Is XP better for gaming?

I read alot of reviews for vista and most everybody says it can't run any old xp games. Can I upgrade to XP or will microsoft not allow me to go to a lower os?

 

XP is better for games from a performance viewpoint.

Many older games do not work with Vista because Microsoft thoughtfully took out DirectSound support. And for some reason Vista has terrible backwards compatibility.

I imagine you will have to buy your own copy of XP; your copy of Vista is OEM and can only be used on the notebook you have. You may consider dual-booting with XP and Vista.

 

I could buy it from dell. Would I need the Windows XP Professional Edition with Service Pack 2 - Upgrade($199) or the Windows XP Professional Edition with Service Pack 2?($299) or could I just buy the home edition upgrade?

 

Orrrrr you could ask a friend who goes to college and get a copy for cheap as dirt.

 

I don't see any sense buying it from Dell, you can get an OEM copy for far less than that.

 

Recommend XP if you're going to try gaming. Vista is only required for DirectX 10, of which there are now DirectX 10 games except for Halo 2. Not only that DirectX 10 effects will cripple a powerful desktop let alone the 8400m GS in your laptop.

 

Vista has its merits too, there are some games that are "Vista Only" and the performance gap between the two OS's is closing almost daily.

The big wave of info that spread the web about how vista sucks vs xp in games spread near the start of the OS but those of us deep into the computer info line know that that gap is not there like it was but general public knowledge still thinks it is.

You can find several benchmarks just comparing new video card drivers for Vista cutting the gap in half instantly, then several other small improvments add into that. There are even some games that run BETTER on Vista than XP.

That all said, it sounds like I am super pro Vista and advertising it, I am not because the issue is compatability. Any newer game should be great on Vista but if your an old timer like me who has a collection of old games you may want to get a copy of XP. I would still use Vista as my primary os tho and just have XP as a dual boot option.

The game I play right now is Worms Armageddon, it wont work in Vista, but I just use Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 and run a virtual copy of XP inside Vista and it works perfectly like that.

 

At the moment, there's no clear need for Vista for gaming whether for compatability or performance. While Virtual PC 2007 may work for a simple game like Worms, any other fairly intense 3D game will suffer severe performance degredation. Plus note the OP GPU is the 8400m GS which will struggle as it is.

Dual boot is the best way to go if you prefer Vista for general desktop stuff, but absolutely not required for gaming (and not recommended by yours truly).

 

A few games so far like halo 2 and shadowrun are Vista only, I wont be too surprised to see alot more titles show up that are Vista only in the near future if MS gets tied in with other video game companies.

I just don't see any reason to stay with XP when Vista is replacing it.

I know there are "hacks" out there to play both on XP but thats no different than just d/l a free copy of Vista and XP in the first place so dont use that as a counter argument.

I personally have tried no less than 8 games on both my laptop and desktop in both Vista and XP and I had no reason to boot into XP to play them, the most I saw was about 2 fps difference average.

 

I've been using the Vista ultimate trial on my new desktop for the past week, and quite honestly, while I'm trying to like it, I have to say that compared to XP, it sucks. It's not that there's a huge performance difference - though I'd probably get a few extra FPS in Crysis on XP, (which could go a long way), it's the fact that it's such a complete pain in the ass when it comes to doing things that XP did flawlessly. Nightmare to find programs that aren't listed on the desktop? Check. Nightmare to get a dedicated soundcard working? Check. Nightmare to get DirectSound games playing without paying Creative 10 dollars to get something you should already have? Check.

The list goes on. Microsoft screwed up a lot of things with the Vista transition. There are a few cool adjustments that could be called improvements, most of them simply aesthetic changes, but the differences seem to be about 20% good and 80% bad.

That said, Vista is the future. It's nigh impossible to buy a new machine without it, and some real-world circumstances are going to start putting pressure to upgrade (the college I'm transferring to next month requires Vista Business + or XP Pro to live on campus). Games will start taking advantage of its particulars and will start performing better - and DX 10 will actually be worthwhile someday. While XP is still the superior OS, and I wouldn't advise anyone to upgrade to Vista yet if they don't have to, buying a fresh copy of XP probably isn't as good of a long-term investment as spending about the same on a copy of Vista.

 

I don't know where people are getting all these compatablily issues from. I was brain washed before ever trying vista from reading all the neg hype. I've been really impressed by it and would never go back to xp. I have some random old games that run fine on vista but won't run on xp.

 

I didnt like Vista at all Nalasco either at first, you could probably find some of my first post saying how I see no point to it other than the interface change (wich I didnt like at first either) but after using it consistently for a few weeks I learned to like it, and over time me and my wife both have grown to like it more than XP and dont even want to use XP anymore. You cant give a fair view of it until you have had more time with it.

 

Actually, in my system, my games run better in Vista than XP. Even old games from 2001. Perhaps it's because Vista has newer Nvidia driver while XP has one year old driver that's never been updated from Sony. The unofficial update from laptopvideo2go doesn't work with my GeForce Go 7400. Too many problems.

 

Addressing the question directly. Yes, If you want to play older games or have a low end graphics card or low memory then XP is definitely better than Vista. Also keep in mind the way Vista handles Direct Sound Hardware Acceleration, as in there is none for sound cards unless you use OpenAL or Creative Alchemy.

All the new fancy windows graphics and options in Vista are pointless in games as you will never see them while playing and may see a decrease graphics performance and more hardrive swapping due to increase memory and resource use by Vista.

The only benefit would be DX10 which adds more refined visual details. but at this stage its a no as crysis in DX10 is only applicable to like 1% of gamers out there with 8800 GTS in SLI and for other games most people find DX9 looks fine and runs a lot faster. One option is dual-booting Xp/Vista so you can migrate when Vista/DX10 is up to better standards and more DX10 games are released.

 

agree with most of the stuff u guys mentioned about the gaming aspect, but for me the main "negative" part about vista is its "innovative" interface and such. i just don't like the whole fancy, future-oriented stuff that i don't need. i like browsing stuff in xp far more than in vista, imo. i know, i know, takes time to get used to, doesn't it, but i'm not ready yet

 

When I bought my desktop gaming rig probably six or seven months ago now, I ordered Vista 64-bit only with it. Figuring I might as well get the new OS if I'm building a new rig. That was a mistake.

I *TRIED* to use it for months and tried to like it but it changed so many interface things that didn't need to be changed. Just so many things that were not necessarily wrong with it but weren't quite right. I liked the Aero desktop and such, but that was about it.

Several games I installed wouldn't work or never placed any icons anywhere to be found.

I had to buy a new copy of XP (OEM). Maybe this was MS's plan all along. Get everyone to buy into the hype with Vista then turn around and buy another copy of XP.

 

You should not have got 64bit, thats more of the problem than Vista. I have triple boot actually on my laptop and have found that 99% of the things I thought didn't work in Vista when I switched directly to Vista 64 just like you, actually work perfectly in 32bit Vista.

It was a matter of pure luck when doing my review of the C90S because I did benchmarks for all 3 OS's (XP, Vista x86, Vista x64) a few of the games/programs that I had tried and didnt work on Vista 64 on my desktop worked perfectly in 32bit vista on my laptop, then I tried them on Vista 64 on my laptop to see they didnt work again.

All of those things were older programs/games, still tho I realized the compatibility issue with Vista that is all over the web is not really there for the most part in x86 Vista. I have... 2 games that wont run in Vista correctly out of 100's.

 

i have to agree with most of what viciousXUSMC says. i play games like patrician 3, aoe1, MOHAA, worms 2 etc......that work absolutely fine on vista.

if your laptop comes with xp, i can't see much point in getting vista yet. and if your laptop comes with vista, i can see no point in getting xp as well. on CoH, i get a 2 fps difference at max settings.

but as someone else said, if you have low ram, xp would be a better option, but its probably cheaper to buy more ram.

 

Honestly, there is a 5-10% performance difference between Vista and XP once both are tweaked.

XP is faster no doubt... but not by much.

Vista has its share of annoying bugs... and frankly their dropping the old sound API without making an emulation routine is one of the worst. Yes, I know it was intentional... but in this case the "feature" is a bug and not the other way around.

Vista can be made to look like XP if you prefer... don't like the look?
Change it.

Vista IS better at deflecting infections and is quite good at catching things you don't normally pay attention to... yes you are going to have to google some filenames to figure out what you just denied... yes this is going to be annoying... but it is ultimately good for you and the entire computing population.

Time to learn basic computer security... if you don't know what it is... its denied. If you don't know anything, you don't get to use anything.

Do your part, decrease the surplus zombie population.

 

For gaming, vista has been nothing but great to me, and it even plays my Starcraft on my notebook on Vista Ult 64 bit. Performance hasn't decreased at all on my hardware, I don't even notice any performance drop in anything..

Some things like networking are ALOT better in XP than vista. Vista is just BASIC, which I hate, and it complicates the process of making Static IP's, and sharing internet through your computer directly linked to another..

 

more like vistAIDS, get away from it like the real thing. XP PRO SP2/SP3 is the best OS for gaming(and everything else) period.

- Hi, i'm PC
- Hi, i'm MAC
- Hey PC, what software can you use?
- Every kind of sotware.

- Hi, i'm PC
- Hi, i'm MAC
- Hey PC, what game cans you play?
- All of them.

thread over.

 

I beg to differ... networking is better in most cases in Vista.

Note bugs aside (the whole long goodbye thing) Vista has been very easy to connect and reconnect to various things...

I have both static and dynamic IP's at work and at home as I am required to move from network to network and require specific internal IPs to manage internal devices... Vista just works... pretty much every time... XP required a great deal more twiddling to make it work under the same conditions.

 

Man, i wish i could use "sotware" on my mac... oh well...

all my games i "cans" plays are ins windows, though, which i duals boots intos.

 

Sorry that your required to dual boot, spending tons of extra cash on the second OS, and tons of extra hard drive space for two OS's when it's unneccisary because there isn't anything a mac can do that windows can't.

<--- certified mac hater

 

well, if there was only one operating system, there would still be people that would whine how unfair and monopolistic it is! lol

 

Hm, so is it smarter to get Vista, if you are going to buy a laptop with 8600M GT? Or will the driver come for XP aswell?

And let's say if I will get Vista, laptop specs are T7250 (2Ghz) 2gb ram, 8600M GT with 512mb and screen res will be 1280x800 - any ideas how big the diffrence will be between XP and Vista while playng .. um, something like Crysis?

Thanks.

 

shouldn't be too much methinks(haven't actually played the game). i bet there are some benchmarks online, tho

 

Thats the card I have in my c90, like I said before the difference from XP and Vista is virtually non exsistant. Crysis tho is well known to be a poor performing game it may like on OS better than the other. I would google "Crysis XP vs Vista" something along those lines and see if you can cook up some benchmarks.

Id test for you but I dont have Crysis.

 

ive found that with many of my older games they run in vista just as well and sometimes better than xp. The good thing I like about Vista is that you can set it so all things that make it slow are turned off when you start to run a program. I found that when playing FSX all i had to do was go into the shortcut properties, set it so it disables the fancy stuff then it runs the game great!!

 

some games that i play on my vista are pre 2005 work fine

rome total war
Dawn of war series
need for speed most wanted
half life 2.

btw not totally hate mac but dislike ^^

Hi im PC
Hi im Mac
Hey Pc what you doing there?
Me? oh playing the latest games like Crysis and CoD4.
Oh i can only do music movies and websites.
I can do that too+ i gotta get back to work with my AutoCAD.
Pc, im go to my garage and make music which is pretty much it.

 

seeing how ur other thread got closed b4 i had a chance to post.
look, apple makes way too much money from selling both its pc's and laptops(for which it charges way too much money) with its software and os, unlike microsoft, that doesn't restrict its users from changing the operating system to whatever the users like. imagine microsoft selling its own pcs with xp or vista on them. can u get a stand-alone copy of os x from a local electronics store?

 

Just remember this. Vista maybe the new. But it takes 512 megs of ram just to run the OS. With that said, XP is what I and many are sticking with for gaming, that way we don't have to worry. As far as direct x 10 games...when you are playing, are you really going to take the time and look at "more ripples" in the water?

Also, keep in mind that in 2010 is when the next version of Windows is supposed to be coming out. Maybe Microsoft will take what worked on XP and mix in the visuals of Vista but not become a memory hog and name it VXP.

As far as Apple goes, if it was not for Microsoft bailing them out of financial difficulties, there would be no IPODs or Itunes....come to think of it, there would be no Zunes....oh well full circle..

 

Vista being a memory hog is only an opinion. XP is a freaking big memory hog if you compare to 98 for exemple....

 

Um it takes 512 just to run it.

 

It takes 512 to run it, but when it has the memory to run you don't have to reinstall it every 3-6 months to keep it stable (and keep that performance difference) like XP...

Vista is indeed a skosh slower in games... 5-10%...

What you get for that "slower" is an OS that is amazingly more stable than XP, fixes itself when it crashes, keeps track of its crashes and then suggests fixes for each one as Microsoft fixes them.

Vista also handles security much better than XP can with every plug-in you can think of, tends to turn off dangerous services by default, and handles networking and jumping networks with ease where XP had clunky controls.
(XP can be forced to work, but Vista just does it...)

If you think XP is better, then by all means use it... but most people just read that this one user didn't like it and then automatically assume (and parrot)that Vista sucks. Vista has its perks. It also has its downfalls.

Vista just needs time to let the community find its strengths and hunt down and kill the microsoft corporate stupidity woven into it.
Just like what happened to XP.

Oh and macOS is fine... they are for people who look at things differently.
This is kind of like "dog" people and "cat" people.

PC OSs are like dogs... they do what you tell them to do... even if you tell them to jump off a cliff.

MacOS is like a cat... you don't really own MacOS, it owns you... and puts up with you because you feed it. You do what you want as long as MacOS "feels" like letting you... when it doesn't you get a bomb or the newly copied BSoD. On the lighter side, if you tell it to jump off a cliff, it tells you to take a flying leap at a rolling doughnut.

MacOS is a pretty wrapper for a commercial version of 'nix.
This is a good thing people... we just need them to let the power users turn off "newbie mode".
(I want a command-prompt in multi-user mode dagnabbit!)

 

Vista holds alot of ram for some of its functions, but it free's up that ram if applications need it.

Unused ram is waisted ram, so Vista finally starts to make a use for all of that system ram and thats a good thing.

 

I am not saying that Vista sucks. I just believe that right now Vista still needs time. XP is stable in it's own right. All I am saying is there are some horror stories with Vista just as there is horror stories with XP. For me personally I like XP...When we bought our PC in Nov of 2006 it had a free upgrade to Vista which is still sitting in the brown envelope. I can always upgrade to Vista...but in 2010, Windows is coming out with the new OS....by that time, Vista may be the standard, XP may fade out, or the New OS may take the best of the 2 and have 1 great os. Only time will tell.

 

My dad's laptop has 540MB used with windows live messanger, 2 IE7 tabs and Norton IS 2008. No tweaks.

It goes with how much RAM you have and Vista will learn how to allocate it well after some times. The page file on it also stays at 740MB, on my C90S it STARTED at 950MB


I also completly KernalPanic. Hell, your system starts slow and becomes faster with time now

 

Gaming xp > Gaming vista. Bloatware FTL. Why in the world do I need transparent windows and animated desktops if my games run in fullscreen. I wish they took XP and made it faster like Linux faster instead of trying to make it look like a Mac. Nothing is more frustrating than a slow computer. It could have all the visual bullcrap and so simple to use that a 4 year old can use it. But it will still be a slow computer that is so simple, it takes forever to get anything done.

 

The bottom line is that XP runs current released and earlier games better than Vista. Plain and simple. Probably for the games coming out over the next several months too only because Vista wasn't fully supported at the time of the games's development.

In a year things will probably be different. So lets revisit in a year.

 

I don't know where people are getting this "XP is only 10% faster than Vista" nonsense from.

When I upgraded my dv6500t from Vista to XP, every game I played literally DOUBLED in frame-rate. UT2k4, for example, was stuck at around 30fps, give or take a few, in Vista at 1280x800 with everything set to high. In XP it's locked at 60fps with v-sync on. UT3 skips, stutters, and is basically unplayable in Vista. In XP I regularly go above 40fps.

Doom 3 in Vista hovered between 20 (yes 20) fps and 35. XP? Locked at 60.

Half-Life 2, same thing. HL2 in Vista runs as bad as it does on the PS3, sometimes going down to slideshows. Yet in XP I can have it at 1280x800, everything maxed, solid 60fps.

I always used the high performance power setting, and went through the power profiles to make sure Vista was "allowed" to use 100% CPU time.

As someone said over at the HP forum, using Vista feels like you're walking through slime. It just slows everything down unnecessarily and its not any good for gaming.

 

Think of Vista over XP as the WINME over WIN98SE.

Basically the core functionality is there from the previous model but with lots of new eye candy and `flashy` features requiring more resources from your hardware but still making your current programs run essentially the same.

A 5%-10% difference might not mean much to some people but for hardcore gamers any extra fps increase counts, particularly in online FPS games and can a make the difference for game being a smooth play experience to a choppy one.

People search the internet trying new graphics drivers every week and overclock their GPU`s. They want better performance for gaming. Drivers are are update more often now for Vista but currently Vista doesn’t match XP on either performance or compatibility compared to XP for games.

 

I think that windows vista service pack 1 will help to get better performance (at least, let us hope that )

I was also thinking to get windows xp in dualboot, but I'm just gone stay with vista alone. I personally don't think that there is that much difference between XP and vista

 

XP is not as resource heavy as Vista. I choose Xp over Vista anytime for gaming.

 

I work faster on Vista than XP.

 

Perhaps other people have more experience and knowledge on this subject than you do and are able to get Vista to work better.

Most certainly if you get double the frame rate in a game with XP than in Vista, you didn't give Vista a fair shot at it. My guess is driver updates and Vista hotfixes or SP1.

This is a horrible comparison... WinME was a bad marketing decision on a retrofit/rehash of an old OS to satisfy the people who couldn't possibly handle upgrading to the new way to do things.
Vista is an intentional evolution of a current product... more similar to the change from Win95 to Win98.

5-10% difference usually does NOT mean the difference between choppy and playable. It is possible... but the difference is usually much more gradual than that. Most people cannot even tell the difference between 60fps and 63-66fps...

Hardcore gamers can play (and compete) on any equipment within reason.
5-10% isn't going to matter unless you are horrible and need something to blame other than lack of practice.

 

Rofl. The typical Vista fanboy response. "People with more experience and knowledge than you" blah blah blah.

I've been building computers for the last decade. I have plenty of "knowledge and experience".

This is almost the year 2008. I shouldn't have to tweak or configure ANYTHING to get a NEW operating system running at least as good as the 6 year old operating system. It should simply run AT LEAST as good as the old one, if not BETTER.

When I installed Windows XP after it was first released, it ran FASTER out of the box on the same system than Windows 98 did. Yet Vista is literally half the speed. Thats unacceptable.

And for your other ridiculous comment, I did make sure Vista was "properly configured". I made sure that it was set to use 100% CPU time and all of that nonsense I shouldn't have to check in modern times.

This was with a fresh clean install and latest drivers for all hardware. No bloatware installed. Only games installed to test.

But the thing is, Windows 98 actually brought useful features to the table. Such as USB support.

Vista brings... what? Aero?

Other than the fact that Vista is horribly slow, much slower than 5-10%, the frame-rates tend to fluctuate more. Even a single frame-drop can cause a hiccup in a game. That can either ruin the experience or cause a missed shot.

XP is not only faster, but it provides more table frame-rates as well. An unstable but high frame-rate is just as bad as a low frame-rate, and that makes a game unplayable.

 

I know when I switched from Vista to XP on my laptop (8400M GS) My Half-Life: Lost Coast stress test rose from 42fps to 49fps.

I haven't tried any of my other games, but in that one that's about a 15% difference between Vista and XP. While gaming on a 13" laptop I'll take a 15% increase anytime.

 

Yes! Luckily I can get them all or something almost identical in Crysis by tweaking my DX9 settings.

 

Well, the reason it's such a poor performer is that it's simply too sophisticated for its own good - way ahead of its time. I'd say the devs did a pretty good job of optimizing it - everything the engine does is being done for a good reason, from what I've seen.

That said, XP is going to run it faster. As others have said, XP is going to run almost any game faster - the disparity is just more pronounced in Crysis because it drags FPS down so far to begin with. On tweakguides, they compared Vista DX10 to tweaked XP D9 (same image quality) at what looked like a pretty high resolution, and the difference was about 4 fps (18 vs 22).

Also, anyone with a Creative card having problems with older directsound games in Vista should look into Alchemy Universal. It's a free alternative to Creative's $9.99 BS emulator that installs a few .dlls in game directories so that they emulate sound properly in Vista. Only tried it with one game so far, but it worked brilliantly.