phi wrote:
Well the final release for Vista SP1 became available via Windows Update yesterday for the general public (Vista Ultimate users will get it slightly earlier than the rest).
I've installed it and spent the last 24 hours testing it.
So far I am please to say that network transfer speeds are much faster (on a 6GB transfer of screenshots - 4.6MB each - there was a 150% speed increase) and the transfer time estimation is definitely improved.
So far the only MxO bug that seems to be fixed is the texture bug where texture sizes would become really small giving everything that weird spotty look. (I suspect it is still there, I just haven't seen it yet)
Incorrect face shading is still there, and screenshots with Anti aliasing turned on still come out solid black.
Technically the shading issues are not a Vista problem, but show up in Vista. MxO and NVidia and ATI need to work together a bit better to get simple bugs like this fixed with the driver optimizations.
NVidia and ATI had to design the Vista drivers from scratch, this is why they were horrible when Vista released and now besting XP in features and performance, it just takes time to optimize drivers, especially with a new Video architecture and optimize them for game specifics.
I'm not saying that MxO's graphics engine is coded horribly, but there are obvious issues they need to address with the WDDM level drivers, and ultimately it is the MxO team responsidibility, as these are NOT common bugs or issues that exiting in other games. And considering Vista is running 99.9% games well, even OLD games, there is obvious an issue that needs to be addressed.
As for your new install, remember (as stated in the MS Documentation) that SP1 wipes all optimizatoin profiling from the system, so it will take a day or two of usage for Vista to once again pick back up in speeds over a clean install. A lot of the technology in Vista, like SuperFetch, and GPU Virtualization depend on understanding how a game or application loads data and when it loads data and at what times it expects data to be in RAM and texture data to be in VRAM and even goes as far as anticipating what time the user loads data for applications or games and normal routines.
At average these optimizations in Vista make it 6x faster in loading application, and 6x faster in using applications that have pull a lot of data from the HD and have zoning like games and MMOs. These features is what gives Vista a bump over XP as it learns, to compensate for the additional services like seraching, etc that Vista has as Overhead(OS Noise) that XP does not.
So in benchmarking SP1, treat it like a day one install of Vista, and as you use SP1 notice that a few days of hard usage, Vista will once again optimize prefetch, Superfetch, GPU Virtualization of textures, etc. Many sites reviewing SP1 in terms of performance don't pay attention to things like this, and then wonder why SP1 isn't as fast as their RTM machine that has been running for months and is fully optimized.
The newbie factor of mediocre tech journalists is a caveat of a having the first built in intelligent caching system in an OS, but is the direction of computing, as even Linux is now working on a couple of technologies like Superfetch, although not as extensively implemented as Vista complete caching system that even goes all the way to VRAM in the GPU and managing textures.
This is why if your Video card has only 128mb or RAM, you can still crank up game textures to the Max settings without performance loss or choking the game/GPU in Vista, since it can intelligently virtualize VRAM and swap low performance textures to system RAM and natively reassign them to the GPU via AGP direct memory access techniques. This also allows for Vista to handle running several 3D applications at a time, as they don't starve for VRAM and Vista also includes a GPU scheduler, that multi-tasks the applications to the GPU or accross multimple GPUs if available.
Things like this is where technical people with OS engineering backgrounds, say, Vista is impressive in terms of technology MS is bringing to the table for current and future generations of computing that you just cannot find in other consumer OSes like Linux or OS X.
Anyway - we ALL need to twist the devs arms a bit harder about working out the texturing and shading issues in MxO. Problems like this have existed for a long time and there is no reason to not address them, especially when they can contact their MS partners and NVidia and ATi directly to get help in fixing the issues. (This bug reminds me of the Lava bug in SWG that only affects 6xxx&7xxx generation NVidia cards because they added PS 3.0 technology and the game doesn't know how to handle it properly. In XP or Vista, the bug exists because it is SWG code that is not figuring out the GPU PS properly. Sadly with SWG devs working hard to keep the game alive, this is a bug that may take a while to ever get fixed, and it has existed since Lava was added to the game in 2005.)
Good luck with your Vista & SP1 experience, if you or anyone following this thread has specific issues or Vista questions, drop me a PM or throw up a post, as I plan on hitting MxO along with my other gaming forum routines.
(I'm a early beta MxO player that has played on and off, so don't let the # of messages or forum join date flash Newb in your mind. Although there are aspects of the higher levels of MxO that I am a Newb, especially with spending time away and coming back from time to time.)
