Background: I've been working with multiple monitor systems since before they were even support in drivers. I infact helped NVIDIA track down and fix a driver bug back in 2000 that allowed different cards to play nice (two different frame buffers = not a fun thing to try to code around).
Anyway - I was all happy for the last several months at work as I have been mostly responsible for field-testing Vista at work. Using lower end video and multiple monitors, I've never really cared much about performance on my work machine until I got an XPS Laptop. One of the things I noticed once I had a bit more "performance" under the hood, my laptop seemed to run the same 3D programs significantly slower than my co-worker with the same laptop - the difference, he was running XP, and I am running Vista.
The other day, I was messing around trying to figure out why the performance was so terrible. As an example - I took Battlefield 2 (yes, it's on my work laptop), which by no means is a "current" generation video card killer, which runs beautifully on my home desktop on an 8800GTS and Vista 64. With a good ping here at work, you could quite literally feel the lag on an XPS with a 7950GTX. It made no sense to me. My normal playing habit, 1680x1050 windowed, and in Vista set to turn off compositing and visual effects, same as at home. The XPS should and I know can handle this quite easily, as my co-worker has no issues whatsoever on his XPS with XP. But the lag just pulsates continuously.
Example #2 - I took Company of Heroes, a much more graphically demanding game. Again, my co-worker has no issues at all on his XPS. On mine, it was barely playable, or rather uncomfortably playable. Again, video induced input lag at 1600x900 windowed with compositing and visual effects in Vista off.
Then, on a whim, since I know video drivers put 3D graphics into a sort of "compatibility mode" when on multiple monitors (ref: the bug I mentioned from 2000), I went to single monitor windowed and also fullscreen exclusive on single monitor, again with compositing and visual effects turned off. The performance was significantly better, most of the lag had disappeared from both titles. Unfortunately, I don't have frame rates or numbers to prove this (yet), but I can without a doubt say that Vista's "new" graphics subsystem isn't really new. It suffers more so than Windows XP did in multiple monitor configurations, which may simply be unoptimized drivers at this point. But just the fact that there is that huge of a performance delta tells me that things haven't changed nearly as much as Microsoft wants us to think it has.
Anyway - I was all happy for the last several months at work as I have been mostly responsible for field-testing Vista at work. Using lower end video and multiple monitors, I've never really cared much about performance on my work machine until I got an XPS Laptop. One of the things I noticed once I had a bit more "performance" under the hood, my laptop seemed to run the same 3D programs significantly slower than my co-worker with the same laptop - the difference, he was running XP, and I am running Vista.
The other day, I was messing around trying to figure out why the performance was so terrible. As an example - I took Battlefield 2 (yes, it's on my work laptop), which by no means is a "current" generation video card killer, which runs beautifully on my home desktop on an 8800GTS and Vista 64. With a good ping here at work, you could quite literally feel the lag on an XPS with a 7950GTX. It made no sense to me. My normal playing habit, 1680x1050 windowed, and in Vista set to turn off compositing and visual effects, same as at home. The XPS should and I know can handle this quite easily, as my co-worker has no issues whatsoever on his XPS with XP. But the lag just pulsates continuously.
Example #2 - I took Company of Heroes, a much more graphically demanding game. Again, my co-worker has no issues at all on his XPS. On mine, it was barely playable, or rather uncomfortably playable. Again, video induced input lag at 1600x900 windowed with compositing and visual effects in Vista off.
Then, on a whim, since I know video drivers put 3D graphics into a sort of "compatibility mode" when on multiple monitors (ref: the bug I mentioned from 2000), I went to single monitor windowed and also fullscreen exclusive on single monitor, again with compositing and visual effects turned off. The performance was significantly better, most of the lag had disappeared from both titles. Unfortunately, I don't have frame rates or numbers to prove this (yet), but I can without a doubt say that Vista's "new" graphics subsystem isn't really new. It suffers more so than Windows XP did in multiple monitor configurations, which may simply be unoptimized drivers at this point. But just the fact that there is that huge of a performance delta tells me that things haven't changed nearly as much as Microsoft wants us to think it has.
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