Cygon’s Blog

Since it seems like Vista is finally running stable on my new system, I decided to do some benchmarks. My older system kept crashing all the time with Vista due to incompatibilities between my Creative Labs Audigy 2 soundcard and the NVidia NForce 4 chipset. Somehow the XP driver could live with those incompatibilities but the Vista one goes mad and causes BSODs.

The test system is an Athlon64 X2 6000+ with an Asus Crosshair (NForce 590 SLI) board, running 4 GB in 2 OCZ ReaperX EPP EB DIMMs. The graphics card is a PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro 512 MB and the sound card is a Creative Labs Audigy 2 Platinum.

My benchmark will compare Windows Vista Ultimate x64 and Windows XP Professional x86. For the benchmarking, I used PCMark 05, which is a 32 bit application and needs Vista’s 32-bit-on-64-bit emulation layer, referred by Microsoft as WoW (Windows-on-Windows), so the comparison isn’t even strictly fair.

Both systems were fresh installs with the latest updates and drivers. Additionally, Windows Vista had Visual C# 2005 Express, Visual C++ 2008 Express, NAnt, Subversion and various development tools installed, whilst Windows XP had Need for Speed: Pro Street and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance installed. None of the systems had been defragmented before.

Test	Vista (x64)	XP (x86)
Boot	36 s	22 s
PCMark 05	6618 PCMarks	6602 PCMarks

This may look like Windows Vista is holding its own in PCMark 05, but actually, it isn’t. Check out the detailed results to see that the graphics card literally won the battle for Vista. Whereas XP does alpha blending in software, Vista uses Direct3D for transparency, resulting in a mad number of transparent windows being rendered.

Test	Vista (x64)	XP (x86)
HDD - XP Startup	9.15 MB/s	10.15 MB/s
Physics and 3D	183.0 FPS	226.1 FPS
Transparent Windows	5296.28 Windows/s	898.65 Windows/s
3D - Pixel Shader	316.44 FPS	330.54 FPS
Web Page Rendering	2.67 Pages/s	3.25 Pages/s
File Decryption	52.09 MB/s	52.45 MB/s
Graphics Memory - 64 Lines	1007.04 FPS	1843.43 FPS
HDD - General Usage	7.33 MB/s	7.42 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / Audio Compression	2689.71 KB/s	2955.91 KB/s
Multithreaded Test 1 / Video Encoding	443.5 KB/s	434.99 KB/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Text Edit	138.69 Pages/s	173.68 Pages/s
Multithreaded Test 2 / Image Decompression	33.99 MPixels/s	34.35 MPixels/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Compression	5.5 MB/s	6.21 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / File Encyption	27.96 MB/s	30.75 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / HDD - Virus Scan	38.86 MB/s	43.25 MB/s
Multithreaded Test 3 / Memory Latency	12.98 MAccesses/s	12.02 MAccesses/s

So, the overall result is that Windows Vista Ultimate x64 is marginally slower than Windows XP Professional x86 for me. Boot time was measured from pressing the return key in my boot menu up to when windows was fully loaded (for Vista, that meant the side bar was completely running and for XP, that meant the desktop and all icons had appeared). Vista had the sidebar with various gadgets, including the CPU meter gadget, running during the whole benchmark.

On my old system, I had been running Windows Vista Ultimate x86. I didn’t run any benchmarks besides measuring the booting time. Interestingly, Vista booted faster than XP back then while now it doesn’t. Therefore, I’d really like to add Windows Vista Ultimate x86 to the chart, but I don’t have the nerve to reinstall my Vista partition from scratch again.

Last weekend, it was finally time for an upgrade to my 1 1/2 years old gaming rig. Amongst other things, I switched from an Asus A8N-E (NForce 4 Ultra) board to an Asus Crosshair (NForce 590 SLI).

This alone solved a lot of issues I was having with my PC. It appears that the NForce 4 chipset has serious problems with heavy bus traffic. If, for example, you’re copying a large file, NForce 4 may fail to deliver the next chunk of audio data to your sound card in time and you’ll hear skips or ugly scratches whilst listening to music.

You can find several references to this bus priorization issue of you google for NForce 4 bus issues. For example:

NForce4 on Wikipedia
Issues With nForce4 Mobo and X-FI Cards
X-FI + Nforce4 = Pops/Hicks/Hisses

The important parts:

We have observed through direct observation of the PCI bus on the nVidia nForce 4 motherboards that when the crackle symptoms are occuring, the Soundblaster X-Fi card PCI bus master memory requests for audio data are being held off (not serviced) for very long intervals.

We have observed peak holdoffs of up to 2 milliseconds in some cases. This is unusual chipset behavior that is beyond the ability of a hardware audio accelerator to compensate for in its internal buffering. The SoundBlaster X-Fi tolerance for these PCI holdoffs is approximately 120 microseconds peak holdoff, with a 1 microsecond average holdoff.

and

Further to the reported cases of crackling issues reported by owners of Sound Blaster X-Fi cards, we have extensively tested both Creative and non-Creative audio cards on motherboards where the issues were reported in an effort to isolate the root cause.

The findings indicate that circumstances causing these audio glitches only arise on Nvidias nForce 4 range of motherboards, with the exception of the newest n590 board which does not exhibit this issue.

The Sound Blaster X-Fi card was designed to meet PCI bus standards and tolerances and this is the only range of motherboards that operate in this manner.

Here’s a list of issues I attribute to the NForce 4 chipset:

• Games that load data in the background momentarily skip a frame or two. As an up to date example, NForce 4 owners playing Need for Speed: Pro Street will experience the game making tiny little pauses while they drive around the track. Enough to completely destroy every sense of speed and to skip past the exact moment you need to turn into a bend.

• You can either watch a movie or defragment your hard drive, but not both. If you try to listen to music or watch a movie during hard drive defragmentation, the sound will hang, skip or scratch every few seconds.

• Your mouse cursor becomes jumpy or temporarily unmovable when you copy large files. As in all the other points, whenever heavy disk activity hogs the system bus, something goes wrong. In this case, the USB devices seem to not be polled in a timely manner anymore.

• Cutscenes played by games while at the same time loading data will hang, jump and have sound distortions. NForce 4 owners playing Call of Duty 4, for example, will have serious trouble understanding the mission briefings played while a level loads. Slower drives might merely destroy the game’s atmosphere.

Now I’ve got the NForce 590 SLI chipset. All of my issues went away with the upgrade:

• The loading screen in Supreme Commander rotates slick and fluid.
• The cutscenes in Call of Duty 4 are intelligible.
• Need for Speed: Pro Street gives me a sense of speed.
• I can watch a movie when I defragment my drive.
• I can use my mouse while I copy large files.

I’ve never been so happy about an upgrade. All of the little issues I was having — gone in an instant.

There are users reporting the issue with the NForce 590 SLI, but all of them have two graphics cards installed and are only experiencing this during heavy usage (eg. 3DMark). I don’t plan on using SLI anyway (I just wanted to get the Asus “Crosshair” :p), so even if the issue is only gone because bus throughput has been dramatically increased, I’m happy

Quality doesn’t seem to be what quality once was…

Installed the game, launched it and did the obligatory video settings adjustment. When I jumped from page to page, one part of my settings was kept, the other discarded. At least until I found the little ‘apply’ button in the lower right, which was only there on some pages, but not all.

I launched the campaign, was about to finish the training course when the game crashed back to the desktop. Wow…

Installing the latest ATI drivers seemed to help, at least I now was able to finish the training course.

This training course needs to be done as quickly as possible and starts with you having to climb down a rope. Wanting to improve on my time, I did the clever thing: I jumped, not climbed down the rope. But someone yelled “you missed the rope!” and the screen faded out. Interestingly, the game had autosaved just then. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in, I’m falling, “you missed the rope!”, fade out. Fade in…

Starting the campaign all over once more, I did the training course in about 20 seconds which seemed to please the instructor, so I continued without repeating the darn thing. Next, I’m greeted by a BSOD showing ATI-something.dll as the source. Great, reboot, launch game again, Campaign, Resume, play on.

Went through the ship mission, lots of scripted action, feels even more like a movie than Call of Duty 2, but the gameplay looks rather poor. Finished the mission, jumped into the helicopter, BSOD, reboot.

Watched in 1st person as the president of some small country being driven through a town by terrorists, lots of unarmed people being shot on the way through, then I’m shot in the face, BSOD, reboot.

Second mission, helped some rebels, stormed a town, rescued some informant, BSOD, reboot.

Third mission, stormed another town in search for terrorist leader who was broadcasting propaganda speeches, stormed his building, he wasn’t there, stormed some more town, some TV station, turns out the speech was recorded, mission end, BSOD, reboot.

Launched COD4, Campaign, Resume… wait, where’s the Resume button? Uh-oh. My savegame was gone with the last BSOD. So now I can enjoy starting right at the *beep* training course again.

Oh, well, come to think about it, that Timeshift icon on my desktop suddenly looks so much more appealing. Maybe I’ll play it through once more instead… and if I wanted to, I could play it from the beginning to the end in one big session without any hangs, crashes-to-desktops or BSODs

After all the problems I was having in Vista, I decided to try one more clean install from scratch. Only this time, I did not install any drivers at all.

• Windows Update worked like a charm. Everything was updated, the Windows Modules Installer error never happened.

• The system was rock-solid throughout the week. No more page faults, nothing.

I have to note that Windows Update did actually pull in drivers for my Audigy 2, but apart from the horrifyingly bad sound quality, at least they seem to do no harm to the system. Unlike the drivers you can get from Creative right now, they’re WHQL certified. Maybe the WHQL certification is something I should look be on the look out for in the future.

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Another thing I tried this week was the old Starship Troopers game in Windows XP. I originally couldn’t play the game because it kept freezing my system after about 3 minutes of play time. But even with the latest patches and a new system, the game still froze my system just like in the past.

This time, by mere chance, I discovered some of the developers recommending to turn off Sound Hardware Acceleration in the Control Panel to some forum users. Tried it and, well, worked like a charm, I’ve almost completed the game now.

The same was happening to me in Bet on Soldier. Maybe, just maybe, I should give it another try with Sound Hardware Acceleration turned off, too…

Lesson learned:

Every single problem I was having has been Creative Labs’ fault.

Throw away your Creative Labs equipment and do not ever buy their stuff again.