Clearly
based on the above results there is one area of
video acceleration (HD content) which works better
than others and that is WMV-HD using Windows Media
Player 11. When enabling acceleration in WMP the
biggest drop occurred on min fps as the graphics
card took the video decoding tasks and freed up
CPU time. Moving to a QuickTime 1080p file we see
that the acceleration seems to be working, based
on max cpu usage however overall there really isn’t
much of an advantage using acceleration in these
drivers. Finally we look at a h.264 file in 1080p
format and find that there is even less of a difference
in performance. We did note that PowerDVD recognises
the Nvidia PureVideo acceleration and it can be
enabled/disabled however there is clearly some work
which needs done before h.264 decoding is properly
enabled on Nvidia cards within Vista.
Conclusion:
There are some aspects of Forceware 100 which we
can class as a complete success such as single card
gaming performance in some of the top titles. In
this area, as our results show, there is little
to complain about and performance in Vista is close
to that of XP. Additionally gaming IQ also looks
good. General desktop use is also rock solid and
we have yet to experience a crash in desktop use,
and this is with our system being on for over 48
hours since receiving the driver. Also video acceleration
of WMV-HD content is working exceptionally well.
There
were areas of the driver we were unable to test,
however are worth noting for those who use high
specification displays on their 8800GTX (they are
noted in the release notes). The first is that the
Apple 30" cinema display wont work properly
in Vista with this particular Forceware version.
The dual-link mode high resolutions will be unavailable.
Additionally those users who have their 8800GTX
connected to a HDTV will find that the output is
black and white. For a number of enthusiasts these
will be major issues and we hope they are fixed
soon. Our own testing was relatively uneventful
which is good. Both on our 7950GX2 and our 8800GTX's
the driver installed without issue and other than
GTX SLI games ran without issue and without too
much of a performance hit.
It
has come to our attention though that the newer
and more popular the title, the better performance
this particular forceware delivers. As you would
expect, Nvidia have a priority list of games (and
unfortunately benchmarks - we would much rather
see an additional game get priority over a useless
benchmark) which will get the most attention within
the driver deveolpment team. We also experienced
some weird issues. This is partially shown by the
largest performance drop in our review with NFSC
obviously not being one of the top priorities for
Nvidia. We have a short time to check a few others
such as Tomb Raider Legend and Black and White 2
and the hits were of similar levels to NFSC. Obviously
as time goes on things will improve in this area
however for the time being its not a perfect transition
from XP to Vista on Nvidia hardware.
Our
two main areas of concern revolve around the control
panel and SLI. Considering how long Vista has been
in development, and the fact that its been nearly
3 months since RTM we feel that the state of the
Nvidia control panel is unacceptable. If ATI were
in the same boat it would be something we would
accept however the fact is that ATI's control panel
is as smooth to use in Vista as it is in XP, additionally
it opens FASTER in Vista and is fully functional.
By comparison, Nvidia's control panel takes 20-30
seconds to open and is very slow to respond to many
changes. If you watched our videos earlier in the
article you will see that a few times we were left
waiting on changes to take. SLI support is another
miss, apart from Oblivion (and that took a lot of
trying, and tweaking to have SLI take), SLI is severely
lacking in this driver. Again if ATI were struggling
to get multi gpu up and running this wouldn't be
so bad however other than a few minor issues the
ATI drivers are much better for dual card users.
Summary:
When we were installing Forceware 100.54 our opinion
was that should we get to the end of our testing
and feel we could move to Vista for our reviews
that would be the ideal situation. Failing that
using Vista on our home PC's in everyday use would
be a fair result. Unfortunately we cannot recommend
doing either at this time. The control panel still
needs a lot of work to optimise it and other benefits
such as acceleration of various video content on
our expensive hardware have yet to be relalised
in Vista. Additionally gaming is a no-go for SLI
users. For those of you who are using single card
solutions, dual booting would be a reasonable compromise
though as it will allow you to pick and choose what
you do in Vista.
We're
sure that things will come good in time for Forceware
100 however at the moment there is still a lot of
work to be done, something that disappoints us greatly...
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