Drivers drivers everywhere but none suitable to link
Today brings new and exciting topics in my “Life with Windows Vista” series. The past few days of PC time consisted largely of me installing my games and customizing Vista and my hardware to my liking while exploring the new features.

I thought my last entry was fairly positive and I guess that is a statement to my overall feel of the Vista experience so far. However, today we are going to get down and dirty. My biggest gripe is my main topic of conversation today and surprisingly it doesn’t fall on Microsoft or Vista, well not so much.

Today’s “goats of the day” are NVIDIA and Creative. While I did rave about hardware drivers being available in my last entry I didn’t get to fully evaluate their functionality at the time. Everything else seems to be running smooth but my 8800GTS and my X-Fi aren’t fully ready for Vista, with Creative is the lesser of two evils right now.

Creative’s X-Fi Vista support is superior to that of NVIDIA’s. It should also be noted that drivers for video cards are much more intensive than on the audio front. Creative does have, for the most part, a fully functional driver for Vista. There are bugs here and there but it’s not like 5.1 sound stops working and you only get sound out of 2 speakers. They are lacking the full software suite for Vista but that is expected to be added eventually and for now you just have to make do with their Audio Console. There are some issues with DirectSound3D games because of the new Vista audio stack, but many of those can be remedied with Creative’s Alchemy Project.

NVIDIA, however, has really seemed to drop the ball, or should I say baton. It’s like watching a track relay race and the runner drops the baton on the exchange and you can’t help but be like, “what the heck?” This is from the company who campaigns their “Vista Ready” and “Vista Experience” capabilities. Vista has been in beta for over a year now, released to manufacturers months ago, and here we are now without fully working drivers. For example, the 3 sets of Vista GeForce drivers I have tested, while giving better in-game and benchmarking performance than early releases, cripple my TV-Out capabilities. If I want to run dual desktops with my TV, which I do regularly for watching movies and TV shows, I have to watch them in black and white! It’s just some random bug in the driver code apparently; something that works fine on my X1950PRO, works fine in XP with both cards, but doesn’t work in Vista. This is among some other random issues: the CS:S fog issue, and no SLi on 6/7 series cards yet. Those are just a few that I have read about.

So what lessons have we learned from this? First off, it can be tough being an early adopter. Features and functionality aren’t always ready from the get-go with new operating systems. While Vista is surely a bit harder to code drivers for, that doesn’t mean you get the right to take this long and not experience some backlash . Secondly, this constitutes a reminder that not everything is rosy being on the cutting edge with the latest and greatest in hardware and software.

Now that my rant for the day is over I want to talk about a couple new and interesting Vista features that caught my eye.

First up is the Windows Experience Index

After your first boot of Vista your system is tested and this index is built which rates your set up. You can also refresh this and test it at any time, for instance when you purchase new hardware. Take a look at my screen shot and you will see my system is rated a 5.5 on the Windows Experience Index. 5.5? Well that’s kind of arbitrary isn’t it? Well there is a standard here believe it or not. The scale runs from 1 to 5.9 currently. Later as hardware capabilities increase, the scale can also be increased. We can see the 5 components/tests which are ran in a span of a couple minutes and churn out your rating. Your overall score is based on your lowest individual test, the reason being that that part is the weakest link in your system. I do question how my E6700 Core 2 Duo only gets a 5.5 rating being the 3rd fastest desktop CPU out there right now, so it’s something I am concerned about. One of the cool aspects of this rating is how it ties in to our next feature, the Vista Games menu.


Windows Vista now has a “My Documents'-Esque'” folder for your games now. The Vista games come preloaded into this folder. It seems if that if you drag and drop your gaming shortcuts which I did here with all my Steam games and the demo for Supreme Commander that the Icons will show up. At first I just got Steam icons but after moving my shortcuts into my games folder the retail games box art showed up also.

If you look at the folder with Supreme Commander demo highlighted we see it shows “Game recommended rating", "Game required rating", and "Computer system’s rating”. These of course are ratings based on the Windows Experience Index (WEI). While Supreme Commander is a high-end game as it suggests a 5 on the WEI, we see that my computer should adequately handle this game being a 5.5 on the Index. Windows can automatically download game information like the WEI scores, ESRB ratings, and other details like that. It’s a pretty cool feature and for someone who always installed their games into a "C:\Games" folder as it was, I say about damn time.

That wraps up today’s entry. Thanks for listening to my driver ramblings and rants and be sure to stop back for continued updates!



Related
Life With Windows Vista: Issue 1
Vista Coverage