Vista - gamer's alert - I am sitting on the fence

PC Format (UK) have just reviewed Vista.

They notice it is much slower than XP for gaming.

Bare in mind, this is going to be down to drivers/patches, etc. So, these speeds will probably go up.

On the test rig they had:
Doom 3 - XP= 78.7 FPS - Vista= 24.7 FPS

That is one hell of a difference to me. Even running in XP compatible mode it only gained about half a FPS.

Vista sucked in other areas too - CPU Multimedia Integer and Floating point iSSE2 tests.

So, I am now baring this in mind when buying Vista. It may be only really good for future gaming. Who's to say that developers are going to patch old games up to Vista?

Remember the 64 bit saga?

This has now really made me want to sit on the fence over Vista.

Nah. I would not go by any review until Vista is released. Not sure all the debug code has been turned off just yet. Plus, ATI and Nvidia have not released decent drivers yet. So it's hard to compare the difference to XP and vista.

I'm not a MS fanboy, but I think Vista is a huge improvement over XP in all areas. Frames per second might be lacking, but the new DX10 gfx cards should fix that.

Puki, I read your thread about your new pc...sorry to hear about the problems you had. I hope everything gets settled.

Jason

There are 2 of those theads - the other one is huge too.

I would wait till things mature - it's always cheaper and more bug/issue free.
I think it would be nice if thee were no new version of windows for 10 years or so - that way we could actually see and benefit from the improvements in hardware. To the end user using a PC today is no faster in perception now than in the days of Windows 3.0 and the 486 DX66.
Every advance in hardware and processing speed is cancelled out by an ever demanding and bloated OS.

The early adopters always get the worst deal. Thought that was common knowledge right about now.

Early Adoption Of Vista is better than using Linux or MacOS.

I installed Vista on my machine yesterday, and it looks amazing, but a little slower than XP on the same machine.

I also installed Office 2007 (WOW thats great package)

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iam not sure but seams like voidrpg still run at 30 fps on Xp and on VIsta cause i locked it to 30 fps :)

I am running MS Train Simulator on Vista right now and it is just about the same speed as on XP. Same experience with other games. I did not try Doom 3, though. Can't be bothered to install it.

Barney

Well I jolly-well suggest you install it. This minute.

Bah, waiting for SP1 before getting a better notebook, might as well try finding a gamer's notebook that can handle the same speeds with Vista than the current XP counterparts, if not more so.

On my PC, Vista seems to be quicker than XP for general use. I haven't thrown any games at it yet though...

Quick Q - how come everybody's got Vista already when its not released til January 2007?

I'm an MSDN subscriber. It was available to download at the end of November.

I wasn't planning on jumping solely to Vista just yet. I'd planned to dual boot for a while, but I somehow managed to completely screw up my XP partition and ended up just sticking with Vista.

*sulk*

Installing new hard drive in a few days. Was gonna give it a go.

Stupid Microsoft. :/

Vista IS faster than XP for general use, so long as you switch off Aero Glass and have more than 1 gig. I was shocked to reinstall XP and notice all the dodgy delays I thought were down to my previous XP install being a bit old...

Secondly, DX and OpenGL speeds are entirely down to drivers. nVidia are more likely to have better results than ATI, who has been a bit behind their game. I'd be surprised if PC Format were using ATI cards on a game that, on release, was completely unplayable on ATI cards.

In my experience from the betas and release candidates, OpenGL speeds were comparable to XPs, maybe a little faster, while DX was noticeably down, but not that noticeably - tho of course Doom 3 is OpenGL. This was with XP drivers, however, by the time nVidia released Vista drivers for my GeForce 6600, I got more memory and Vista decided it would crash while booting up every time I put the 6600 in (yes I checked the memory), so after that I was stuck with XP drivers for a GeForce 3.

I've heard ups and downs about nVidia's drivers since then, with more downs than ups and ATI have only -just- released a beta set of Vista drivers. So a review before the Vista release in January is a bit premature - PC Format need their hands spanked.

DirectX games are running OK on Vista. I have ATI X1950XTX with ATI Vista RTM drivers and so far I can't say that DX games are slower. Grey Alien's "Holiday Bonus" runs without a hitch so DX powered BlitzMax games are OK. OpenGL games are running slowly or not at all.

Barney

The thing is most people don't buy windows, the latest version just comes with thier high-street shop bought PC, or upgraded via thier business. So really you dont' have much choice when its a big new roll out (as opposed to ME and XP64 which ran along side other versions)

Well I have 1 gig of RAM and Aero Glass turned on and it still seems considerably faster to me (and my colleagues).


I'm sure I read somewhere that Microsoft said that ATI's Vista drivers were the most mature (of the two leading manufacturers). I can't find the article now though, so it's possible I'm wrong on this.


Not true. ATI's first publicly available Vista beta drivers were released on 2nd November 2006 (iirc). I've been using them for the last month! Their latest beta drivers were released on 13th December. I agree that PC Format using beta drivers for performance tests is a bit naff.

As i understand it Ati/Amd hardly did anything to make opengl work yet in there drivers, directx though is working as it should.

Vista is slower than XP? Well I never saw that coming! (Obviously)

What the hell is "general use" of an operating system? Staring at the desktop? And how do you measure how quickly Vista does that?

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No.

then how do you define it Amon?

I'd define it as business apps and printing grandma's cookie recipe. High end gaming rigs are not general use, otherwise high end cards would be put in generally available machines more often.

Googling the net for infrmation, reading and sending emails, downloading pOrn.

But neither of that uses the OS! It uses web browsers, e-mail clients and BitTorrent programs. How can you measure the efficiency of an OS based on the applications you run on it? That's just absurd!

Don't be naff, Mikkel. General use obviously involves the use of the average's user's computer on a daily basis. Solitaire, surfing the net, mail etc and your occassional Office app.

For me, it's anything -but- playing a game (a proper game, none of that solitare crap).


Uhh, by making the same measurements with the same programs in both OS's? I'd have thought that obvious.


I didn't need to. After reinstalling XP the results were obvious. I have Outlook 2007 in my Startup folder. In Vista, Outlook would pop up and be usable within 30 seconds of the desktop appearing (probably much less) - with XP, it's at least 1 minute, perhaps 2 if Avast! is updating itself. This pertains to everything I do in XP, although the times apps take to start after the system is fully booted is harder to time, but it's still noticeable.

So what you're telling me is that Vista makes your harddrive faster?

> Staring at the desktop? And how
> do you measure how quickly Vista does that?

Interestingly on all the XP machines I have, if I leave the machine staring at the desktop for 30mins or longer. When I come back I have a 10-30 second wake up delay whereby XP takes its time to get working up to speed. Of course with XP as complicated as it is, who in their right mind would begrudge it from having a little sleep whilst it's waiting for your return? bless its little cotton socks!

> So what you're telling me is that Vista
> makes your harddrive faster?

No stupid! It makes your harddrive WORK faster, you gotta give these new harddrives a good exercise to brush away the cobwebs pushing around those 8gigs of bloat whilst your PC is turned on. We can't let next generation hardware and storage space become too large/fast now can we?

.

The era of good OSes is far behind us.

Perhaps Linux and MacOS are less bad than Windows, but it doesn't matter which OS you use. I haven't encountered any good ones for a long time now. And it seems they are only getting worse.

As for Vista. I expect the biggest crap ever created, as is common for MicroSoft. I did read articles in which Windows Vista is pimping new features that make it better and more stable (features Linux and MacOS have for years right now).

That FPS diffrence Puki noted, is indeed ridiculous and unacceptable. But for now, I will first look to Vista and then comment it. My boss wants to install it on new PCs as soon as it's released, so we'll see then.

In my spare time, I like to follow this litte project: www.skyos.org ;)

I couldn't connect to that site. :-(

yeah, sometimes that happens.. it's been really bad lately, after they changed their DNS thingy...
You just have to try later..

Nope, I'm telling you Vista is faster. My hard drive operates at the same speed regardless of what OS is telling it to do things.


While Bob was one of the only flops they'll admit to, ME is far superior to Vista in that regard.


What's rediculous is that a well known magazine is giving an unreleased product a review using beta drivers.

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hahahahahahahahhahahahahah.......jajajajajajjajajajajaj

Thankyou Bregors

Believe it or not H&K, but it did happpen to me that even that worked as slow as getting shit out of a bottle. Cut short, took lots of time. But I guess that's what you get for installing Red Hat 9 on an older machine.

@Bregors: In full screen mode it makes little difference, in windowed mode there would be a slight hit due mostly to the extra vidmem being used by Glass. This doesn't apply for OpenGL of course, for which Glass is always turned off =]

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