First reviews of Nvidia's next-gen cards

[Freddie]

Reviews came out today on Nvidia's new GTX 260/280. This is the biggest jump in Nvidia's GPU technology in about a year and a half.

Tech Report (http://techreport.com/articles.x/14934/1)
AnandTech (http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3334)
Hard OCP (http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTUxOCwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==)

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Did you notice how they talk about XP being 50% faster than 9800GTX SLI but Vista only being 25% faster? Interesting. Makes you wonder if they worked on the XP development first to get it working and are going to optimize for Vista later and what (if any) difference that'll make.

[Freddie]

Interesting. No, I didn't notice. Where does it say that? All I saw was that the three sites I linked used Vista for their tests.

I can imagine Nvidia working harder on the XP driver because more customers use it. But if all the review sites use Vista for benchmarking, that might have been a mistake.

[Icetech]

Its not nvidia's drivers.. its vista.. we noticed the same things with ati cards on systems we build for customers.. all our gaming systems stay XP for now...

[Anozireth]

Did you notice how they talk about XP being 50% faster than 9800GTX SLI but Vista only being 25% faster? Interesting. Makes you wonder if they worked on the XP development first to get it working and are going to optimize for Vista later and what (if any) difference that'll make.Which article was that in? They all list Vista on their test platform stats. I could see the card being faster on XP in some situations, like Crysis. If the card isn't rendering the DX10 bells and whistles (which XP doesn't support), it should be faster. But that's comparing apples to oranges. I would think most gamers buying cards at this level are running Vista for DX 10, so optimizing the drivers for XP first doesn't really make sense to me.

[Freddie]

Its not nvidia's drivers.. its vista.. we noticed the same things with ati cards on systems we build for customers.. all our gaming systems stay XP for now...
I'm not an expert about this -- I don't even use Vista. But my impression from reading hardware review sites is that this difference has disappeared. Back when Vista first came out, the review sites generally found that on average, Vista was a little slower in games. But more recent tests show that Vista has caught up.

I don't have time now to do a whole lot of digging in Google, but here are two links that give the general idea. They show ExtremeTech's comparisons of XP and Vista for game speed. The first link shows benchmarks from when Vista first came out. The second link shows last month.

XP vs. Vista Game Performance, Feb. 2007 ('http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2096940,00.asp')
XP vs. Vista Game Performance, May 2008 ('http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2303830,00.asp')

Here's how ExtremeTech summarized their findings in the more recent article:


If you were expecting a huge drop in performance as your eyes scanned from the XP to the Vista results, well, surprise! As many a tech analyst predicted, Windows Vista's gaming performance conundrum has largely been solved, and it was mainly due to early graphics drivers.

In fact, I'd been planning to run a few other gaming tests, but the results from these were so uninteresting that further work didn't seem merited. Love it or hate it, Vista is performing far better than it used to.

Game performance, it seems, has been exorcised from your concern when choosing a Microsoft operating system. That leaves a few other factors, of course: stability, responsiveness, eye candy, price, DirectX version, and a few other odds and ends.

It took about a year and a half, but the performance gap between Vista and its forerunner has finally evaporated.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Which article was that in?
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/unveiled_nvidias_next_gen_gpu?page=0%2C2

I read some before these were posted. ;)

[Syro]

Here's another link http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/nvidia-geforce-gx2-review.ars