Graphics card drivers for all tests are nVidia Forceware v169.04
nForce drivers are v6.86 for Win2K & XP / v15.01 for Vista
Creative drivers are v2.09.0007 dated 30 Oct 06 for Win2K & XP / v2.15.0002 for Vista dated 9 Oct 07
Resolution is 1024x768 and all settings are on medium.
All tests are run in the bin32 or bin64 folder for each respective system using the "Benchmark_GPU.bat". The best score from the 4 runs is chosen.
All operating systems are clean installed with all updates and service packs applied. Vista also has
KB940105 installed. (And my
Crysis Win2K fix is of course applied in the Windows 2000 test)
System specs for all tests are;
CPU: Opteron 185 2.6ghz
Mobo: DFI Expert nForce4
Mem: Corsair TWINX2048-4000PT 200mhz
Video: XFX 7900GT (volt modded) 720/880mhz Core/Mem
HDD: 150GB Raptor and a 500GB HD501LJ Samsung drive
Sound: Creative X-fi ExtremeMusic
Windows 2000:
Average FPS:
39.71
Min FPS: 22.59
Max FPS: 62.38
Windows XP 32bit
Average FPS:
43.88
Min FPS: 24.49
Max FPS: 64.69
Windows XP x64 64bit:
Crysis Bin64 executable;
Average FPS:
40.87
Min FPS: 22.84
Max FPS: 59.02
Crysis Bin32 executable;
Average FPS:
43.42
Min FPS: 26.35
Max FPS: 62.83
Windows Vista 32bit:
Average FPS:
26.96
Min FPS: 15.37
Max FPS: 39.23
Windows Vista 64bit:
Crysis Bin64 executable;
Average FPS:
26.90
Min FPS: 15.51
Max FPS: 38.83
Crysis Bin32 executable;
Average FPS:
26.84
Min FPS: 15.65
Max FPS: 39.05
From this we can conclude that with such a lowend system as mine there is no point at all in running the 64 bit executable of crysis.exe; it seem to have more overhead and thus get lower performance on this system.
We however see that in Vista there is no performance penalty by running 32 or 64 bit.
Having said that
Windows XP 32 bit is still 63% faster than Vista both 32 and 64 bit!!!
As for our NT5.X based systems
Windows XP 32bit is 10% faster than Windows 2000, and 7% faster than XP x64 when Crysis is running with the 64bit executable.
The performance gap when Crysis is run using the 32bit executable in XP x64 is only 1% tho which is within the error margin.
I would say the winner here is Windows XP x64 because it gives you the choice to run apps in either 32 or 64bit mode, plus you get none of the issues of being able to hit the 2GB virtual address space; which I expect will be doable with Crysis using high settings.
With my medium settings the memory usage was up to 1.4GB for Crysis in Vista, and virtual memory usage peaked at 1.6GB in Vista. That only leaves 400mb until the game will crash due to exceeding the limit for address space. (This is also the reason the game asks you to install
KB940105 when you run it in Vista.) There is a
120-day trial you can get from Microsoft incase you want to try XP x64, it's what I used for these tests...
I will of course soon upgrade my graphics card so I can enjoy Crysis (I preordered it about a year ago
)
But like many others I am waiting to see how the upcoming G92 8800GTS will stack up to the G92 8800GT. And also what ATI's new 3XXX series of cards will do...
These are very happy times for us PC gamers, both very good games and graphics hardware that will probably challenge the old venerable Geforce TI4200 are literally being released each week!
Edit; I should add that I think the reason my system performs so badly in Vista is because nVidia has been tweaking their drivers for the 88XX range of cards, and leaving out the old series...
I expect performance to be much closer with a more recent graphics card. (But for technical reasons Vista does have a larger overhead so XP should always be a percent or five faster than Vista, this info is from Microsoft themselves and is due to the new driver model introduced in Vista...)
