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Looking at Vista: AMD and NVIDIA drivers compared

Most driver comparison focus solely on 3D gaming and / or application performance. Why? Well, for one thing, they're easy to do - make sure you use comparable systems / settings, run a few benchmarks with the previous drivers and then the new one and, voila, you're done. That doesn't mean its not important - through such articles we can see whether or not there are performance differences, issues / bugs resolved or introduced. Done on a relatively long span of time and you'll most likely see the number of issues / bugs with a given card or series go down and the performance levels increase (though usually not by much).

Drivers are an integral part of a graphics card performance. No matter how good the hardware is, if the drivers can translate design into performance, it won't work. However, there's so much to drivers than just performance. Stability, compatibility and usability for example. Though stability and compatibility is interesting to focus on, time and resource constraints will likely limit their usefullness. If we were to test each new drivers for general stability and compatibility with, say, the 100 most popular game titles today, by the time we're finished there likely to be several new driver versions already. And that's testing final, reference drivers - not beta or non-WHQL ones.

In addition to performance, usability is the next 'easiest' thing to reivew. Usability focuses on the Control Panel aspects of the driver and Control Panel generally stays fairly constant from one driver to the next. There's likely to be some difference over time, like the introduction of a new feature or user interface tweaks, which probably deserve an indepth look. This train of thought led us to wonder - what is the state of Vista drivers from AMD and NVIDIA? Besides improvements, what differences are present or missing? With Vista SP1 making the beta rounds, we thought this is as good as time as any to look just how far both companies have come in regard to Vista drivers. At the very least, it should allow us to see whether or not we can use Vista as a test platform.

There are areas we won't cover in this article. Installation, file size, control panel memory footprint are some of them. Nowadays, drivers are much more easier to install than two, three years ago. Both AMD and NVIDIA have stick to a unified driver architecture (thankfully!!!), though early GeForce 8800 and Radeon HD2900 drivers broke that tradition somewhat. We're still not crazy about AMD's and NVIDIA's decision to ditch the old control panel, but these control panels are here to stay. Thankfully, they've gotten to a point where they're not such a nuissance to use (all the time). There are third party tools or driver modifications you can use, but we won't cover them. We also won't discuss hardware monitoring functions and overclocking support - most users seem to rely on third party utilities rather the built in functions anyway.

Control Panel

Since looking at performance is easy, we'll do the hard stuff first. Control panel drivers - that would be AMD Catalyst Control Center for Radeon graphics cards and NVIDIA Forceware (New) Control Panel for their GeForce series. For the purpose of this article, we will be looking at both manufacturer's control panel software using two cards - a Radeon X1950 Pro with the Catalyst Control Center and a GeForce 8600GTS with the Forceware Control Panel. Undeniably there will be differences between the cards we use and cards from different series (Radeon HD2x00 or the GeForce 7 sereis), but they should be minimal.

Below you can see screenshots of various pages of the control panel. Click them to see them in actual size.

General Settings

Though both drivers has slightly different approaches to display features, both basically offer the same sets of general features. For the purpose of this article, we're going to separate them into three categories - general settings for display / monitor setup, 3D settings for performance / image quality and color correction settings. Other features not covered in those categories (and other small things we saw during our testing) will be covered in Other Settings.

We will also compare features and panels on both Vista and XP. The purpose is too see whether or not there is a difference between the two. The Windows XP driver / control panel should be considered the more 'complete' version since its more mature (and very likely has more feature as well).

AMD









Multi monitor setup, extended displays, resolution, color depth, refresh rates and screen sizing and positioning are all present in the Vista version of Catalyst Control Center. What seems to be missing is the Refresh Rate Override section, which is present on Windows XP (as you can see below). One note to AMD driver developers - we'd like to see a clearer distinction between screen position and size controls on the last panel. The text description is a little bit vague, since we can see there's arrows on both the box (which controls the position) and the borders (which controls the size). 









The omission of Refresh Rate Override might seem a big deal, but there's actually no need for it in Vista. This 'feature' is a workaround for Windows XP behvaiour in the 'old days' where full screen applications run at 60 Hz refresh rates at all times indifferent to resolution. This is not much of a problem with newer games, since they appropriately use the highest refresh rate possible on a given  resolution or lets you manually select a refresh rate.

NVIDIA





NVIDIA's approach with the new Forceware Control Panel is more 'wizard' like. As expected, display settings such as resolution, color depth, refresh rates, screen positioning and rotation are present. Well, almost all of then. You'll likely see differences between the Vista and XP - there's no screen positioning and rotation settings in Vista. You also don't have access to the Display Optimization Wizard and Custom Resolutions settings, features which we think sets the NVIDIA Forceware apart from the Catalyst Control Center.







Now, we all agree that control panel settings should be made easier and less 'complex', but we think NVIDIA should've made their panel more 'compact'. You'll no doubt notice the relatively large size of the window - we had to set it that way so there's no scrollbar present on every setting. True, you can resize / maximize the window so it takes less screen / desktop space, but that involves more mouse scrolling on the user part. It also leads to another problem we will get into later.

3D Settings

Ah yes, 3D settings. Most likely the place where gamers will spent most of their time tweaking image quality and / or performance. Both drivers offer real time previews of image quality setting changes. AMD is actually on their second version of the preview here, which many think is a significant improvement to the old one. For this page, we stitched together screenshots for the 'All Settings' page on the Catalyst Control Center and 'Manage 3D Settings' on Forceware Control Panel so you could see all of them together in one image.

AMD





Catalyst Control Center is definitely more friendly to less tech savvy users. In addition to offering a preview on the Standard settings with various preset default profiles, you can also see a preview with each image quality enhancement feature - anti aliasing, anisotropic filtering, mipmap detail levels and adaptive anti aliasing (or anti aliasing that's aware of transparent textures).





Though informative, more tech savvy users will likely go directly to the All Settings page or even use the Customize View to set the Catalyst Control Panel to show only this page in the 3D section. Although you can force anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering from the driver panel, the consensus is that you should always apply these settings in game whenever possible. This is one area where we think AMD could make some improvements - we actually would like temporal anti aliasing settings and anti aliasing filters (on the Radeon HD2x00 series) to be more like the adaptive anti aliasing setting. That way, we can select anti aliasing levels in game and let the Catalyst Control Center 'enhance' that setting with temporal, adaptive AA or anti aliasing filters. NVIDIA have already use a similar scheme like this in their Forceware Control Panel.

NVIDIA





NVIDIA employs a more straight forward approach than AMD. You can select various preset defaults or customize settings to your heart's content. You can also see there's more settings to play around here than with Catalyst Control Center, most of which has some impact on performance and image quality. We do like the option to force anti aliasing to off or force bilinear / trilinear filtering - very handy on an entry level graphics card or system. There's also a second tab for game specific profiles.





There's virtually no difference to the Vista version.

Color

If you play around with photos, images and videos, this area is likely the ones that concerns you most. Setting up your monitor to reproduce 'correct' color correction may not be of concern to the average user, but it should be. Gamers can also use color correction features to brighten or darken scenes, enhance colors and specular highlights - think of it as manual 'tone mapping'. The color corrections controls we're going to discuss here applies to the desktop - we'll discuss overlay (video) color controls later on.

AMD





We're not particularly fond of AMD insistence to separate hue / saturation controls on the AVIVO Color page and everything else (brightness, contrast, gamma) on the Color page. More so since the Catalyst Control Center is unable to save changes to hue / saturation inside a profile. Thankfully, everything else seems to be in order. New to Catalyst 7.6 in Vista is the Black and White Levels section. Everything else is pretty much the same in Windows XP. You can set brightness, contrast and gamma for all channels or individually for each channel. At least this way, you should have some measure in controlling hue or tint.





The AVIVO Video page offers similar control, but only applies to overlays. The usual color control settings are there, though gamma is missing on the Vista version. For those using multi monitor setups and extended displays, you can use theater mode to manipulate overlays on your secondary monitor(s). The Basic Quality section controls how AVIVO perform video deinterlacing, including pulldown detection. As usual, you can see a preview when cycling through default profiles in Presets and each sub section (Basic Color, Basic Quality). If you have a Radeon HD2x00 graphics card, there are some additional options here as well.









Vista and XP versions are pretty similar, except for the 'Gamma' slider and Windows Media Settings section. The lack of gamma setting is unfortunate, because it allows you to tweak gamma setting (of course) independently from the desktop. In Vista, you'll likely have to tweak it through some other means (ffdshow picture properies come to mind). From our experience, enabling Windows Media Video acceleration doesn't always produce good results in Windows XP - particularly with WMV Videos compressed with custom compression and decoder complexity settings.So, it's not a major loss.

NVIDIA



The NVIDIA Forceware Control Panel does offer more color controls in one page than AMD Catalyst Control Center. You can use Digital Vibrance to alter saturation settings - but only upwards. You'll notice that in our setup, Image Sharpening is greyed out. Much like it did in XP, it does allow for sharper images, but it also sometimes introduce ringing. What is unfortunate is the lack of the 'Graph' slider in Vista. Much like Advanced Mode in the old NVIDIA control panel, it allows you manually edit the color graph, for all channels or each independently.







From the amount of controls available, there's a lot more you can adjust with NVIDIA's Forceware Control Panel. Much like in XP, you'll need to play a video in a media player (that uses overlay) to see the difference. We like NVIDIA's decision not only to allow gamma adjustments for overlays, but also the ability to set gamma for each channel individually. Sure, most users will likely never feel the need to adjust such settings, but its nice to know that its there if you need them. Say you have make color corrections to your desktop. You can use these overlay color correction settings to compensate for your color correction settings or vice versa.- you can apply color correction settings to videos only. By default, these color controls are disabled and that's why they're greyed out in the screenshots.

For low bitrate videos with lots of blocking and blurry visuals, Edge Enhancement and Noise Reduction settings may be able to help image quality so that it's more 'palatable'. Particularly if your video decoder doesn't do a good enough job of deblocking the video. In our experience, setting Noise Reduction too high actually blurs any Edge Enhancement, so you'll likely have to experiment to find the setting you're comfortable with.





We tried to make a video showing what you can do with the color correction graph, but of course, the video fail to capture the color changes (of course).









Unlike in Vista, the overlay color controls are enabled by default in XP.

Other Settings

Tray Icons

Driver tray icons offers a quick way to alter driver settings without really opening the driver panel. These settings usually include 3D settings, general settings such as resolution, color depth, and monitor refresh rates. The AMD Catalyst Control Center tray applet also include profile selection, which makes it very handy if you want to load a certain profile or even apply a profile to revert to the default settings. NVIDIA's Forceware tray icon does not offer profile management, but it does offer a shortcut to the 'old' Color Correction panel on the old driver panel. From there, you can apply a color correction profile. Granted, it's not as good or as comprehensive as AMD's solution, but in newer games you should be able control the degree of anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering in game. You can also alter refresh rates directly from Forceware tray tool. The Catalyst Control Center tray icon don't offer this option, but the driver already manage refresh rates automatically according to the monitor's EDID or default driver settings. It's smart enough to lower the refresh rates at higher resolution - ie. from 1280 x 1024 @ 85 Hz to 1600 x 1200 @ 75 Hz and vice versa.

That's with Windows XP. In Vista, there's no tray icon applet or the option to enable it with NVIDIA Forceware. That means you have to bring up the control panel each time you want to make an adjustment. So, in this regard, AMD has the better solution.

Profiles

OK, let's make a distinction here. We're not talking about game / application profiles that offers certain speedups or optimizations. By profiles we mean driver profiles which lets you store 3D settings, color correction settings, video settings and the like.

Profile support with Catalyst Control Center is great. You can save just about almost everything to a profile - 3D settings, display resolution, refresh rates, rotation, color correction and even AVIVO settings. The glaring omission - AVIVO color settings in the monitor properties. This particular panel controls hue and saturation settings for the desktop. We think AMD should put these settings in the Color section or at least allow the Profile Manager to save its settings. Selecting a profile couldn't be more easy - you can call all the profiles stored from the tray icon, with a hotkey, from the control panel itself or make a shortcut to it on the desktop and also runs the associated game / application. However, the shortcut option is currently problematic with Vista (at least with our setup) - probably due to Vista using IE 7. Everything else works fine though. One feature we very much like to see is the ability to save a profile or all the profiles into a file. This means you can backup your settings and don't have to reset everything else in case you have to do a fresh Windows installation.

Now, many don't realize there is a profile support with NVIDIA Forceware. That's probably because the profile menu only shows itself when you select the Display section of the control panel. We think NVIDIA should've made it easier to spot and ditch this scheme. Much like Catalyst Control Center, you can save 3D settings, various display settings and color correction inside a profile. What is a definite plus is the ability to save those profiles into a file. That means you can backup your profiles easily, even share it with another machine (with an NVIDIA graphics card).

The bad? Well, we already mentioned that there's no easy way to apply a profile with NVIDIA's Forceware control panel. You have to bring up the control panel, select display so that you can select the Profile menu and then you can load the profile you want (and the associated program if you choose to do so). However, the annoying part is that profiles saved (into a file) with Windows XP is not compatible with Vista. A major bummer, since you basically have to reset everything again so it's best to write down your settings somewhere in a text file and save it..

Composite Sync Support

Though LCDs are nice, energy efficient, sleek and 'gasp' sexy compared to CRTs, no doubt there are users still sticking to CRT monitors. We are among them and the Viewsonic G90F-4 we're using is a composite sync monitor. AMD Catalyst Control Center does offer explicit support for composite sync monitors, enabling us to use high refresh rates with high resolutions. So, instead of 1600 x 1200 @ 60 Hz, we were able to use 1600 x 1200 @ 75 Hz and not have the display 'squashed' inward. With NVIDIA Forceware, we have to lower the refresh rate to 72 Hz to achieve the same setting. NVIDIA does offer Custom Resolution, but less tech-savvy users will probably be to baffled by the various options.

Restore Default Button Placement

This one is easy, but annoying as hell. Look back at the control panel images we show you earlier. Now find the 'Restore Defaults" for both control panels. 9 out of 10 will likely say they were able to find the button more quickly on the Catalyst Control Center than the Forceware Control Panel, more so with Vista. It's slightly easier to spot with XP, but you still have to know where to look. Conventional wisdom would place the button next to the Apply or Cancel button (which pops out on the bottom if you made any changes). What makes it worse is that you probably won't be able to see the button AT ALL if you don't expand (or maximize) the Forceware Control Panel window. We think this is a pretty bad decision made by NVIDIA's driver developer team.

Response Time

This is another annoyance that's we think shouldn't be present in the first place. AMD (back then ATI) took a lot of flak when they first introduce Catalyst Control Panel for this reason alone (not to mention the memory footprint of the panel itself, the slow start up time etc). Things have improved quite a lot, particularly with Vista. Start up time and memory footprint has improved considerably. AMD driver team also made a good decision to basically 'split up' the Catalyst Control Center into several components - that means the slightly larger memory footprint with 3D previews will not be present if you are not using 3D previews at all. Vista allows small, but significant improvements to the Catalyst Control Center. Applying 3D settings are now instantanenous, even when you're looking at the 3D preview or have a 3D game / application running. No monitor's blanking in and out (or on and off, if you prefer) either. No more exiting FRAPS just to make sure AA is applied when you change the settings.

The problems mentioned above are not present (or at least not as noticeable) with NVIDIA Forceware Control Panel. So, at least NVIDIA has that nailed down. Or at least we thought so. If you look at NVIDIA's Forceware Control Panel, you'll notice that the more detailed 3D settings doesn't include a preview, so you have to go back and forth to see any image quality changes. This is not a big of a problem with 3D applications, but what about video? We certainly want to see immediate changes so we could fine tune our settings.

Below are two videos captured in Vista, showing what we saw when we tried to move the overlay color correction sliders on both Catalyst Control Center and Forceware Control Panel. 

slider response with NVIDIA Control Panel in Vista
XviD video, 7.214 KB

slider response with AMD Catalyst Control Center  in Vista
XviD video, 9.675 KB

At first glance, the Forceware Control Panel seems to do a better job. You could see immediate changes to the clip playing on Windows Media Player 11, however you'll no doubt notice the changes are not instantanenous - more a like steps instead of a smooth transition. AVIVO Video Basi Color settings does much worse, the changes only applies after you stop moving the control panel (taking off your finger from the left mouse button). However, when we change the sliders from within AVIVO 'All Details', the changes are what we think it should be - an instantanenous, smooth, gradual transition. No doubt, both driver developer team has some work to do here, but clearly AMD has less to do.

Display Optimization Wizard

If we have to pick one feature on the NVIDIA Forceware Control Panel that's truly better than AMD Catalyst Control Center, this is it. There's simply nothing resembling this feature on the Catalyst Control Center. The wizard easily guides you in making brightness, contrast, and RGB gamma settings. If there's something to improve, it would be something similar, but for video / film. However, Vista Home Premium and Ultimate users already has access to a similar feature with Windows Media Center Display Configuration wizard (accessible through Settings - Tasks - Windows Media Center Setup).

Monitor Diagnostics

Though both driver over tools to manually adjust screen position and size (at least in XP), both lack diagnostic tools to help users adjust or more appropriately, correct, image distortion. It may not be a big deal for the average users, but it will certainly help those who like to make sure their monitors are setup and aligned correctly. There are third party applications for this purpose and at least we know of one graphics card manufacturer that bundles such a utility with their card. It would be great if both AMD and NVIDIA can include such a tool with their drivers.

Performance

Graphical settings for these games are set to their highest possible values. Notable differences are F.E.A.R where we disable "Soft Shadows", Quake 4 where we use High Quality - not Ultra Quality - but anisotropic filtering was set to "1" for default tests and "16" for AA / AF tests. We used Serious Sam II built in "Maximum" quality preset then change resolution and AA / AF settings accordingly. However, for this article and future articles, we decided to enable HDR (high dynamic range rendering). This also applies to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblvion.We basically use the 'Ultra High Quality' settings, disable V-Sync and set everything to their highest possible values. However, 'Self Shadows' and 'Shadows on grass" are disabled. For Oblivion, AA and AF are forced from the driver panel. Clear weather was used for our run of Monza GP tests. For Need for Speed: Carbon, we used the game's "Maximum" video quality preset, but change the filtering to "Trilinear" for default tests - AA AF tests are run with "4x" and "Anistropic". NFS: Carbon test were done with the Sprint Race on Lincoln Boulevard. 

Our test setup
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 socket LGA-775 (running at 7 x 400 MHz)
4 x 512 MB A-DATA Vitesta 5-5-5-18 PC6400 DDR2-SDRAM
Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro 256 MB graphics card
Gigabyte P965-DS3P Intel P965 motherboard
Hitachi Deskstar 250 GB Serial ATA 16 MB buffer 7200 rpm hard drives
LiteOn 1673S DVD-RW
Tagan TG530-U15 530 watts ATX/BTX power supply

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 installed
Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit with all the latest updates.
ATI Catalyst 7.7 reference driver
NVIDIA Forceware 162.18 reference driver for Windows XP
NVIDIA Forceware 162.22 reference driver for Windows Vista
Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 8.3.0.1011
Realtek Semiconductor High Definition Audio System Software Ver:R1.72
DirectX 9.0c
all respected games used for benchmarks have been updated to their latest, final builds.

We'd like to thank ASUS for providing the EN8600GTS Silent and Gigabyte for providing the Gigabyte P965-DS3P motherboard and Gigabyte Radeon X1950 Pro graphics card for this test. We'd also like to thank Tagan for the Tagan TG530-U15 power supply.

The results:

Now honestly, the results above doesn't tell the whole story. There is a definite improvement with Vista compared to XP. Though the results don't show it, frame rates are generally much smoother in Vista than it is in XP. Smooth frame rates equals less stutters which is always good. You'll notice that minimum frame rates at 1024 x 768, without and with AA and AF are higher in Vista than XP with the Radeon X1950 Pro. The GeForce 8600GTS minimum frame rates do get lower without AA and AF, but average frame rates saw an increase of about 2 fps. Granted, that's not much and still within normal variations between runs, but the smooth frame rates makes it a clincher for us.

With increased resolutions, the additional burden begins to bog down the graphics cards. Curiously, we're still seeing that 2 fps difference. Strangely enough, the Radeon X1950 Pro  lost 2 fps while the GeForce 8600GTS actually gains. Comparing Vista to XP drivers, we can see minimum frame rates are still up with both cards in Vista. So, Microsoft's claims of less overhead with Vista seem to have merit - even DirectX 9 applications will profit from the new driver model. However, do keep in mind that improvements will likely only be noticeable in situations where we are nowhere near the graphical processing limits of the graphics card.


We encountered an annoying bug with NVIDIA's Forceware 162.22 for Vista. You'll get slowdowns whenever you apply system changes in Quake 4. To workaround this, we had to restart the application after changing resolutions and / or applying AA and AF. A quick glance of the graph shows that performance differences between Vista and XP are negligible, though they are present. Funny, the Radeon X1950 Pro seem to get slightly faster with Vista as we use higher resolutions, probably due in part to AMD's new OpenGL drivers. The GeForce 8600GTS is slightly slower with Vista by about 7 to 10 percent, though you'll likely won't notice the difference ingame.


Remember, we're using different settings this time around - HDR is enabled in both default settings and with AA and AF enabled. There's really no difference between Vista and XP on both cards. That's probably because we are pushing the graphics card to their limits. In passing, the GeForce 8600GTS seems to handle HDR plus AA and AF better than the Radeon X1950 Pro. Notice how although the maximum frame rates on both cards with HDR + AA and AF at 1024 x 768 are on the same level, the average frame rates are higher on the GeForce 8600GTS. This changes at 1280 x 960 upwards, but minimum frame rates are consistently higher on the GeForce 8600GTS. 


The only results with playable frame rates here is the 1024 x 768 graph. Clearly, these test settings are too much for both cards., in both Vista and XP. As you can see, the GeForce 8600GTS lost quite a bit of frame rate with Vista. The difference is not as pronounced if we enabled AA and AF, but average frame rates is till 2 fps slower in Vista. This confirms our earlier conclusion that any performance between Vista and XP aside from slowdowns caused by driver bugs will only be noticeable in situations where the graphics card is not the limiting factor.   


Ouch. Clearly driver developer teams from both AMD and NVIDIA still have some work to with their drivers. Performance in Vista are nowhere near what it was in XP, except maybe at 1600 x 1200, where we're beginning to see the graphics card become the performance limiting factor.  Because of its raw bandwidth, the Radeon X1950 Pro is still able to push frame rates above 30 fps at all times with this game, even at 1600 x 1200.


This time, it's actually AMD that has a bug. In Vista, we had to turn down Catalyst AI to 'Standard' to get frame rates comparable to Windows XP. We did try the same thing with GTR, but it makes no difference. A quick glance shows that both AMD and NVIDIA driver teams still has to work a few thing out with this game - Vista definitely is slower than XP here.

Conclusion:

In closing, its clear that both AMD and NVIDIA still have work to do on their Vista drivers. Based on our experience writing this article, AMD is in a better position than NVIDIA in this regard. First of, the features. Most of the features present in Windows XP are present in their Vista drivers, some not needed anymore are removed and some additional, Vista specific features have been included. There are some improvements we'd like AMD to address and hopefully they are listening. We did expect not all games will run as fast as they did in Windows XP, but we were pleasantly surprised to see most of our game titles (and benchmarks) seem to work just fine, even better in some regard (F.E.A.R). This situation will likely improve with time.

NVIDIA sure have a lot of catching up to do. First one is probably the GeForce 8800 slowdown bug, which they are aware of and in the process of resolving. There's that bug with Quake 4 we encountered, plus the big performance drop with GTR (which also plagues AMD drivers). Clearly, NVIDIA's driver developer team still need to focus on getting performance where they should be. However, that doesn't mean they can't 'reintroduce' driver features already present in their Windows XP drivers. We also like to see some interface touches to make things a little bit easier, those shouldn't be that hard to implement. Now, we know what some people would say. One can point out the fact that we're using graphics card from different generations has a part in this, but that doesn't explain the non-performance aspects such as lack of features on NVIDIA Forceware for Windows Vista..

Is Vista ready for games and benchmarks? We think so, but the question we should be asking is whether or not we (your PC and the drivers) are ready for Vista. We're not there yet, but we're much nearer now than we were at Vista's launch. With Vista SP1 is making the beta rounds, its pretty likely more users still holding out with Windows XP will transition when the Service Pack is finally released.

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