ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT Performance with Windows Vista

So, nearly four months later, here we are at last, refreshed and reinvigorated, ready to see how ATI's high-end Radeon HD 2900 XT graphics board performs comparitively under Windows Vista and Windows XP Professional. Our DirectX 9 board testing in this fashion gave us some rather mixed results, and although there wasn't a great deal to tell between the two Operating Systems in a number of titles, a handful of bugs and performance issues meant that driver performance under Microsoft's latest OS very much gained a 'still room for improvement' tag.

So, will we see similar results from ATI's DirectX 10 parts? Several extra months of driver development and a part more specifically designed around Windows Vista's 3D graphics API would lead us to hope not. However, the proof is, as they say, in the pudding, so let's grab a handful of real-world game titles and see just how that pudding tastes with regard to ATI's Catalyst 7.8 driver on both Operating Systems.