Vistas not too great for gaming at the moment is it?

Hendrix89

I was wondering, being a gamer, is there much point in me going from XP to Vista now or in the next few months? After reading up I noticed that Vista is actual giving worse performance in games than XP right now... I mean if thats the case then I definately won't be getting it any time soon.. Is it? Anyone here gaming on Vista? How is the performance compared to XP?

Peteee

Most places say Vista is a no go for games at the moment.

It's either even, or a 10%-15% drop in performance for Direct3D games on Vista. A small number of games get a 10% increase under Vista.

OpenGL games are pretty much a no go, as only ATi has released drivers that support OpenGL at the moment (And these are stability rather then performance related)

I'd say hang on to XP a few more months until ATi and nVidia get their heads around writing better drivers, then we should see the gap close or diminish. My understanding is that the drivers architecture has changed a great deal in Vista (Drivers no longer run in Kernel mode, giving better stability, but (Theoretically) worse performance)

cregser

Peteee wrote:

I'd say hang on to XP a few more months until ATi and nVidia get their heads around writing better drivers, then we should see the gap close or diminish. My understanding is that the drivers architecture has changed a great deal in Vista (Drivers no longer run in Kernel mode, giving better stability, but (Theoretically) worse performance)

Not to mention all the extra memory and CPU cycles Vista hogs thanks to all new user interface, security and DRM "features".

Fact is though, game developers like DX10 (or whatever it's called) and Microsoft will only let XP support up to DX9. So sooner or later, new games won't work on XP. I think Crysis is DX10 only, but it may work in DX9 with many features turned off i.e. look like crap - like a DX9 game switched down to DX7/8.

Hendrix89

Right well then I think I will be sticking with XP for the next few months at least. I will use the money for a gfx graphics card or monitor upgrade.

I just hope the XP updates will keep coming.

Thanks.

Saruman

going to hijack this thread
What about new PC's?
Im buying 2 new ones. Should i get XP home or go for Vista? Im inclined to stay with XP but as cregser said.. dx10 is vista only. I do not want to buy XP only to have to buy Vista again in a few months.

Endurance Man

Only heard bad things for gaming, it does not like steam games from what iv heard. Iv had the beta version for a few weeks now but after reading a about the poor gaming perfomance i stayed away.

DonkeyStyle \o/

Well if I do get Vista any time soon; it'll be dual-booting with XP, that's for sure.

Peteee

cregser wrote:

Not to mention all the extra memory and CPU cycles Vista hogs thanks to all new user interface, security and DRM "features".

Fact is though, game developers like DX10 (or whatever it's called) and Microsoft will only let XP support up to DX9. So sooner or later, new games won't work on XP. I think Crysis is DX10 only, but it may work in DX9 with many features turned off i.e. look like crap - like a DX9 game switched down to DX7/8.

Memory is useless if your not using it, which is exactly what Vista (And Linux and OS X) does. This explains it well.

The DRM, that wont be used till 2011 and dosent apply to existing media at all, and wouldn't be there at all if it weren't for media companies

Capt'n Midnight

Peteee wrote:

This explains it well.

There is a way to disable superfetch in vista by setting the following registry key to a value of "0":

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters\EnableSuperfetch

Beelzebub

#Elites wrote:

seemly its not due to Vista, but due to the Drivers ATI/Nvidea have released that claim to be "Vista Ready" when they are not..

MS has filled a lawsuit agaist Nvidea due to this..!

Where did you get this information from?

I've seen this: "A group of Nvidia customers are upset over the company's lack of final Vista drivers and are now threatening a class action lawsuit against the graphics card giant. "

http://tomshardware.co.uk/2007/02/02/nvidia_lawsuit_vista_drivers/

I really don't see Microsoft bringing a lawsuit against NVidia.

8T8

There is no lawsuit from MS a bunch of whiners acting on "Internet Drama" moaning about not having drivers for Vista before it's release got their panties in a twist when NVIDIA finally released a driver and found that it was shock buggy.

They and by that it seems one or two persons set up a site claiming they are going to sue NVIDIA or some such rubbish.

It's amazing what short memories people have I recall when Win2K came about surprise surprise the display drivers where buggy as hell.

A lot of these folks are kids and do not understand the complexity of the issue especially when it comes to display drivers that have years of polishing and bug fixes built into them, then Vista comes along with a entirely new driver architecture which is completely different from XP and expect everything to work overnight.

However that does not mean NVIDIA should be entirely excused AMD/ATI have done a much better first effort than NVIDIA so sure they could have done better but it is unreasonable to expect miracles.

You can see some benchmarks of AMD/ATI's drivers here which show some promising improvements even over XP in certain areas.

The basic summary is this if you are a serious gamer then don't consider switching to Vista until at least 3-5 months from now so that AMD/ATI & NVIDIA are given time to further improve their drivers.

Peteee

8T8 wrote:

A lot of these folks are kids and do not understand the complexity of the issue especially when it comes to display drivers that have years of polishing and bug fixes built into them, then Vista comes along with a entirely new driver architecture which is completely different from XP and expect everything to work overnight.

If a new road came out and people said 'Ah yeah it's full of potholes, but come on, building roads is really complex, wait 4-6 months and we should have everything worked out, cos as we said building roads is really complex, cut them some slack'

Wouldn't exactly cut it, would it. And it shouldn't be allowed to cut it in the computer industry.

It's nVidia's job to come out with good, stable drivers. It's not as if Vista snuck up on them. The RC's have been out since august, and no API changes are made after the RC's so they've had a stable platform to aim for 6 months. Even the RTM build is 2 months old.

They even say on their website that 'nVidia and Windows Vista provide outstanding 3D performance'

8T8

Well NVIDIA has always had a "morel flexibility" when it came to marketing their products which is why they do so well in terms of sales, don't agree with it but they have doing that for a long time.

(I heard they also have their own Vista certification program that is not Microsoft's which allows them to slap a Vista ready sticker on it and avoid the pitfalls of less than stellar support)

I agree with you they should have done better but also saying Vista has been around for such & such it didn't sneak up on them isnt exaclty fair either.

They only have so much resources and it takes time & resources to port drivers let alone write new ones especially for a company that juggles many different products like NVIDIA.

Just look at the testing nightmare they have;
GeForce 1-7 XP 32-bit & 64-bit plus all variations of XP MCE ,Server, Pro , Home etc
GeForce 8 is now a standalone driver 32-bit & 64-bit plus all variations of Vista.
Quadro cards must also be tested against for all the above.

Every single card & it's variation GT, Ultra, LE if it wants WHQL must be tested against the OS the driver code and games which is a huge task.

The RC's are not final code which is what matters the most, NVIDIA had beta drivers for the RC's sure but they didn't work all that great given the state of the OS. Vista went RTM on Nov 8th that is not a long time ago or a lot of time in the space between its Jan launch date to roll out finely polished drivers.

That's just for DX9 they are still trying to iron out the bugs in their DX10 drivers (thank god their are no DX10 games) & then there's OpenGL support which to be fair to NVIDIA have done a better job than ATI out of the gate but ATI are planning a full rewrite of their OpenGL ICD for Vista which again takes lots of time and compatibility testing.

All things considered I think it is going well for both companies take Apple as a comparison it took them years to solve the game performance problems of shifting to a partially GPU accelerated UI it will be fully accelerated in Leopard an area where Apple are playing catch up to Vista which is also full accelerated.

cregser

Peteee wrote:

Memory is useless if your not using it, which is exactly what Vista (And Linux and OS X) does. This explains it well.

The DRM, that wont be used till 2011 and dosent apply to existing media at all, and wouldn't be there at all if it weren't for media companies

Interesting, thanks. But I'd rather leave the memory free if I was not multitasking i.e. playing a game.

Although I don't know, I still believe that the enhanced UI and DRM features do take a toll on the system. The UI would have to remain somewhere (RAM) that it could quickly be called back from. The DRM would only work on an OS that provides abstaction from the hardware to the software - costing more resources. The SuperFetch thing is yet another process that takes CPU cycles away from your game.

8T8

cregser wrote:

Interesting, thanks. But I'd rather leave the memory free if I was not multitasking i.e. playing a game.

Although I don't know, I still believe that the enhanced UI and DRM features do take a toll on the system. The UI would have to remain somewhere (RAM) that it could quickly be called back from. The DRM would only work on an OS that provides abstaction from the hardware to the software - costing more resources. The SuperFetch thing is yet another process that takes CPU cycles away from your game.

They don't or won't is more proper term, Microsoft spent a lot of time in developing the WDDM* driver system to give to advanced resource management features precisely to avoid hurting performance.

You can see benchmarks here which back their claims that the WDDM driver works well and the UI has no discernible impact on gaming.

* Windows Display Driver Model which is the new driver architecture for Vista.

Per the DRM it has no impact as far as I'm aware the DRM only kicks in if watching DRM content though obviously Vista critics have been trying to paint it otherwise. Even if it were the case whatever CPU cycles it does steal are not on any meaningful level.

Also Vista has a much better prioritisation system than XP where if you are familiar with the manual priority setting Vista now does this automatically and will dedicate all the free resources of the system a game etc

That coupled with the WDDM driver should mean in the long run Vista should end up faster than XP once ATI & NVIDIA get their act together. SuperFetch is intelligent enough to know not be doing it's business while the system is busy with a game over time it will learn what is used most and copy that into a cache.

Peteee

cregser wrote:

Interesting, thanks. But I'd rather leave the memory free if I was not multitasking i.e. playing a game.

Which is exactly what Vista will do anyway.

The used RAM is just overwritten with the game data.

Since overwriting RAM is gonna be the same speed as overwriting 'free' RAM (So long of course if none of the data needs to be written the disk, and with SuperFetch this data dosen't need to be written to the hard drive) it makes perfect sense to use this RAM.

From using Vista for a month or so, it definetly improved loading times

art

Peteee wrote:

The DRM, that wont be used till 2011 and dosent apply to existing media at all, and wouldn't be there at all if it weren't for media companies

That blog is very misleading, and occasionally factually inaccurate. I wouldn't consider it an authority on the issue at all. Plus he's apparently also employed by Microsoft, so hardly providing an objective view on the matter to people.

I completely agree with your point on the "useless" RAM though.