In a posting at WorldCAD Access, it was noted that in tests, some of the popular CAD (Computer Aided Design) programs ran from 80%-98% slower in Vista than they did in XP. Wow! What could possibly cause this monstrous decline in performance? This is worth a deeper look.

Evan Yares posted an article at AECnews.com clarifying the issue a bit. He points out that the original article took information from Tom’s Hardware Guide benchmarks, and that only one of the programs displayed this unexpected result. He then sums up the problem as follows:

“…out of the box, Vista supports OpenGL as a software layer sitting on top of Direct3D, creating a nasty performance problem. The solution is to use the installable client drivers provided by either NVIDIA or ATI (both of which include high-performance OpenGL support), rather than the “certifiedâ€? drivers that come with Vista. The authors of the Tom’s Hardware article didn’t do this.”

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t issues with CAD programs, or programs in many other categories as well, when running in Vista. What it does suggest is that Vista is young, and Vista drivers are even younger. You can expect issues like this until the software and the drivers mature a bit. Until then, don’t panic and assume Vista is the end of the world! Besides, if you’re using your computer in a production environment, you need to test all of your programs on Vista before even thinking about upgrading. For most, that upgrade window probably won’t come for another 6 months, so relax, and don’t stick that Vista DVD in your production machine!