Vista vs XP performance on games.

Hello,
I am looking to upgrade from XP to Vista, mainly for the crazy stability problems i ma having as well as a strange 10GB piece of the C drive which isn't in any form visable when i know its there.

So anyway i want to start a clean and instead of installing XP again, which i dont want to do as ASUS's modified version is from what i have seen unstable and crappy. But the deciding factor is what sort of performance difference am i going to be seeing on games. I mainly play Battlefield 2142 on high settings with an average FPS of 35, and i am wondering if and by how much that would drop.

Versions of the OS's i am refering to are XP Professional and Vista Business, and my specs are as in my signature.

 

Although this is not your machine it is a test ran on the Vista vs Xp on the exact same hardware and it should answer your questions about the performance differences. http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/

 

Where abouts does it give details on the performance in games, because i cannot find it.

 

You have to click the arrows that say "Next Page" at the bottom of the article to get to the benchmarks and next pages.

 

Pretty much i am going to get a slight but not a major decrease in FPS on my games, but it shouldn't be anything to large

 

Yeah that's about right. I could have told you that but if you're like me I want to see some numbers and there is no way I could have explained it as good as they did.

 

i think you will also find that some games will have an increase in speed.

 

Agree. I think when Vista first came out the video drivers were severly lacking, they seem to have caught up as of late, I think the biggest unresolved concern is ability to run some legacy apps in Vista and I think that some of them will never be able to be ran without purchasing new versions. Photoshop Elements comes to mind for an example.

 

So that means there is a chance my FPS wont go down by much more due to the new drivers for vista.

As long as my copy of Photoshop CS2 works fine, its alright really, the rest of my drivers and programs will have new versions online for vista.

 

Don't expect Vista to solve this.
There's probably a perfectly normal explanation for the harddrive stuff (There are plenty of possibilities, NTFS metadata, index overhead, the partition doesn't fill the entire drive, you've forgot to take into account that harddrives operate with 1mb = 1000kb, and not 1024 like everyone else uses), and Vista certainly won't change that.
As far as stability goes, I'd stick with XP. In theory, Vista has changed a few things that would allow it to become more stable one day (moved some drivers into user-mode, mainly), but on the other hand, drivers are generally far less mature, meaning they'll more often cause problems.

There are valid reasons to "upgrade" to Vista, but harddrive capacity is definitely not among them, and stability is not yet one either.

But your choice.

A general rule of thumb is that you lose 20% in most DirectX9 games by switching to Vista. DirectX10 games should perform better (but can't be compared because they won't run at all on XP), and those 20% will probably shrink a bit over time. (I've talked to a guy on NVidia's driver team who's reasonably optimistic about closing the gap. It might never perform as good as on XP (my guess), but he sounded like they still had plenty of room left for improvement, at least.

 

I'm not sure about everyone else, but I installed vista last night and have got great results. No crashes yet, my surround sound for my audigy 2 zs is working, and I got the 7.6 ati drivers to work for my notebook. Also, I don't think CS:S is playing any worse than it did on XP. I get the same fps, if not better.

 

I will tell you the full details of the hard drive problem. When i bought the notebook it had 2 partitions which i am guessing most do, but the problem arose when i noticed that what it told me for "Used Space" in the "Local Disk (c:/) Properties" bar was 10gb higher, than if i was to go into the drive, highlight all the files, including hidden and protected files, and calculated the total usage of them.
This is where i have lost 10gb, so pretty much i am 20gb down on what it says on the box.

I have no idea what and why that is but i thought a format and re-install of windows would fix this.

Secondly i am getting blue screen's quite often and when i write up the error message and put it in a search engine it will normally come up with something about corruption of exe files which caused this and a clogged registry.

Those are the main reasons for wanting to do a format and install Vista really

 

Yeah I want to know how Vista can play Battlefield 2 with a dx 10 card.

 

Just wondering, but do the different versions of Windows Vista affect gaming performance?

For example, would Vista Ultimate result in less gaming performance than Home Premium, since it has more features resulting in more RAM usage?

I'm not great with computers, so sorry if this question sounds stupid

 

Yeah I would believe Ultimate uses more ram which in other words would be a little less performance.

 

There are a few places your GBs could have disappeared to. First, they might be stuck in your hibernate file, although unlikely if you had hidden files selected in the root of your drive. Second, that second partition might contain a very large ASUS installed restore file. Many computer vendors these days will include the "Restore System to Original State" disk on a hidden partition of the hard drive instead of a separate disk. More likely, you have several system restore points taking up much of your space.

Go to Start>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Cleanup (wait for the program to start). Now click on the "More Options" tab and look down at the "System Restore" section. Click on "Clean Up" and click ok when it prompts you. Now press the ok box on the program. Now check your disk space again.

 

that just freed up 6GB which is great. I am however still pushed to at some point do a clean install of windows. I have a partitioned hard drive, so if i re-install windows on the C:/ drive will the files on the D:/ remain unaffected?

Also for Vista Drivers am i best to go on the ASUS website and search under my Notebook model and just downloading all of those and saving them on a CD prior to my install?

I have never actually installed Windows from scratch before so i am not sure what exactly to do.

When you were earlier talking about that Ultimate will have less performance than Home Premium, does that mean Business will have quite a high performance then? Because it doesn't have all the extra's

edit: My Hard Drives are currently set to FAT32, is there any way to change these to NTFS without deleting the data on those disks?

 

I just clean installed vista on my C drive (now reformatted), and all the stuff on my D drive was intact. Should be fine.

 

Does anybody know of a way to change the format of my hard disks from FAT32 to NTFS without wiping the data on them?

 

In Windows XP you could convert the system from FAT32 to NTFS at a command prompt by typing CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS

 

Thanks for that.. i have now i think sorted a lot of the issues i had out so i am going to see how it goes now and put that Vista upgrade on hold for a little longer.