XP or Vista

If you were about to buy a new laptop, and wanted best performance for gaming, would you pay extra to get XP over Vista (Premium Home)?

 

Yes, XP is known to be faster at everything over Vista. XP SP3 runs twice as fast as Vista SP1, Vista is a memory hog. But XP is for ultimate fps, You'll probably lose no more than 5-5fps in Vista depending on the game. And I gotta say, Vista is a lot more pretty than XP lol, but you can use Vista skins on XP.

 

my vote is for xp !!

since i need to work on my machine and need a stable and fast os i will not switch for at least a year. An os that slows me down does not only take time, it also does cost me money.

and pretty, well i would not actually call vista pretty. but that depends on your personal point of view.

 

Well i vote for xp but i don't think that with sp3 win xp will be twice than sp2 in games...the twice is referred to office application and startup application time...
Anyway i hope to beat my record of 7 seconds of windows startup with new sp on xp

 

neither i vote~~~performance gap between them is not as huge as u think,,
if you buy a new laptop,,use the original version the machine installed and save the money to buy more games..

 

I'd get Vista. It's obviously going to get better than it is right now, and I have not noticed a big difference between them as long as your computer is powerful enough. Nothing worth paying extra for XP for anyway.

 

ATM, XP is probably better. There are some sorta old visual novels that I haven't been able to play because I'm on Vista. But then again, Vista's going to get better. If you have 2+ GB of RAM and 7900 series or 8600 and up Vista shouldn't be too bad for gaming. I'm sure Chaz will disagree .

 

Check this article out. It's pretty recent, and states:

If you're really serious about performance and productivity, the money might be worth it. You can get them cheap on ebay or amazon.

Now Chaz has every reason to disagree, Amol.

 

XP all the way... remember tat windows are trying to screw us with DX11 later on at 2009. And by then, you should have tons of DX10.1 games that you would probably be better off to move to Vista (wif new hardware of coz, like a Nvidia 10600M GT )

 

i voted for vista because of one thing only: DX10 (droooool)

of course, there's no point in getting it though if you don't have a high end video card.

 

The point is one,simple and clear...vista is slower than xp in all performance benchmarks...but hey it has dx10 i love the microsoft brainwashing...

 

XP!

(1) Every game released today, with Halo 2 and Shadow Run the exceptions (both mediocre games anyhow - and Microsoft releases of course), will run on XP. Nearly 100% of games released in the next year or so will be DirectX 9 / XP compatible.

(2) XP has a much smaller memoroy footprint and less background services to gobble resources.

(3) DirectX 10 performance is something to be desired with current gen GPU's - especically mobile GPU's. Except for the most expensive laptops (i.e. 8800 GTX single and SLI), no notebook GPU will be able to handle DirectX 10 features with any grace anyhow.

(4) Compatability. Vista has issues with older game titles, not to mention even newer ones.

To me the answer is simple. XP all the way. This coming from someone who wasted $130 on a copy of Vista for my desktop gaming rig only to buy another copy of XP to run on it because I was so agitated.

 

Thankfully my school provides every student with a free copy of XP SP2.

 

You guys are also forgetting about Vista's ability to manage multiple core CPU's independently from one another. In XP it will only balance the load out to the CPU cores, so all of the cores are carrying the same load. Since Vista can actually manage each core independently from one another, one core might be at 5%, another at 90%, etc. I have a quad core inside my desktop, and almost any computer you buy nowadays has at least a dual core in it. I think that is is a huge step over XP.

 

How does this *points to quote* exactly translate to real world performance? I mean, sure, it sounds good, but so what? What does it mean for us? Does that mean single threaded applications perform better in Vista, or maybe processor-intensive apps run better in Vista, etc.

Anyway, for me, it's XP... for now. I still have hope for Vista. But if it's really hopeless, MS says they'll be releasing Windows 7 in 2009, right? Maybe they've learned their lessons.

 

Vista - just in case it gets better later on
I'd then do a clean install with a custom version of XP to get maximum performance

 

That article was very quickly dismissed by professionals due to its horrible comparisons.
It is a prime example of why you shouldn't believe everything you read and should pay attention to exactly WHAT they are comparing.

XP is nowhere near twice as fast overall in gaming.
5-10% faster in my experience provided both are tweaked and patched.
(I'd believe a bit more in situations where the hardware was underpowered compared to Vista.)

That being said, XP is indeed quicker especially on lesser hardware.

If all you do is game, you don't think DX10 is going to get better and you MUST have the 5-10% extra fps, then XP is better.

If you do more than game, and you are capable of figuring out things like installing up-to-date drivers and running microsoft hotfixes, then Vista will serve you quite well.

I prefer Vista in general, but there are situations under which XP is still better.

 

Please explain. In my processor-intensive single-core applications, Vista usually had the CPU load levels wildly varying, usually with each one in the 30-70% range but the average of the two being 50%. I expected it to be 99% and 1%, but it wasn't.

Meanwhile, both Vista and XP allow you to set affinity (in Task Manager) so you actually will get 99% on one core and 1% on the other. Checking just now, XP allows you to set affinity with up to 32 CPU's, a gigantic number for a consumer-and-small-business oriented OS. I don't see the difference you are talking about.

My preference should be obvious from my sig. I'm sticking with XP until at least 2011. After that it all depends on budget and, once that's not a factor, whether Windows 7/8/9/10 is as good as XP.

 

there isn't any point in paying extra to get xp.

people are living in the past. difference in game performance with a half decent gpu is negligable. and vista runs all the games that i play, and i play some old ones. then there are a few vista only games.

 

I'm happy with all games on Vista... and don't see a real necessary point in rolling back to XP. Every game I play I get great framerates... so no real reason to put in the extra work, reinstalling all softwares/patches, hotfixes, service packs, etc. just for an extra 5% in games...

 

I'm using vista a long time and i'm thinking more and more going back to XP...

My only problem is: I installed 4GB ram, so i want a x64 OS...
I can get the drivers for my laptop for Vista x64 but for XP x64 I don't think so (Is it possible to use Vista 64bit drivers on XP 64bit??)

 

XP 64-bit drivers do not work on Vista 64-bit. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this.)

 

But i actually want to use Vista 64-bit driver on Windows XP 64-bit ^^

 

Vice-versa in that case.

 

5-10% is only an average...in crysis for example i gain 15 more fps...other games like battlefield 2 are unplayable or they have heavy slowdowns on vista...! so try the switch before talking

 

This is actually a big problem for me, i want to go back to XP but I got 4GB ram (so i want a x64 version) you could say, you just buy windows xp pro x64 but i first need to know if i can get drivers for my G1S...

I know there are drivers out for windows XP (This will be the 32bit version) but i don't think these will work in the 64 bit version of xp, right?

 

32 and 64-bit drivers are a different set for XP just like Vista. You need to search for the x64 XP drivers for your G1S.

 

You get + 15 fps in Crysis when switching from Vista to XP ?

wow man, if that is true I will switch back to XP already in one week lol

 

Well, I'm starting to think that there aren't Asus G1S driver out for XP 64 bit
Also on the site of Asus you can chose Windows Vista 32-bit, Windows Vista 64-bit and Windows XP drivers...

 

sgtmatt1 this is for you it's not xp but crysis on vista x64...seems that that 64 bit of vista is faster...need a try!

http://www.neowin.net/news/gamers/07/10/31/crysis-15-more-performance-with-vista-x64

[i read on another site that the improvement is caused by the full use of 4gb ram that can address more memory]

 

I havent found any XP64 drivers on the asus site for the 1gs, did you ?
Why not switch to vista 64 ?
I ordered my dvd yesterday... we´ll see...

 

Looks like a nice increase of performance
And if that's already a nice increase (going from 32bit vista to 64bit) than XP has to give another increase

XP 64bit would be perfect for me, but why are drivers always the problem lol

 

No, there aren't any XP x64 drivers for the G1S on the Asus site..

Well, first i wanted to get vista 64bit because I got 4GB ram in my laptop... but i always got problems with vista (problems with my 8600M GT GDDR3), like now I'm on the 169.28 driver, this drivers gives me the best performance in games but every driver who gives me good performance in games gives me bad performance of working with vista (When i select items on my desktop, when i move windows and so on it doesn't go smooth, it goes with stuttering...) I tried older driver, these driver give me much less performance in games and fix the stuttering of vista.
this is one of the reasons i want to go to XP 64bit another reason is that XP is just faster than vista and less demanding for your hardware (gives more performance in games)

 

Have you checked out the graphic drivers on the g1s drivers-cd ? they give me by far the best performence though they are very old... dont know the version number.

I hope vista 64 gives me some frames for crysis
At least I can use 4gb of ram.

 

Did you run 3DMark06 with the driver on the dvd and with one of the new drivers??

I might install it again to check it out, but you can overclock with it?? (I started Ocing G1S's GPU with newer drivers...)

 

When it comes to 64-bit OSs, Vista x64 has far more support than XP x64. Nobody really cared for XP x64 - it wasn't really needed at the time of release, I don't think it sold well, and vendors never bothered to make/release any drivers. Now with a lot of 64 bit processors in the market, the situation's slowly changing. And I'm sure Microsoft's pushing hard on this one =P.

 

With other words, my best option is getting vista x64?
Or Windows XP 32bit (But than i can't use all my 4GB ram, only 3GB )

 

I got 4400 3dmarks06 with the one on the cd.
I tried some of the newest drivers but they all gave me about 4100-4200 3dmarks.
I dont know if you can overclock with them, you might want to find out

 

Ok, thanks
I will install the driver form the DVD now

Have you also tried the newer driver from the Asus download page?

 

Yes, I did, but as I said it only gave me 4200 3dmarks.
I tried pretty much every driver form laptopvideo2go since 87.45 lol
Its hard to believe that the "g1s driver" gives me the best result, even for myself

 

I just installed it, overclock is NOT possible and my GPU runs much hotter: 65°C when on a zalman notebook cooler !!!
But ! Indeed, it gives good performance, normally i overclock my GPU for playing cod4 and with this driver everything is smooth on clock settings lol

But it runs hotter (on desktop) because the GPU doesn't downclocks itself (other do that, so the temp. drops) but my maximum temperature while gaming stays the same (84°C while on zalman cooler or something like that)

I want to try the newest driver from the Asus website (to so if i can overclock with that one) but the download from the asus server is sooooo slow man


EDIT: But when i stay with the standard driver i can't play Bioshock any more... :s

 

I was able to play Bioshock, at least the demo. o0

As soon as i got my ultimate 64 I can post some 3dmarks if you want to.
Maybe afterwards you want to switch to 64 too

 

I would be inclined to say so =)

 

Man, I cant believe it. Vista 64 gave me a massive performance boost.
My average frame rate for crysis was about 20 with vista 32, all settings "medium" except shaders. Now I get ~30 with everything on "high".

 

It's more of a difference caused by the bloated OEM install but Crysis does use 64bits instructions.

Is that at 1680x1050?

 

Wow, that's a BIG increase !!
But i also want to take the OS that gives the best performance ingame:
Want do you guys think, does vista 64bit give better gaming performance than XP 32bit ??