How long until the "Vista" thing starts to fly?

I was wondering how long it'll take until we'll see Vista drivers for all ASUS notebooks, and not have to sip through download pages for different models in order to gather the right drivers for our notebook.

I personally have an A6KT and don't have the possibility of upgrading to Vista. Nevertheless i was thinking the last few days if i should pick up Home Premium x64 for my laptop. I was immediately bummed by lack of Vista drivers.

What do you think? Should i just buy it and hope for the best regarding drivers or is there no way i should consider this at least until ASUS has model-specific drivers up on the download page?

 

I'd give it a couple of months.
This is always the case with new OS's, and as someone kindly posted a while ago, it looks like xp is performing twice as fast as vista as far as games go at the moment. What card do you have?

 

have a look for the vista drivers thread in this very asus forum, its got practically all the drivers you'll need ....


insane

 

The Barnard - unfortunately you're completely right about game performance under Vista. While it isn't always the case, depending from game to game, i've noticed that ATi has at the moment more stable drivers. I personally run Vista Ultimate on my Desktop, with an nV card and i get BSOD's all over the place (i get a BSOD when entering Media Center even!) not to mention that the few games i played are unplayable on Vista at the moment.
And to answer your question i have an ATi X1600 card on the notebook. Truth be told, i wouldn't consider switching to Vista for games, but for practical reasons. It does seem faster, especially because of SuperFetch. And that combined with a 1GB flash stick can make a laptop really fast.

Insane i know there's about everything i need in that forum, but i guess i'll have to wait some time for the system drivers as i have a SiS chiset.
If i had those i'd pick up Vista Home Premium in a heart beat

BTW, is it true that only Ultimate edition has a fully functional Media Center?

 

I've had maaaaany bad experiences with ati, in particular with the drivers and the lack of support lol. How do you find vista anyway?

 

newegg.com

amazon.com

lol

not very hard

 

nVidia drivers at the moment are total garbage, I think the best they have is beta and it doesn't cover any of their SLi setups or anything extra. The ATI ones are WHQL certified and work fine, gaming performance is a bit worse in Vista since it doesn't have all the enhancements that have been made to XP over the years, it will get better tho. Definitely wouldn't switch to Vista if you are using an nV card...not till they at least release a final driver at least...

For my part I've always had many bad experiences with nV, the only cards I ever owned that burnt out (even with no overclocking) were nVidia ones... but what I say about the nV drivers is not from my experience but from 10+ online reviews/articles that could be quoted - the ATI info is based on my experience and another 10+ reviews..

Cat

 

you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe ALL video drivers in Vista are WHQL certified, as they would not work if they were not.

 

That is not true, you can install unsigned drivers. The signed driver restriction is only on the x64 version and even that can be bypassed using a boot flag.

 

According to Tom's Hardware DirectX games seem to be within about 3% of XP, so I wouldn't worry about Gaming on Vista; unless of course you want to play an OpenGL game, such as Unreal Tournament. Vista doesn't support OpenGL, so you'll take huge performance hits on those games.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/index.html

In another article that compared a variety of video cards (maybe at anandtech?... but I don't remember for sure) I saw several tests where directX games actually performed better on Vista depending on the card being used. It seems that the driver implementation is better for some video cards than others... but the difference between XP and Vista is always VERY SMALL except in OpenGL games.