The Vista Ultimatum: Nvidia Unplugged and Uncut, Part One
I've had my hands and eyeballs wrapped around Nvidia's new 780i chipset running a pair of 8800 GTX's video cards for the last couple weeks. The good news: Any way you slice it, Nvidia's Vista drivers and Vista SLI support are showing dramatic improvements over their dicey debut alongside Microsoft's pilloried OS uplift circa January 2007.
On the other hand, games like Microsoft's latest Flight Simulation X expansion and Vivendi's recently DX10-patched Lord of the Rings Online still suffer noticeable and occasionally punitive frame drops when switching from XP to Vista. Then there's the so-called Crysis hack that lets you ostensibly access DirectX 10 features running Windows XP without the Vista performance tax. Load a copy of Fraps and cycle a couple test demos and voila, you've got what certainly seems like a notably disagreeable frame rate delta.
But benchmarks tell no stories. They measure a game's bottom line without exploring its aesthetic contours. They reduce "satisfaction" to an integer and "image quality" to a range of filters and tricks.
In an attempt to crawl behind the scenes and put some of those numbers and tricks in context, I spoke with Nvidia's Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations, and James Wang who works in the company's technical marketing group. What follows is the first part of that interview, which I'll be airing uncut over the next couple days.
On Vista, Performance Penalties, and Peremptory Publishers
Game On: Jumping right in, when gamers claim to experience discrepancies between XP and Vista without noticeable visual rewards, what are they actually "seeing"?
Roy Taylor: Let's operate on the assumption that you're talking to the general gamer, and the question is, are they really seeing any performance difference? Now that might sound like a facetious answer, so let me back it up. What we're talking about I think really is the relative measure of performance, especially from the point of view of a general gamer. I think in positioning terms we have to ask ourselves, will the general gamer, and I do mean the general gamer now, really notice the difference between 39 frames per second and 32 frames a second? And I would argue that in a lot of cases, no. There might be some where they will, but for most general gamers, I think that Vista does not obviously give them a slower experience. They don't run benchmarks. They don't own Fraps, and they don't own 3DMark.
So for a general gamer, I would argue that they haven't seen a noticeable slowdown, and bearing in mind that Microsoft shipped in excess of 70 million copies [of Windows Vista] now, if it was really true that they had a problem in this area, it would be mainstream news of wholesale rejection of the operating system in every store and on every PC. And for the general gamer, we have to be honest with each other, that hasn't happened. Now there are some journalists who are unhappy about the performance difference, and certainly there are some hardcore gamers who've noticed it, and a lot of web sites have picked up on it. But for the general gamer, I don't believe that's the case.
GO: What about the enthusiast base (which includes me by the way) who want to understand why you've got this apparent performance drop moving from Windows XP to Windows Vista?
RT: Right, so for instance why would it be that a game that runs at 40 frames per second in Windows XP and on exactly the same rig would run it at 35 fps on Vista? The answer is "Because Vista is very, very different."
Why is Vista so different and what are we doing about it? Well the first part of the answer is that Vista was extremely ambitious. If you look from a gaming point of view at what they were trying to do, gamers weren't asking for faster frame rates. I've gone and I've looked because I'm told this many times, and you can google and google until your fingertips start to bleed, but there's absolutely no record anywhere of anyone promising that Vista would run games faster, or indeed even of anyone asking for that to be the case. No one was saying "Look, I'm playing Far Cry, and I want it to run at 100 frames per second instead of 60."
What gamers were asking for, frankly, is better games. More immersive games. And one complaint that was voiced is that games are too often pretty, but they don't really have much better gameplay. So that meant we had to ask, how do we work the graphics into the gameplay? And to do that, Vista sought to change things by introducing the ability to make structural gameplay changes based on the graphics. To make that happen, Microsoft had to put some pretty radical changes into the underlying structure.
GO: What about gamers who'll argue they don't notice much of a delta in terms of visual improvement going from XP to Vista?
RT: That's because most of the effects you've seen in Vista to date are what's called post-procedural effects. That means by the time Vista came out, and the way that Vista was introduced, it wasn't possible for most game developers to put the deep structural changes into the game for the operating system. And I'll be frank, most publishers, even had the developers wanted to, were not comfortable with implementing those deep structural changes. They wanted the game to sell to the widest possible base of gamers.
GO: Because you've got a base that doesn't care about incremental changes and a publishing consortium that's driven by the bottom line.
RT: Yeah, but the problem is that most people in the industry, on the developer's side, on the journalist's side, were not doing it for the money, but because it's something they really enjoy. Most developers make games because they really get a kick out of it. For publishers, that's not the case. They came out of business school, and it could just as easily be frozen pork bellies or tins of baked beans. They have no romance about it whatsoever. It's all about the money. And so they'll sit and look at it and say alright, in the first year, Microsoft will sell this many copies of the OS, the install base is this many, and so yeah by all means put something sexy into the game, the new stuff, but don't let it compromise the old stuff.
Now one of my favorite phrases for 2008 is "scalability is the enemy of experience," which is very true. So consider this. You would like to -- because it's inherently a good thing to do -- make a cool game. And DirectX 10 and Vista will allow you to do some really neat stuff. So you put it in, and the publisher says "Well how will this affect those guys with the older stuff?" Well, it pretty well won't run. And the publisher's response is "In that case, rip it out, because I don't care how good it made the game, if it won't sell to those guys, it ain't going in." So what you tend to do is compromise.
Right now, most of what you're seeing under DirectX 10 is post-procedural, which is to say, the developer made the game, they did the artwork, and they wanted to do some DX10 stuff, but what they did effectively is simply overlay some DirectX 10 effects on top of a DirectX 9 engine.
Think about making a sandwich. You've made your ham sandwich and now you're going to spread a layer of jam on top. It's just going to make the sandwich thicker, instead of putting jam in the middle from the get-go. You're applying more processes, so for every cycle of the game, you're adding some additional processes, and you're not really getting the structural version, because if you did it might not necessarily be backwards compatible. So for every developer and every game, I wouldn't call it a war, but let's call it this fun adversarial struggle which takes places between the artists and the storytellers and the publisher. Now every developer wants to get rich with a game, but oftentimes there are some cruel and tough decisions that take place on the content room floor, which stops a game being what it might otherwise be.
Next: Crysis hacks, DX10 vs. DX9, and (disclosed here exclusively) Nvidia's worldwide GeForce install base.
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so what does all of this tell us? that nvidia and microsoft are covering up for the fact that vista sucks. oh yeah, go out and buy vista, then go out and buy 4 gigs of RAM, oh wait, did we forget to mention that you need a graphics card with 512 megs of v-ram and a 600 Mhz clock and 32 GBs transfer rate which will also require you to get a new power supply and dont forget your processor to keep up with all of this, and while we are at it a new motherboard with higher bandwidth would be a plus as well... total cost of all this just to run vista AND a game with any decent graphics and FPS, which nvidia and microsoft are CLEARLY underplaying, somewhere around 3000 dollars or including periferals games the operating system and other goodies necessary for a system good enough for what anyone in gaming is expecting out of their purchases, somewhere in the ballpark of 4,000 JUST to play a game. no thanks vista you suck!
Blah blah get a better job and quit wining. Vista's great! Ram is cheap and graphics cards are coming down in price every month or so. The new intel 45nm dual core is only 200 bucks on new egg. So, for about a grand you can have a great system. E8400- 219.99, corsair xms2 2gigs for 74.99, asus p5k delux 199.99, MSI 8800 gts OC 269.99, computer case for 100 bucks or so, cooler master 750watts 79.99, vista home premium OEM 109.99. Thats only about 1,050 bucks for a custom vista machine that can play most games on high settings not 4 grand dude. People need to do research before they make a comment.
I agree with UmbrellaRobot. For some absurd reason, people are very eager to whine about perceived "faults". Vista's great. people need to stop Microsoft-hating and do some real comparisons.
No, it’s more than that, there are too many faults to explain why Vista could have been a whole lot better. Lets start off with giving the user an option to tell the OS weather or not there will EVER be other users on the computer, and if the OWNER would like to activate protection rights. Would the OWNER like to disable "prefetch?" Would the owner of the PC like to configure THEIR PC they way THEY WANT. Does the "Control Panel” or the "Personalize" menu open every time when asked? Can you delete any file on your computer no matter what? NO, NO, NO. Why does Vista not start from the very beginning asking dear god "Insert YOUR name here"_______ what would you like me to do? Do you want, ever, to have a "guest account" ever. No, well you can’t go back, are you sure? Okay, no guest account. How about a "public user" folder, if you create this file now you will not ever be able to delete it, and I will have to assume that there will for ever be other users on your computer-oh, NO, OK!