and a X1900XT.

With the Intel Core 2 T7600 @ 2.33ghz I recorded times of around 8 seconds on Windows XP and around 1-2 seconds on Vista. I have a video (below) from Vista which shows the responsiveness of the new Control Centre. It really is a long overdue improvement. Memory usage is also down from around 90MB peak/7.3 idle to 53mb peak/5.5 idle.

Press Play icon bottom right when window opens.