Trackmania NationsTrackMania is a series of arcade racing games for Windows, which include stunting with cars, track-building, elements from puzzle games, as well as elements testing the players' dexterity. It was developed by the French team Nadeo for the PC. Instead of following the usual trend of choosing a set car and track for playing in the game, the TrackMania games allow the player to create their own tracks using a "Block" process in the spirit of the 1985 game Racing Destruction Set and the 1990 Brøderbund release, Stunts.
In contrast with most other racing games, the TrackMania series lets the player race a track as many times as he/she wants, until time runs out. He/she can choose to respawn at any time possible, due to landing upside down, going off the track, or even just because the start did not go optimally. Although in multiplayer games multiple cars race on the same track, they cannot actually collide or otherwise influence each other.
The ugly duckling in our games’ line-up, this is a free game (
go download it now!) based on stunt drive racing with fast cars. Nothing realistic about this game but pure arcade fun.
The outcome of these tests are quite interesting, GTX 280 drops ~10% going from XP to Vista, while the HD 4870 X2 gains ~6%, this brings these cards closer together. Performance with AA enabled is noticeably better under Vista for the X2.
For a detail view of the results, with AA scaling and XP -> Vista Scaling see
this table
...8xAA on ATI should be compared to 8xQAA on nV, not the 8xAA which is 4xMSAA based CSAA mode
...16xAA on ATI effectively turn the card into single chip card which can do 16xMSAA, since both chips render the same frame with different AA patterns
...16xAA on nV is 4xMSAA based CSAA mode and 16xQAA on nV is 8xMSAA based CSAA mode
So 16x and 8x comparisons in your graphs are far from being 'fair' or 'apples-to-apples', the 8xAA should have ATI 8xAA vs nV 8xQAA (8xQAA = 8xMSAA) and 16xAA shouldn't even exist since the GTX280 can't do 16xMSAA which is (practicly) what the HD4870X2 is doing by blending the same frame rendered twice with different AA patterns.