Is XP still better than Vista for gaming ?

[mickey_megabyte]

of course it all depends on your hardware, driver support and what games you play.

i think there is very little in it fps wise - but if you look at the computing experience as a whole (ie not just games), the whole OS is greatly improved from the bad old xp days - and as for security? well xp fails bad!

i've moved to 7 over the last few months, and that seems faster than xp - boots up real fast and is just so snappy - best of all, it can only get better as drivers become more mature - roll on the future!

 

[Fire Wizard]

And deffinatly XP has a slight performance edge across all those - its not that noticeable in the ones where its around 30-40fps - but the places where its 200+ its quite noticeably different... whether it has any realworld impact is debatable...

I am purely going on a real life performance and the difference in my experience between Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 is extremely small. Real life performance should be the main area to concentrate on since whilst there maybe a difference in fps, it won't necessary effect the user to the extent that the fps counter is portraying.

EDIT: Whatever way you shake it tho - theres only 2 horses in this game XP and Windows 7 and XP might be in the lead right now but its already flagging. Vista slowed to a trot many miles back.

I disagree. Windows Vista is a perfectly usable and fine operating system to use.

 

[CaptainRAVE]

I use Vista and would never go back to XP for gaming. Can't wait for windows 7!

 

[mickey_megabyte]

why wait? you can dual-boot it now! you'll love it!

 

[CSA]

so would win 7 home edition be better than my current win xp x64 for gaming ?

 

[Rroff]

why wait? you can dual-boot it now! you'll love it!

coz once it goes retail you'll have to wipe it off and reinstall :S

personally dual booting never really works out - I end up making one OS or the other my home and rarely boot into the other one.

 

[derkaderka]

Depends on the game(s)

Most of the ones I tried game play was smoother under Xp

 

[FrenchTart]

coz once it goes retail you'll have to wipe it off and reinstall :S

personally dual booting never really works out - I end up making one OS or the other my home and rarely boot into the other one.

On the second part, yup. I much prefer to to VM if I *really* need more than one OS to access at once.

On the first part, all the cool kids love reinstalling and reconfiguring 500 different bits of software every couple of months. It's the most fun you can have with your clothes on...

 

[HangTime]

I delayed moving over from Windows 98 til SP2 due to the general instability

While I agree with some of what you said, I don't believe Win98 to be more stable than XP SP1 (or Win2kpro sp4 I expect, although I never used it).

 

[mickey_megabyte]

coz once it goes retail you'll have to wipe it off and reinstall :S

personally dual booting never really works out - I end up making one OS or the other my home and rarely boot into the other one.

well you've got three months to check it out and get used to it if release is 22 october. mine doesn't expire until next march.

dual-boot is great idea if you want to try out new os, but don't want to wipe the old one - i guess you're not an experimenter, so leave things how they are.

 

[Rroff]

While I agree with some of what you said, I don't believe Win98 to be more stable than XP SP1 (or Win2kpro sp4 I expect, although I never used it).

Depends to a fair degree on the user - like above I keep my OS installs trim and tidy, I absolutely hate stuff like iTunes that installs 3-4 background services that you don't even need, puts stuff in startup, etc. I saw a lot of BSOD with XP before SP2.

well you've got three months to check it out and get used to it if release is 22 october. mine doesn't expire until next march.

dual-boot is great idea if you want to try out new os, but don't want to wipe the old one - i guess you're not an experimenter, so leave things how they are.

I already have XP, vista and win 7 multi/dual booting on a couple of different PCs - but I like to make an OS my home and its a pain to reinstall everything - so until win7 goes retail I'm firmly back on XP.

 

[Nelly]

Used Windows XP since it was released upto service pack 2, have been using Vista 64bit ultimate since christmas with service pack 2, had no problems with any of my games.

I'm playing EverQuest which was released in 1999 with no problems at all on Vista, a lot of old games just need XP compatability mode activating, the big advantage for me is I can run 3 EQ's at once, the extra ram is a blessing with Vista.

I tried Windows 7 beta RC & was impressed used it a couple of weeks on another hard-drive, have ordered Windows 7 Home Edition E, any missing features/bugs will be fixed so I cannot wait.

Is XP still better than Vista for gaming ?

Not sure to be honest but with Vista Service Pack 1 it made some great improvements stability wise, all my games work great.

I have access to all my ram as Windows XP is crippled to around 3.1GB total I think including video card memory, Windows Vista doesnt have this problem so I have my 4GB Ram + 1.768GB Video card memory fully useable.

 

[Mattus]

EDIT: Whatever way you shake it tho - theres only 2 horses in this game XP and Windows 7 and XP might be in the lead right now but its already flagging. Vista slowed to a trot many miles back.

That just isn't true if you're on half-decent hardware. I have Vista 64 on my Q6600 with 4GB RAM - a decent rig, though not a top-end one - and I can't believe how smooth and fast it is. Making it lag seems virtually impossible - last night I had a Linux virtual machine maxing the CPU whilst editing some really large images, importing music into iTunes, watching an HD video and surfing. All that and system responsiveness didn't suffer at all. I'm not sure XP would have performed as nicely.

I did benchmark a bit better when I used XP, but in actual real-world usage Vista 64 is leagues ahead.

 

[jigger]

Anyone dual booting.

 

[T1Cybernetic]

I really hate XP now. It feels so old.

I use Vista and would never go back to XP for gaming. Can't wait for windows 7!

Is xp really that old I have not tried vista because i never had a problem with xp, it so far has done everything i need it to do but i must admit vista and windows 7 look much better!

 

[EdAllonby]

I went to try xp the other week to see how it would fair on my vista machine. I was actually pleasently suprised not only was vista gaming better, but on xp it was craching quite a bit too !

 

[Rroff]

That just isn't true if you're on half-decent hardware. I have Vista 64 on my Q6600 with 4GB RAM - a decent rig, though not a top-end one - and I can't believe how smooth and fast it is. Making it lag seems virtually impossible - last night I had a Linux virtual machine maxing the CPU whilst editing some really large images, importing music into iTunes, watching an HD video and surfing. All that and system responsiveness didn't suffer at all. I'm not sure XP would have performed as nicely.

I did benchmark a bit better when I used XP, but in actual real-world usage Vista 64 is leagues ahead.

Q6600 here too on XP and I regularly have itunes running a VM (usually running off VB3) programming IDE, full image editing setup, 3D modelling package and level editor open as well as spotify, etc. and its butter smooth... vista/win7 is slightly better for threading tho... but the subject was gaming performance not desktop.

And as a general rule XP is still slightly faster overall for single threaded gaming performance and often still hangs in in multi threaded games too... but quite frankly I see windows 7 overtaking it in the not too distant future and I don't see any future for vista.

 

[Mattus]

I see more future for Vista than XP. 7 is going to convince a lot of the XP diehards to upgrade, whilst people who have no problems with Vista will be less inclined to do so, since better performance seems to be the main improvement in 7.

Meanwhile, in the prebuilt market, people who have systems recent enough to ship with Vista are probably not looking at replacing them yet, whilst the millions of XP prebuilts out there are slowly going to be replaced by machines running 7 (and not downgraded to XP like many Vista machines were!)

XP has had a glorious run, but I don't think many home users will be running it in a few years' time.

 

[jigger]

If Win 7 provides a performance upgrade then I think most people would switch.

I did not see Vista as anything other than a problematic down grade with some nice touches that I really couldn't give a monkeys about.



Anyone able to run some bench marks before I am forced to tie this OEM peice of crud to a motherboard.

 

[Mattus]

If you see Vista as a downgrade from XP, you're seeing it wrong. It is a vastly superior desktop OS. I hate using XP now.. it's ugly, my files aren't indexed, my programs aren't prefetched, managing files is awkward, I can't even control the volume of a particular application...