What OS for gaming?

I have the following specs on my laptop:
C2D T9300
4GB DDR2 Ram
9500M GS 512DDR2 RAM
250GB HDD etc.
and came with Vista Home Premium 32bit.

Taking into consideration that i have 4GB of ram should i go 64-bit and is it possible to upgrade for free? I also have Win XP 32 and 64bit? What OS would you recommend?

I have read that with the SP1 Vista gaming performance is almost the same as XP, any experience with this?

 

If you did a search you would have found many of these threads. I have a gaming rig and I only use Windows XP. Windows Vista lacks with gaming performance when you want to squeeze the most performance out of your games.

Some say the performance is close and I say BS. If Vista were that good I would be using it by now for my gaming needs. I have far too many games that just don't give me the performance I need and I have others that just plain run terrible in Vista and I have 2-3 games that won't run at all from compatibility issues. And no i'm not going to find out why, when they run very well in XP. So let's not try that excuse, OK.

If you do light gaming, nothing that's incredibly CPU or GPU intensive then go with Vista if you like the OS. I won't be bothered trying to make a bloated OS work with my games. I love racing and flight sims and Vista is just not the way to go, IMO.

 

ExtremeTech.com did a comaprison a little while back of Vista SP1 vs XP SP3 with regards to gamng performance. The result was a dead heat, the conclusion being that driver support (particularly graphics drivers) for Vista had caught up to XP.

Full story here:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302495,00.asp

I'm not a serious gamer myself these days, so I'm not saying that they're right or wrong. Just passing their findings along.

 

Almost all of the games I have tried run as well or better in Vista now, but if you asked a year ago I would've said the opposite.

 

hey you can trim down vista you know..i think vista is fine for gaming the only game i had problems was unreal 3.
what about dx10? i know you can use it on xp after the hacks but i never tried it.. i think performance is very similar now with xp and vista sp 1 ..

look at the link fountainhead typed

 

@rodknee
I know they are few threads out there but the ones i found were older, pre SP1 for Vista and SP3 for XP. That is why i opened a new thread.
@fountainhead
That is one of the link i refered to when i said performance are closer now.

But what about 32bit vs 64bit? i hear there are drivers and software issues with 64bit. Also i dont think i will find Windows XP 64bit drivers for my Acer. Does those 3GB include the 512MB from the VGA? I think I have read something about that? Does that means my notebooks acts as it would have 2.5GB Ram and 0.5GB ram from the GF?

Thank you for the reply

 

i don't think your OS matters nearly as much as you seem to think. you should be more concerned about the hardware. i haven't had any problems or decrease in performance since using Vista on my laptops while gaming. but then again i mostly play older games like warcraft 3 . i can safely say that i can play CoD4 max settings w/o problem on Vista if that means anything.