gaming on xp vs. vista

As you guys know, Vista will require more power to run than XP because of better visuals, etc. Does that mean that running a game on Vista will be poorer performance wise than running the same game on XP?

 

A lot of games that have been tested on Vista so far have shown a decrease in performance of about 30%, roughly.

 

i havent been able to get fraps to run in vista to test games.

Its not a big difference whatever it is. I do believe without a doubt it must affect performance.

If for nothing else the 500 mb of ram vista uses.

 

no video drivers for vista are complete yet, as vista is still beta, so for now games perform slower in vista.

 

Will the first Vista release use this much? i havent downloaded any beta's thinking they were probably useless after the original is out.

 

Nope, Vista's gone Gold now.

 

Im using the free trial. Final release.

I have video card driver problems though. The release is final but the drivers are not.
I think thats what jeff means and thats correct.

I have problems getting games to run and have an unsupported gpu, nvidia 7700

Vista seems to use about 500 mb. This is a good thing really in everyday tasks.

 

Games will run slower on Vista until they are optimized for the new operating system and good video drivers are developed. Remember, Vista has been developed with Direct X 10 and dual core CPUs in mind that older games were not designed for.

A similar problem exists with the new Intel Macs and older PPC applications. Older PPC applications that have not been optimized for the new Intel Macs tend to run slower than on a PPC Mac.

And if anything, Vista uses more resources than XP so when comparing two systems with the same specs, games will run slower. Some people with slower computers choose Windows 2000 over XP because it uses less resources.

 

If you have a dual core cpu, a good one, you'll see a performance boost.

 

Why do people insist on spreading this idea that games run worse on Vista than they do on XP? I've asked this question to many people who use Vista RC releases and they all say that performance is within a few % of XP levels, the only thing letting it down at the moment is drivers which are not finalised, and Vista which is not even yet complete.

 

Can you explain why? Does that mean my laptop (Asus A8JS) will run games better on Vista than XP?

 

Yes, the simple answer is that Vista is designed to be implemented primarily on multi-core processors with support for single core while XP was designed back in 2000(?) for single core CPUs with support for multi-core.

And no, Vista will be a lot worse on games until decent drivers are released. I'm especially interested in Vista64, but for now all the drivers suck and you're better off gaming on XP.

 

even if vista works with dual core better than xp, that makes no difference to the game.

the game will have to use dual core to run faster.

There is no possible way that vista can make a game run faster.

 

Well in theory, better dual core support would help in the sense that the scheduler is more likely to devote a core to the game permanently and use the other core for other tasks rather than say, swapping a game back and forth between each core. Even in games that aren't officially multithreaded, they often do use separate threads for say loading textures, playing sound, running AI, etc. The difference is that while there are separate threads, the different threads were never specifically designed to run perfectly in parrallel (ie truly multithreaded), but a good OS scheduler can still task the threads more effectively per core so squeeze out what little parallelism there is.

Also, even in current DX9 games, Vista's DX9 API is "better" than XPs in that it includes a better memory manager, balancing RAM usage between various programs and various components within a game. One of the things about Vista is that it actually implements a form of HyperMemory by default so even if you graphics card were to have 1GB of memory, Vista would still be using some system memory to assist the GPU. This actually isn't a bad thing, since Vista uses this system memory to more agressively (and hopefully more intelligently) preload textures and stuff that the GPU might otherwise have to go to the hard drive for. Now this feature is really seen for DX10 games, and upcoming games designed for DX9.0L in Vista, but current DX9 and earlier games will use a more limited form (to avoid compatibility problems), but there is still some benefit.

Now all this doesn't necessarily mean that Vista will run current games faster. Future games though, even DX9 games, should show some benefits over XP, once they are programmed to take advantage of DX9.0L as I mentioned before.

OpenGL games though, will be more difficult to catch up to XP much less overtake it. This is because in Vista, instead of OpenGL being a separate API, Microsoft has implemented it basically as a subset of DX9.0L. This makes it seem like OpenGL is running in emulation, but things are supposed to improve once graphics card drivers improve to the new conditions. Still, this is certainly an attempt to disadvantage OpenGL though.

 

Wow, how underhanded. And OpenGL basically saved the graphics industry from the mediocrity that was DirectX. I'm gonna call Bill about this.

 

Oh I have noticed that vista loads 256 mb of hypermemory.

My gpu is 512 mb and it lists it as 768 mb.

It doesnt run games any faster. I have the core duo hot fix and it made games run better in xp. I am finding the opposite, that using games in xp utilizes the 2nd core better.

I have problems right now getting any game to work right in vista so i shouldnt even compare though.
I need a new graphics driver for the 7700 to even test.
I ran the game prey in vista and I estimate it wasnt a large amount slower but it was slower.