Vista - Strange Vista Benchmark Results

EDIT: Using 3DMark06

Long story short, I upgraded my computer due to a graphics card company sending me the wrong card in the mail for an RMA. I sent them a 7900GT 256mb Geforce for repair, they sent me back a 7950GX2 512mbx2 Geforce and said "Oops, our fault, keep it."

On Windows XP I was getting great results, I went from 4174 to 5805. The problem was, though, that my hardware was all older than the new card, so I went ahead and upgraded. During the upgrade, I decided to pick up a copy of Vista Home Premium for future need. I made a dual boot of XP and Vista for games that wouldn't run under Vista, and I benchmarked on XP. The score jumped from 5805 to 9075. Wow! Sweetness. I benchmarked on Windows Vista and got 4860. OUCH. That's a downgrade from the card BEFORE this great new mistake as a gift from my video card company.

I believe it must be some sort of driver complication, but of the scanning programs I've used (and mind you, I used the trials to see which drivers were out of date but didn't buy the license to actually download the driver) said that most of my drivers are current on my system.

The ones being out of date don't look too important, but here they are..

High Precision Event Timer (exact match: definitely out of date)
ATI I/O Communications Processor SMBus Controller (says might not be out of date, but throws a flag anyway)
ATI I/O Communications Processor LPC Controller (says might not be out of date, but throws a flag anyway)
PCI standard host CPU bridge (says might not be out of date, but throws a flag anyway)

Other than that, everything checks out. I'm not sure what else would cause such a terrible decrease in performance (nearly 50%). Can anyone please help me? Thus far, I have found no one on Google with as much of a decrease as me. I've seen decreases in the 100 - 500 points range, not the 4200 or more points range.. o_O

The biggest factor that explains why your scores between XP and Vista are so radically different is because the benchmark program you are using (you never said which) is likely written specifically for XP. The Vista scores cannot be taken as a true benchmark unless you use a benchmarking utility written specifically for Vista, such as PCMark Vantage (http://www.futuremark.com/products/pcmarkvantage/). You can then compare scores between yours and other Vista installations.

But unless you find a utility that can correctly test and recognize the differences between both XP and Vista, you cannot accurately compare scores.

Hello, and thank you for your reply! Also, my apologies. I used 3DMark06.

I agree with your main response on the programming differences between XP and Vista, but I'm looking online and seeing other people comparing their Vista and XP scores and losing maybe 100 to 400 points. They are accurately getting the "10% performance hit" where I'm getting over a 50% performance hit (in the program itself).

This is not a huge problem for me since I dual boot and play my games on my Windows XP installation regardless, however, as I said before, I do like to have things optimized so I was curious if anyone had any problems such as mine.

Can't seem to find this on the forums anymore, so I'm bumping it.

On Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:03:40 -0500, Locke wrote:
I looked at this wondering what you were using to benchmark your system,
but learned little - could you flesh it out?
--
Kris
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DFI Infinity Blood-Iron P35-T2RL | E2200Alen 2.2@xxxxxx TtP0310
| 2x1gb Mushkin HP 800@xxxxxx | MSI NX8600GTS-OC 256mb |
Raidmax RX530-SS psu | Vista Ult 32 SP1

It'd be the big bold 3DMark06 in my second post. :P

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 14:24:24 -0500, Locke wrote:
I tried to run it but it gave me a message that it needed DX9 and I'll be
damned if I'll take any chance of corrupting DX10 just to run that!!!!!
Soon enough something that will use DX10 will come along - if not from mad
onion, from somewhere else.
--
Kris
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DFI Infinity Blood-Iron P35-T2RL | E2200Alen 2.2@xxxxxx TtP0310
| 2x1gb Mushkin HP 800@xxxxxx | MSI NX8600GTS-OC 256mb |
Raidmax RX530-SS psu | Vista Ult 32 SP1

Well, Kris, first of all, you got the wrong version of 3DMark06. Lord knows there are so many of them, but you need the most recent, which is 1.1.0. The best mirror is here, Forums - OverclockingWiki.org - Downloads - 3DMark®06 Basic Edition (Build 1.1.0) Full Install (be sure to make a free account, however).

Secondly, there is a program from Futuremark that does benchmark DX10 systems, and it's called Vantage or something of the sort (Futuremark - Announcing 3DMark Vantage! has details). However, seeing as I'm on a DX9 card (GeForce 7950 GX2), I want the DX9 bencher.

I don't know how some Vista people are getting their benchmarks so much higher than mine with the same hardware, but alas, it's happening.

I'm an idiot, I know all about being specific when asking a tech question and I didn't even list my specs this time. I should lay off the beer. lol. That being said, I know I have the hardware to run Vista. I'm currently 5.4 of 5.9 Vista rating if that makes any difference.



Proc: AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Windsor 3.2GHz Socket AM2 125W Dual-Core

Mobo/Chipset: BIOSTAR A770 A2+ AM2+/AM2 AMD 770 ATX AMD

RAM: A-DATA 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel

HD: Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive



And yes, I'm totally up to date on my Windows updates (including SP1), and I don't have a hog of an anti-virus running (Windows Live! One Care). I installed Vista on Friday night, and it's now Monday night.

On Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:01:16 -0500, Locke wrote:
Thanks for that info!!! I did not know there was a new version out. I'm
torrenting it down as we speak. Let you know what I get...
--
Kris
----------
DFI Infinity Blood-Iron P35-T2RL | E2200Alen 2.2@xxxxxx TtP0310
| 2x1gb Mushkin HP 800@xxxxxx | MSI NX8600GTS-OC 256mb |
Raidmax RX530-SS psu | Vista Ult 32 SP1