May 27th, 2008
Vista screams past XP in gaming tests!
Sorry for the exclamation point in the headline, but my inner media critic, who is taking over for the second half of this post, insisted on it. It’s there for a reason, which I’ll get to shortly, I promise. [Update: My inner media critic is laughing out loud at the people who completely missed this reference and posted TalkBack comments complaining about the headline. "See," he says, "you should have used FOUR exclamation points. Then maybe they would have figured out the headline was deliberately sensational, to make a point about how important headlines and opening pages are to media coverage."]
Our technical press, like the mainstream media, sometimes has a hard time letting go of an idea it’s been pushing. That’s true even when new facts show that the old story wasn’t, strictly speaking, accurate. Or when facts on the ground have changed and maybe it’s time to alert your readers to the new realities.
Today’s case in point: I just got through reading ExtremeTech’s recent lab-based head-to-head comparison of gaming performance in Windows Vista SP1 and XP SP3. The conclusion was quite a surprise.
Here, I’m going to spoil it for you and go straight to the last page. After publishing the results of two synthetic benchmarks (PCMark05 and 3DMark06) and testing frame rates for three popular games (World in Conflict, Supreme Commander, and Crysis), ExtremeTech concluded:
As many a tech analyst predicted, Windows Vista’s gaming performance conundrum has largely been solved, and it was mainly due to early graphics drivers.
In fact, I’d been planning to run a few other gaming tests, but the results from these were so uninteresting that further work didn’t seem merited. Love it or hate it, Vista is performing far better than it used to.
And the last word?
It took about a year and a half, but the performance gap between Vista and its forerunner has finally evaporated.
Wow! (Insert ironic reference to failed Vista marketing slogan here.) That’s news, isn’t it? A magazine devoted to hardcore gamers and tech enthusiasts does a bunch of tests and proves that Windows Vista is every bit as fast as XP, on identical hardware. It just needed a year’s worth of driver updates and a service pack to get there. (And in the run-up to Vista didn’t everyone say you should wait for Service Pack 1? Don’t they always say that?)
In fact, ExtremeTech found that Vista actually outperformed XP in three of their six game tests, and scored dead even in the other three. Back when I was a magazine editor, that would have been a cover story with a big, bold cover line:
Vista screams past XP!
A bit sensationalist, perhaps, but guaranteed to get a reader to click through to the end. Or maybe, if you’re not willing to give up on the Vista-bashing, you’d prefer this cover line:
Wow! This pig really can fly!
But not at ExtremeTech, where the headline reads like the Estonian lab guys snuck in to the editorial cube farm and wrote it while the editors were out to lunch:
Gaming Performance:
Windows Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3
I almost didn’t get past the first page of this needlessly chopped-up story (four paragraphs on the opening page, only three paragraphs on page 3, etc.). I guess in the interests of fairness I should insert a page break here. So go, read the second half, in which my inner media critic takes over completely.
Keep reading: Why editing matters –>
Pages: 1 2
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Ed Bott's Microsoft Report via Email alerts or RSS.
| 05/28/08
