Introduction

Today FPS doesn't matter! We'll, that's not true, but what we intend to find out is when it comes to graphics card drivers under Windows 7, who does a better job? The problem is that there's no graphics card that performs exactly the same when it comes to testing an ATI based one and an NVIDIA one.

What this means is that instead of saying that the NVIDIA card we used today scored X FPS and the ATI card scored Y FPS in the different operating systems, we'll be saying that the NVIDIA card performed X % and the ATI one Y % better or worse.

It really does sound confusing, but when you have a look at the graphs you should have a better understanding. Today what we want to find out is which driver is better when comparing the same driver version to its Windows Vista counterpart.

Questions we intend to answer include the following. Does ForceWare perform better in Vista or Windows 7? Does Catalyst perform better in Vista or Windows 7? Which driver gives us more positive gains overall?

Like our VGA performance test earlier this week, there isn't much else to say. We'll jump forward to the test setup to find out exactly what's going on and we'll also see what cards we're using before we get into our benchmark results.