UPDATE |Despite refusing our initial requests for comment, following the publication of our story, NVIDIA has provided further information about its Vista drivers. See the article body for more.So who's winning the Vista driver race so far - ATI or NVIDIA? We asked this question and were surprised that NVIDIA didnotwant to talk about it, so we decided to take a look for ourselves.
UPDATE | Despite refusing our initial requests for comment, following the publication of our story, NVIDIA has provided further information about its Vista drivers. Edward Lim of NVIDIA's PR agency in Singapore, CIZA Concepts, points out that NVIDIA's Control Panel is included in version 88.61 of the Vista beta drivers. However, in further testing, we discovered that this was only visible in control panel "classic" mode; there are no other links to it from driver properties, display properties or system tray, which is why we initially missed it.
So who’s winning the Vista driver race so far - ATI or NVIDIA?
Since the Vista betas were first released, I’ve been installing them across various hardware platforms, supported by different graphics adaptors.
Of course, graphics drivers are under continual development throughout the alpha and beta releases of Vista, so it's understandable that performance has been markedly inconsistent.
These caveats aside, I decided to test the latest drivers in a controlled lab environment and see where NVIDIA and ATI were up to in a direct head-to-head.
The lab
The test system was based on an ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard, with an Intel 2.8GHz dual-core, 2GB DDR2 RAM and 2 x 160GB Seagate SATA drives. MSI Australia generously supplied the graphics hardware - an MSI ATI RX1900 XT-VT2D512E and an MSI NVIDIA NX7900GTX-T2D512E.
To establish a baseline for testing I installed XP SP2 and ran two benchmarks - PCMark05 (1.1.0) and 3DMark06 (1.0.2) - using the latest drivers from both manufacturers (ATI Catalyst 6.6 and NVIDIA Forceware 84.21. All tests were run at 1,280 x 1,024 resolution. The results were:
So the platforms were pretty consistent, with the NX7900GTX proving slightly faster overall (as expected). The PCMark05 scores show that the only notable difference between the systems was the graphics hardware (again, also expected).
The next stage of the test involved installing Vista Beta 2 AND the latest Vista beta (build 5456), install the latest beta drivers (ATI Catalyst Beta @ 23/05/06 and NVIDIA Forceware 88.61) and doing a visual comparison between the two.
Performance results were, well……inconclusive. All systems ran Vista flawlessly with full visual effects turned on. Aero Glass rendered quickly and smoothly with no noticeable difference between the two.
Digging down a bit deeper though, there are differences to be found. The first is that the ATI Catalyst driver is far more mature at this stage of development than NVIDIA Forceware.
At the most basic level, ATI’s driver has been digitally signed by Microsoft - NVIDIA’s hasn’t. This alone suggests that ATI is well ahead of the game. Additionally, ATI’s Catalyst Control Center is fully operational in this beta driver whereas the Forceware driver has no customisable properties at all. The normal GeForce properties flyout and system tray icon available on an XP system are completely absent.
Straight from the source
In the lead-up to the test, I got in touch with both ATI and NVIDIA to get their comments on their work with Vista and the WDDM driver model so far - innovations and so on.
Andrew Dodd, ATI’s Software Product Manager sent through a load of information on their work so far. ATI has brought two major new features to their Catalyst drivers, designed to enhance the Vista and WDDM experience. Following the segregated kernel space/user space model of the WDDM driver, ATI Catalyst leverages off this to provide security to the graphics hardware.
Applications will only be given protected access to the hardware access - this ensures that other technologies like HD-DVD and BluRay which require security and protection against third-party attacks for secure playback will be fully supported.
The Catalyst drivers also feature parallel engine support - the driver sees the graphics hardware as separate engines, which means that frames can be rendered continuously and stored in memory until needed. Multi-GPU systems (ie: CrossFire) will get double the benefit from the technology.
And NVIDIA’s innovations are……well, who knows? I got in touch with a PR manager, the head of NVIDIA PR and channel PR. No-one sent back any information and finally I had to go through a channel reseller. I got a response, but absolutely no information, no interest in being involved in the test - nothing. In fact, the replies that I did get indicated that they really didn’t want to be involved:
“As the launch of Vista is several months away, it's way too early for performance testing. Any comparatives between NVIDIA and ATI will not at all be reflective of final driver performance and compability. We will keep you posted closer to the launch date.”
I can't help but wonder why NVIDIA's being so evasive here. Vista has been available for testing for well over a year, and drivers have been available for all this time. Beta 2 has been downloaded by two million end users. Of course no-one is suggesting that running formal performance testing would be appropriate at this point - Vista is still loaded up with debug code and plenty of stuff is still broken. But you can still put a test system together and see what’s happening.
And then there was this:
“We appreciate your interest in NVIDIA and Windows Vista. But as mentioned in our email earlier, NVIDIA is not ready to comment on this.”
Why not? The test we ran proved that the performance on NVIDIA’s beta drivers seems fine albeit lacking in functionality. Yes it’s clear that ATI is ahead in development and innovation, so why not just get involved with the process?
Either NVIDIA is trying to hold its cards close to its chest in terms of the feature set for its Vista drivers, in the hope it will trump ATI, or it is simply having problems getting the drivers up to speed. It's hard to know given they wouldn't talk to APC about it.
Above: NVIDIA CEO Jen Hsun Huang
(As a postscript - I was surprised to be able to get DirectX9.0c and 3DMark06 installed on a Vista system, and it ran all the way through, though, as I mentioned earlier I wasn't looking for performance numbers. I’m checking with Microsoft whether DirectX9.0 is officially going to be supported under Vista, which will be important for benchmarkers.)