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).
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