Performance in Games

Far Cry

There’s a terrible performance hit in Far Cry: about 40% for the senior models in the Radeon X1900 family and 30-35% for the Radeon X1900 GT. In Windows XP, you can run this game on a Radeon X1900 XTX or XT with 4x FSAA in every resolution, including the exotic 1920x1200, but Vista Beta 2 limits you to 1600x1200 or even to 1280x1024 (on the Radeon X1900 GT).

The same can be seen on the Research map, in the underground base. The performance hit from transitioning to Windows Vista is smaller than in the previous case, yet is big enough all the same.

It’s different in the HDR (FP16) mode: the Radeon X1900 XT slows down from transitioning to the Vista environment only in 1280x1024 while the Radeon X1900 XTX becomes slower in every case. The specifics of the HDR implementation in Far Cry for ATI cards combine with the specifics of the operation of the new window manager in Vista to produce this result. Whatever the cause, we’ve still got a performance hit.