Windows Vista 3D graphics performance: Part 1 - ATI (DirectX 9)

Unless you've been living under a rock during 2007 so far, you'll doubtless have noticed that on January 30th, Windows Vista was finally released to the general public.  Since then, we've been hearing plenty about Microsoft's new Operating System, and one of the hottest talking points has been the state of various companies Windows Vista drivers.  Much of that particular focus has been on graphics drivers, and ATI and NVIDIA's efforts on that front - Despite putting plenty of work into their Vista drivers, both firms have come under fire for various bugs and performance issues (although admittedly NVIDIA far more so).

We're now more or less four months down the line from Windows Vista's retail release, so just what standards have the two graphics IHVs managed to reach with regard to driver quality in that timeframe?  Over the next few weeks, we'll be finding out in what should be a four-part affair, covering both ATI and NVIDIA's DirectX 9 and 10 graphics boards respectively.

Our first port of call is ATI, to see how both the performance and stability of their latest Windows Vista driver (Catalyst 7.4 at the time of writing) compares when using a DirectX 9 graphics board.  From there, we'll tackle NVIDIA's DirectX 9 level board performance in part two, their DirectX 10 performance in part three, and then hopefully return to ATI's new DirectX 10 flagship, the Radeon HD 2900 XT, in the final instalment.

So, if you're currently running a Radeon X1000 series part, and are thinking about making the move from Windows XP to Windows Vista, prick up your ears (or should that be eyes?) as we put our usual benchmarking suite through its paces under both Operating Systems to watch for the pluses and pitfalls which may affect gamers at this moment in time.  Our weapon of choice for today is the hugely popular Radeon X1950 PRO - As well as examining single board performance, we'll also be utilising two boards in a CrossFire multi-GPU configuration, to see how well (or badly) this is currently supported under Windows Vista.