Rage3D Win 7 and GPU Drivers: Vista Redux or Smooth Sailing? Rage3D Win 7 and GPU Drivers: Vista Redux or Smooth Sailing?Hai gais ... long time no see! Whilst we're busily trying to replicate the long and contorted development cycle of the K8L (read, we're just as late with our Deneb review as the original Barcelona was), we've broken away from the wonderful world of ALUs, AGUs and cache hierarchies to bring you a quick look at what's cooking in the graphics arena.
So, we heard you like Windows 7?
Windows 7 is currently a sweetheart for enthusiasts everywhere, based on the way it behaves in its publicly available beta-ish incarnations. Claims amounting to it being the bestest Microsoft OS ever are anything but scarce - the validity of which is difficult to gauge at this point, albeit odds are looking good. Win 7 is pretty much a rounding off of the much maligned Vista, taking away the sharp edges of that particular construct. A tweak there, a fix here, a readily available driver/software base to make the transition smooth, as opposed to the abrupt break Vista brought and voila, where there was vitriol there remains only honey.
Whilst we're not going to discuss the OS in detail, as many aspects are still not disclosed(able), we are going to look how ATI and nVidia are handling the preparations for its expected 2009 release. Both IHVs have Win 7 drivers available, and we just happen to have the needed hardware to peek at how they fare. Be advised that this is a preview, with both the OS and the drivers being non-final, in spite of the fact that, as you'll soon see, it would be hard to notice it in practice were it not for the disclaimers.
ATI and coming early
Last week, we received word from our friends in ATI's driver team that they were gearing up to release “the industry's first unified driver to support both Windows Vista and Windows 7”. Say that really really fast and see if it brings a tear to your eye. No? Ok then, let's move on ... Also included in the email that carried those awe-inspiring words was a rather cheeky question: “Would you like to play with them?”. No guys, really, we wouldn't ... after all, it's not like we're graphics nutters, not at all :P Of course, the answer given in practice was quite different, and soon enough we were installing Win 7 build 7057 to play with the provided driver build.
As we were doing the above, a thought was born: why not look at how the significant other on the graphics market is handling the Win 7 affair? We're of course talking about the men in green, nVidia. Whilst we don't have access to their entire lineup (yet), we do have one of their babies, and one that we're rather fond of. Conveniently enough, it also fits into an interesting competitive niche, so it made the prospect even more appealing. Long story short, the big “n” is in.
Getting back to the initial story thread, it's worth mentioning that ATI is quite proud of its Win 7 driver, which was released on the 18th of this month as the 9.3 Catalysts. Performance increase versus Vista and a full WDDM 1.1 implementation (more on this a tad later), as well as a very early release (Win 7 hasn't even hit RC status) are some of the things that gave the likes of Andrew Dodd or Terry Makedon warm fuzzy feelings (hi guys!). For nV things are a tad different since their publicly available Win 7 build are still tagged as a preview build, and they're not yet joined into the main driver body, existing as a separate entity (you have disjunctive builds/packages for Vista and 7 respectively). We expect this to be revised in the coming months, as Microsoft comes nearer and nearer to releasing its new creation.
You may be wondering if there's anything significant that Win 7 changes with regards to drivers...after all, it's pretty much Vista, isn't it? Well, whilst the latter may be somewhat true, that doesn't mean that there wasn't any room for improvement or that improvements are scarce. Quite the opposite, actually...at least when it comes to graphics drivers.
As many of you recall, Vista shipped with a new driver model, dubbed the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM- thank your deity of choice for abbreviations) 1.0. The new (at the time) Aero Glass interface and other goodies required it in order to function. With Win 7, we get a new improved and perky WDDM 1.1 (however, wddm 1.0 drivers should work, with losses of functionality/advantages).
This 0.1 version increase switches from DX9 to DX10 for the Desktop Window Manager (DWM - yes, give thanks again)- this is the dude that, putting it simply, handles rendering your desktop with all of its wonky glassiness. This move is touted to bring performance benefits, mainly in the area of memory consumption with more windows splurged across your desktop. Microsoft suggested an up to 50% reduction in memory consumption per window.
Since we saw a graph illustrating this behavior, and it looked pretty awesome (we can't show it to you due to legal reasons, sorry), we tried to replicate it via our own experimentation, since we have a fetish ... try as we might, however, the results weren't quite as outstanding, irrespective of whether we dabbled with ATI or nV. Whilst there are certain benefits compared to Vista, they're not something you'd normally notice/care about (unless you had 100+ windows open and a rather low amount of RAM installed). Since our graphs ended up being lame, we're not going to post them, and instead we'll give you the short story:
So, in short, whilst it is obvious that tweaks are in place, they're not something that will change your real-world experience (hopefully, this formulation hasn't been trademarked yet).
Moving on, there's a new Direct2D accelerated 2D graphics API (yes, we know, that's as unexpected as Luke's paternity), designed for interoperation with existing code that uses GDI/GDI+ or Direct3D.
However, what is interesting (to us), is the fact that performance in DX10 titles should be superior to that experienced when using WDDM1.0 drivers, mainly due to improved/tweaked memory management. Jumping ahead, we've seen some of this in practice, and we're working on an interview which should provide some insight into this-stay tuned, as it should be out this decade, honest! The rest of the improvements are not quite grand, albeit nice, with the new CCD API likely to be appreciated by those unlucky souls that have to battle 4:3 projectors/external displays as they're giving presentations from their widescreen laptops (we feel your pain):
Another interesting aspect is that, by ATI's and Microsoft's admission, the Win 7 Aero desktop was designed using DX10.1. What this amounts to in practice is hard, if not impossible to gauge since not many details have been provided. WDDM1.1 support isn't conditioned by 10.1 capability-nV's driver is happily supporting WDDM1.1, whilst their hardware is yet to implement DX10.1- and in the time we've had to toy with Win 7 on both DX10 and 10.1 capable parts we weren't able to spot any differences. However, we'll hazard a guess that ATI will do some more “chest-beating” over this since it's a fairly important perk for them.
Finally, you should be aware that from the 9.3s onward, all ATI Catalyst releases will deliver an unified driver for Win 7 (WDDM1.1) and Vista (WDDM1.0), for the HD2000 series and higher. It's still unclear what will happen with older cards, but we're investigating. The Win 7 and Vista drivers should experience feature parity, with everything supported by one being supported by the other.
With all this in mind, time to see what happens in practice!
Seeing what we threw into the blender should give you a pretty decent idea of how the cocktail came out tasting:
So, we have a fairly beefy base configuration, and a
somewhat complex mix of cards. A QuadCF pair, the very nice 4850/70, and the
oldish and not necessarily goldish 3870, all of them carrying the red and white
flag from Markham. On the other hand, from nV, we only have the 8800GT/9800GT/GTS240
(yeah, we're being slightly pedantic ... however, performance and feature wise
they're pretty much the same thing) - a very very successful SKU. You may be
wondering why we don't have more nV cards vying for supremacy - the answer is
fairly simple. On one hand, our tree that grows nVidia-boards seems to be quite
opposed to performing its job, as it has yet to bear a single fruit. On the
other, the money-tree project is still in progress, but the outlook is
definitely good - once we get it to have a nice and full foliage, we'll be sure
to trim it and put everything into hardware toys. Until then, we make do with
what we have.
There's also another, more palpable reason: the market segment in which the 8800GT/9800GT/4850/3870 reside is one we've seldom looked at, and one that's also quite appealing given the current economic conditions. It's also about to get a kick in its competitive nuts soon enough, so consider this a preview of a more fleshed out piece we'll be doing once some newcomers arrive. A preview that's thrown into a preview. Using preview software ... this is certainly madness, and we're not even in Sparta.
We're using the latest build for Vista's Service Pack 2, coupled with the latest available Windows 7 build, coupled with the latest driver builds available from ATI and nVidia respectively. Everything else is pretty straightforward, keeping in mind that most, if not all Vista drivers should work just fine in Win 7 - and, in fact, for all other hardware we used Vista drivers where needed, without any issue.
In terms of tests, we opted for 6 titles, and 3 setting combinations:
You'll note that we've strayed away from FRAPSing through the tested titles, and opted for repeatable in-built/pre-built tests. In fact, the only game for which we relied on FRAPS was Mass Effect, all others having testing tools readily available either within the game (as was the case for FarCry 2, World in Conflict, Company of Heroes or Stalker -for this last one we used the benchmark utility recently released by GSC) or from 3rd parties, as was the case for Crysis, for which we used Framebuffer's excellent benchmarking utility.
The games were chosen based on graphical punch - Crysis and Stalker are perhaps the greatest GPU torturers ever - as well as popularity/triple A status. Keep in mind this is a cursory glance and going through a throng of titles, whilst neat, would've not quite wise ... after all, this is something we'll do once final everything hits the market, later this year.
Finally, to keep in line with the Microsoft EULA, we're not going to show you performance numbers per se, but normalized values, with normalization taking place against Vista performance for the trans-OS comparisons.
Okay chicks and chickens, let's get this party started by checking out if an OS upgrade will make your power guzzling dual 4870X2 combo faster than a speeding bullet - because we already know that in Vista it's faster than a bullet cruising at legal speeds:
[Neo] Whoa! [/Neo] Whilst averages do get a kick, what's happening with minimums is more interesting, since often those were regarded as chinks in the 4870X2 dual-GPUed armor. We have a hunch about what's going on and why we're seeing these numbers, but we'd rather investigate further and have an educative exchange with the driver guys before detailing. At a glance, it would appear that the resource management part of the drivers has been overhauled/improved for Win 7, since more often than not, minimums were caused by resource swapping taking place. It's also possible that certain AFR tweaks have become possible with the coming of WDDM1.1. Now, do these improvements trickle down to lower-targeted SKUs? Tis' not like everyone has dual X2s for playing solitaire ... let's see how the 512MB 4870 fares:
Once again, it's the minimums that see the more significant boost, albeit the amplitude of these boosts is reduced. You may be wondering why we used High (no AA, lowered 1680x1050 resolution) settings, as opposed to Very High which was used for the X2s - it's because we wanted to avoid running out of VRAM, and we didn't have a 1GB 4870 on hand. Time to slither down memory lane and look at how two “old” boys cope with the changing times - first, the 512MB 3870:
Not too shabby, for an old man/no longer frontline GPU, and once again we see minimums being Win 7s most beloved children. However, the 3870 hasn't aged all that great - you can't see this from the normalized results above, but even at the rather mundane resolution we tested, it was anything but a speed demon ... on the other hand, it's not that expensive nowadays and well on its way out, so we shouldn't be too hard on the once unexpectedly good card. Finally, after this sea or red, it's time to take a sip of green, with the perky 8(9)800GT:
We're seeing a similar behavior on the greener side of the fence, and it seems that nV likes Win 7 well enough even with these preview drivers. The only fly in the ointment is FarCry 2, which seems to lose a wee bit of performance, but that's the sole exception.
Some more low-hanging fruits and a conclusion of sorts
Another aspect that was intriguing was seeing how OpenGL fared, since with earlier Win 7 preview drivers from ATI it was more or less a no go. For that, we picked up the now infamous FurMark test, version 1.6.5 - we're lucky to report that nothing exploded under the huge load (yes, the executable was renamed) and that OGL performance was identical between Vista and Win 7, at least in this test. Your Quakes and Dooms are safe, it would appear. The same applies to nV, by the way.
We also checked HD-video decode acceleration, since this is something of a biggie nowadays, with everyone shooting rays of blu. Using Media Player Classic Home Cinema Edition, we checked for both H264 and VC-1 decode assistance and ... hold your breath ... it was there, without any fuss (we used MPC since it's decoder leverages DXVA and it's also easy to check if it's working or not). Your HD collection (containing mainly educational videos, of course) is in no immediate peril, it would appear.
Since these were the low-hanging fruits, that means it's time for some preliminary conclusions. In short, if Win 7 were to launch tomorrow, we dare say you could jump right into it without any worries. It was also nice to see ATI being on the ball and releasing their first official Win 7 driver so early whilst, at the same time, we found nV's preview build to be quite good. All in all, irrespective of who's servicing your PCIE slot, you should not fear that its pants will be firmly around its ankles when Microsoft releases its latest creation.
We're working towards getting a shot at interviewing Andrew Dodd, ATI driver guru, because during this testing spree we picked up a number of interesting questions that we'd like answered, so stay tuned for that chat (and Deneb ... must not forget the Deneb review!).