Vista and Gaming

[brady]

Recently I've decided that I'd like to get back into PC gaming. To start off I reinstalled HL2 on my green machine. I'm running Vista 32bit with the latest drivers for my 7600GT. So I started up HL2 for the first time and put all settings to max, 4xAA and 8xAF, HDR off, 1280x1024. When the game loaded I checked my FPS and noticed I was in the teens and low 20's. This is unusual because I played HL2 on my 3500+, 6800GT, 1GB 3200DDR system when HL2 first came out and I played the whole game at the above settings with FPS that rarely dipped into the 20's and stayed pretty consistently above the 30's.

Is this performance typical in Vista. Up until now I've totally been oblivious to Vista gaming. I was expecting and performance drop, but that much? In XP I was running a single core 3500+, with a 6800GT agp, and 1GB of ram. Now I'm running a dual core 4200, with a 7600GT and double the ram and my performance is significantly worse than my older system in XP.

[flukester]

Your machine is weaker than mine, memory included. Vista, despite what others would say, is not as lean as XP. There is a load of crap going on in the background. There is a lot of overhead period unless you tweak, drivers are weak and Vista is buggy period. Cut your res to 1024x768, take off AA and imo, you should be better off.

Vista as a gaming OS, imo, is just not the right time yet. There isn't really enough DX10 games yet to substantiate the move to Vista. Even if there were DX10 titles, you'd be crippled with your 7600 and your CPU and ram.

I'd recommend you stick with XP at least until SP1 comes out or you upgrade your PC...

[six_storm]

I've got a little bit weaker of a PC, but the same video card as you. I tried to use Vista but it gave me really poor performance so I reinstalled XP Pro and all is well.

[$n][pErMan]

Vista pretty much requires a higher end machine for good gaming.

[brady]

Ok. This basically just confirms my suspision. I just wanted to be sure that I wan't doing something wrong. I plan on building a new machine in the next few months. Since it's going to be a gaming rig I'll be sticking with XP for sure.

[delas52]

I get same 3dmark (05/06) scores in vista as in xp. Also oblivion runs just as smooth in vista.

I did notice css played a little bit slower however, so maybe the source engine is the complication here.

[Stoneyguy]

It's my personal experience that Nvidia's performance dropped more then ATI's did when I upgraded my 2 PCs to Vista.

[XxDeadlyxX]

Really a 7800 and dual core is minimum for getting "almost-the-same-as-XP" performance, Vista just raped my single core, especially when it came to HD-DVD playback, more CPU usage than in XP :(

[crainger]

Really a 7800 and dual core is minimum for getting "almost-the-same-as-XP" performance, Vista just raped my single core, especially when it came to HD-DVD playback, more CPU usage than in XP :(

Yeah. My 3800+ is stuggling in Vista. It's really an OS made for multi core. So I have a quad core upgrade lined up. LOL I'd never thought I'd go straight from single core to quad core! :afro2:

[RAY16]

Vista is usable on my ancient system if I just use it for average every-day stuff. If I try and play HD video or play newer games I start to see some issues, though.

Weird thing is, some games get a massive decrease in performance, while others are roughly the same. Take Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for example, aside from some extra HD swapping due to the higher memory requirements it runs pretty much identical to when I run it on XP. But other games, such as Source engine games get a massive hit to performance. It's a strange mix of Vista being more demanding and some games just not liking it.

[j0j081]

Vista for everyday use works fine on this system but my cpu is too slow for gaming. I can play cs:s but barely. I'm gonna use Vista for for everything but games.

[Dragunov]

No problems at all with gaming, only with some older games ...

[$n][pErMan]

Ok. This basically just confirms my suspision. I just wanted to be sure that I wan't doing something wrong. I plan on building a new machine in the next few months. Since it's going to be a gaming rig I'll be sticking with XP for sure.
Well if you are building a new machine Vista should be fine. With good specs the performance loss is trivial IMO. So you drop form like 267 FPS to like 243 FPS in a game... big deal. Acctually my system now matches its perforamce in XP after some driver updates and a slight OC on the video card. You will notice with Vista simple things like Alt-Tabing out of a game is flawless and smooth and if by some chance your game does crash it does not take the system with it :p At the very least... duel boot Vista with XP to decide for yourself :)

[flukester]

[pErMan']So you drop form like 267 FPS to like 243 FPS in a game... big deal.

To me that's a totally unrealistic look at it..

[Blacklash]

I don't see huge FPS differences in gaming either.

What I did notice is very choppy performance under x64 Vista in "Oblivion" heavy foliage areas compared to XP. The FPS is in the right range yet the play is choppy. I get virtually the same FPS under XP yet running through heavy foliage is very smooth.

These days I mostly game under XP. I do dual boot, so I can run both without issue. Guess I will save Vista for DX 10 titles.

[JasonPC]

Does anyone know if there's a way to run 32-bit Half-Life 2 in 64-bit Vista? It seems like there should be no reason to force people to run the 64-bit version. From what I hear the 64-bit version absolutely blows and the benchmark I've taken from the 32-bit Counter-strike test showed very little difference in framerate from XP. But the Lost Coast demo that is forced to run in 64-bit mode had a drop in framerate by 50 whole frames. It was still very much playable, but that's a nasty drop.

[Rakeesh]

I think the only problem with vista is most of the IHV drivers haven't matured yet. Every time there is a crash or overall slowness, everybody hops on the blame Microsoft bandwagon, when the vast majority of the time it is due to faulty software that they've installed. But the IHV's aren't entirely at fault just yet - vista has a very radical set of back end changes that it is just going to take time for the driver developers to get used to. These back end changes are very good for the future of personal computing - hell, OSX and linux would do well to adopt similar changes.

This is one of those situations where it isn't really anybodies fault IMO. Just growing pains, thats all. It'll pass.