Microsoft Corp. has released yet another patch that should improve performance of three-dimensional games in Windows Vista environment. Nvidia Corp. has already started to recommend the hotfix to its customers along with a new beta driver package. However, it is unclear whether low performance and abnormal behavior is limited to Nvidia’s hardware and software only and does not affect ATI Radeon graphics products.

Microsoft explained that existing games and other graphics applications frequently allocate virtual memory for a copy of the video memory resources that the application uses. However, this is no longer necessary with Windows Vista, which has a special Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) manager that ensures that the content of every video memory allocation is maintained across display transitions. Still, the new operating system (OS) has a mechanism to emulate the behavior of previous versions of the OS for compatibility issues.

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