Wednesday January 7
 
15:50
 
Confused

Last night I replaced Vista Home Premium 64 with Vista Ultimate 64 on my home PC… and my Vista graphics score dropped 0.3 points.

Both installs were clean installs, both using the exact same drivers, both are SP1 and updated via Windows Update with all the latest updates, both are 64 bit – yet a difference of 0.3 points. I don’t get it. I tried playing about with drivers to get the score from Ultimate to match Premium but it doesn’t budge.

Update: No Longer Confused

I finally found what was causing the difference. From 0.3 points, 0.2 points was lost because I had a second monitor plugged it. Even though the second monitor wasn’t powered on, it seems like the display was being mirrored.

The final 0.1 was reclaimed when I removed Microsoft Dreamscene. I can’t think of anything more pointless than an animated desktop – if I’d know what it was, I would never have downloaded it in the first place. I’m surprised Dreamscene reduces the Vista graphics score by 0.1. I mean, if it makes a difference to performance, you’d think the score would drop by more than 0.1. And why should just having it installed make a difference? I’m not running it.

Final score:

Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ 5.2
Memory (RAM) 8.00 GB: 5.9
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics 3.5
Gaming graphics: 3323 MB Total available graphics memory 3.6
Primary hard disk: 36GB Free (70GB Total) 5.4
Windows Vista (TM) Ultimate

Base score 3.5
Determined by lowest subscore

System

Manufacturer: System manufacturer
Model System: Product Name
Total amount of system memory: 8.00 GB RAM
System type: 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores: 2

Storage

Total size of hard disk(s) 549 GB
Disk partition (C:) 36 GB Free (70 GB Total)
Disk partition (D:) 70 GB Free (199 GB Total)
Disk partition (E:) 129 GB Free (279 GB Total)

Graphics

Display adapter type: ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics
Total available graphics memory: 3323 MB
Dedicated graphics memory: 256 MB
Dedicated system memory: 0 MB
Shared system memory: 3067 MB
Display adapter driver version: 8.510.0.0
Primary monitor resolution: 1920×1200
DirectX version: DirectX 10

Network

Network Adapter: Realtek RTL8168C(P)/8111C(P) Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC (NDIS 6.0)
Network Adapter: Microsoft Tun Miniport Adapter

I’m pretty happy with that. The lower score is the graphics, and given that I’ve not played a single game in the last two years, that doesn’t bother me at all. Aero, HD playback, etc are all sweet.