Windows Vista 3D graphics performance: Part 2 - NVIDIA (DirectX 9)

After taking a look at performance under Windows Vista for ATI's DirectX 9 level graphics boards in part one of this series, the second part of our analysis of 3D rendering performance under this new Operating System should really require no introduction.

In part two, our focus is on NVIDIA's performance for their GeForce 7 series of DirectX 9 parts, making our analysis this time around arguably more important than that of part one, simply due to the amount of criticism NVIDIA has suffered on account of the quality of their early Windows Vista drivers.  After such a poor start, NVIDIA have been pushing hard to release frequent driver updates, meaning that we've very quickly moved from ForceWare 100 onto the ForceWare 150 series drivers being used today.  These drivers supposedly have a vast number of bug fixes and performance improvements over earlier drivers, so just how well will they stack up against the company's latest WHQL Windows XP driver, which is now beginning to show its age itself as this OS has been somewhat abandoned while NVIDIA focus on Vista.

Join us as we roam through our usual benchmarking suite, testing both single board and SLI performance to see whether NVIDIA's Windows Vista drivers can answer the calls of the critics.  Our graphics board of choice for testing is the GeForce 7950 GX2, which offers close to GeForce 7900 GT 512MB performance in single GPU mode, while also offering SLI capabilities on our Intel 975X chipset motherboard thanks to its housing dual GPUs on a single graphics board.