Windows Vista Gaming Performance Reports

[Rob Williams]

Will using Vista put a damper on your gaming addiction? Using the Beta 2 this past summer, we saw rather large performance decreases. Now that Vista is finally out, have things been improved?

You can read the full article here and discuss it here.

Hey Rob-- just a noob question-- Can you have xp on one hard drive, and vista on another, and boot from one or the other depending on which OS you want to use?

[Rob Williams]

Hey man,

Yeah that's no problem at all. The bootloader knows what OS is stored where. It may become a problem in the future if you wanted to get rid of one of the installations though. Vista is very picky, so if you remove an OS or a partition, you would probably have to go into the Vista setup and repair the installation.

Vista makes a few simple things difficult, but it would not be a big deal to do what you want to do. Straightforward really.

Eek, my new rig is having Vista preinstalled. This really sucks. We can expect the new drivers to help, like a lot, though, right?

~Ibrahim~

[Rob Williams]

Don't worry about Vista if it's already on its way.. hopefully it will treat you better than it did me. It could prove better with a different GPU... I wish I had two G70s to test with. I noted HL2 specifically in the article, that's a game I had problems with ever since the RTM came out. What strikes me as odd is that some games perform far better than others.

I had another problem with the 8800GTX and the latest drivers as well though. My old school MMO had flickering textures big time...

I think in another month things should be improved a lot in the gaming department, just as long as these drivers can get sorted out. We don't even see SLI support yet, and the RTM has been out since November...

Do you honestly think that a system with 20293 marks in 3DMark01 isn't perfectly capable of running games from that era?

[Rob Williams]

Good point, I did word that poorly. Of course it's capable, the goal was to show "differences". I still wouldn't jump to say it would run all older games fine, since I ran into a few problems with a few older games that either ran sluggish, flickered or not at all.

Can you do test results on World of Warcraft?

[Rob Williams]

You are not the first person to request this... I don't play the game, but I will get ahold of it for future testing. So... I won't have results right away, sorry for the inconvenience.

You left something out of the article. Microsoft stripped DirectSound and DirectSound 3D from Vista, meaning that there is no hardware audio in any DirectSound game. No fancy effects or even surround sound. Just plain old stereo. I don't know why they did it, but there you have it.

This is the reason I won't be upgrading to Vista any time soon.

OMAC

Originally Posted by Rob Williams

Will using Vista put a damper on your gaming addiction? Using the Beta 2 this past summer, we saw rather large performance decreases. Now that Vista is finally out, have things been improved?

You can read the full article here and discuss it here.

Thanks for the article I have been looking for a VISTA/XP game comparison for a few weeks now.

My results are allot different then yours using the same drivers and version of VISTA as you, however my system setup is allot different and I was using in game HL2 Source’s video stress test.

Using lower settings in HL2 my end score on average was about 40FPS lower on the VISTA machine. Plus in game I also noticed that hitching that you are referring to, it was odd in that my FPS was around 60 but the screen would hitch like there was lag of some type, this however did NOT happen in XP. In XP I was able to use the MAX settings @ 1600X1200 and as I said above scored 40FPS higher. NVIDIA, MS or both need to do allot more tweaking if MS expect me to shell out 300+ dollars for DX10 and getting such horrible results.

I also wanted to point out that VISTA does crash more often then XP however its recovery system is like NTFS was to FAT 32, basically VISTA closes the app and it doesn’t affect what you were doing in VISTA it reminds me of OS-X and the way it handles applications. Also suing VISTA I had not had to reboot once installing any updates or AV software.

My setup,
*AMD64 FX 60 @ 2.9GHZ (Liquid Cooled)
*ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe
*1Gx2 CORSAIR TWINX2048-4000
*BFG 7900 GTX OC
WD Raptor 120GB 10Krpm

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

You left something out of the article. Microsoft stripped DirectSound and DirectSound 3D from Vista, meaning that there is no hardware audio in any DirectSound game. No fancy effects or even surround sound. Just plain old stereo. I don't know why they did it, but there you have it.

This is the reason I won't be upgrading to Vista any time soon.

OMAC

Thanks, I added an addendum regarding this.

Originally Posted by Unregistered

My results are allot different then yours using the same drivers and version of VISTA as you, however my system setup is allot different and I was using in game HL2 Source’s video stress test.

You have been hit worse than I have. 40FPS lower on avg is a huge deal. I didn't run the Stress Test that's built into HL2... I am not even sure I knew there was one. I'd give it a test now, but that computer is busy crunching numbers for another article.

I look forward to seeing other experiences... so far everyone I know who has used Vista RTM has had similar issues as us. I haven't heard from anyone who used an ATI card under it though.

" I also wanted to point out that VISTA does crash more often then XP "

Yes it seems so. I even had the "My Computer" crash on me yesterday, and MS Paint crash a few days prior to that.

Try using a motherboard that ACTUALLY has Vista drivers for it!
Then your benchmark would be more credible.

[Rob Williams]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

Try using a motherboard that ACTUALLY has Vista drivers for it!
Then your benchmark would be more credible.

Thanks for dropping by! The P5N-E SLI includes BETA Vista drivers, which were used during testing. I forgot to make mention of this, but it's more fun to receive comments like yours this way.

You should add a test of Microsoft Flight Simulator Deluxe with your results. It would be interesting to see if a game made for Vista is faster on Vista.

Dutch