Is XP still better than Vista for gaming ?

[jigger]

Its not superior as its still slower by the looks of things. If it can fully surpass Xp the it will be superior untill then its just a different OS.
At the time I was using it, it was a buggy pile of crap with some very nice idea's the main ones being DX10 and kernel stability, I thought by now it would offer more performance and no issues.

Anyway I can feel your love for Vista and that's cool, but I am looking for speed and would like to know how much I am about to lose.

 

[Andric]

Vista was much better at launch than xp ever was.I also got xp when it launched and nothing working with it.Xp was very poor until sp2.When i got vista i set up a dual boot with xp just incase and never used xp again.I have win7 pre-order and ill do the same dual boot again.Vista has had its day now nevermind xp.

agree with this - xp wasn't all that and had the same types of post comparing it unfavourably with the one before(me or something crap like that).

UAC in vista is a pain and much imprved in win7 - though confirmations still needed as in any other half way tightened down system. Can turn it off but I just get rid of the screen darkening myself which makes it a lot less annoying imo.

On original subject vista 64 is imo better & more stable than xp. win7 RTM is reportedly better performance-wise than either.

 

[Mattus]

It is perhaps a little slower than XP when gaming, simply because it does a lot more background processing which takes CPU away from the game. But that background processing allows a much nicer desktop experience, and I'd much rather have that than an extra 3FPS.

 

[jigger]

agree with this - xp wasn't all that and had the same types of post comparing it unfavourably with the one before(me or something crap like that).

UAC in vista is a pain and much imprved in win7 - though confirmations still needed as in any other half way tightened down system. Can turn it off but I just get rid of the screen darkening myself which makes it a lot less annoying imo.

On original subject vista 64 is imo better & more stable than xp. win7 RTM is reportedly better performance-wise than either.

It was Win 98 and I agree XP was a hunk of crap also until service pack one, but Xp did start to really pull away performance wise very early on and showed it was clearly the faster OS from the start.

Vista has well had its development holiday and Vista must by now be as fast as it going to get.

Anyone dual booting ! Am on every one ignore list

Please dont make me tie this OS to a motherboard only to find out I should have used my last XP licence.

 

[Amnesia]

It is perhaps a little slower than XP when gaming, simply because it does a lot more background processing which takes CPU away from the game. But that background processing allows a much nicer desktop experience, and I'd much rather have that than an extra 3FPS.

hi

where do you get this 3fps from ?

is this game you're talking about running at 10fps which would be a massive 30%increase

maybe 30fps ? so its still a massive 10% increase

300 fps ??? 1% increase


i can see you like vista a lot and thats fine but i cant see it having more of a lifespan than xp.
one of the most annoying things i found with vista is what you pointed out....when i double click an icon i want all available resources running it.....not vista doing its own thing in the background.
i also hate the hard drive constantly being thrashed.....i also dont like my load times increased because the os wants to guess what im going to do....double clicking for me isnt very hard so i'll tell the os myself what i would like to load.

i know some of these services can be stopped but then where is the upgrade when all you're really doing is exchanging speed for stability.

whats with the uac or whatever its called... ? and whats with running apps as admin so often ?
tbh if you dont feel an app is safe then you shouldnt run it and it would have been better if the option was to run it in a safe mode rather than doing things the other way around .

 

[Mattus]

where do you get this 3fps from ?

is this game you're talking about running at 10fps which would be a massive 30%increase

maybe 30fps ? so its still a massive 10% increase

300 fps ??? 1% increase

I just can't see a situation in which 3fps or 5fps would actually make a difference.

A game that's running at 10fps will still be unplayable at 15fps.

A game that's running at 30fps won't be substantially better at 35fps.

A game that's running at 300fps won't feel different from a game running at 305fps.

If it was double the frame rate then I could understand, but it's really a pretty small difference.

i also hate the hard drive constantly being thrashed.....i also dont like my load times increased because the os wants to guess what im going to do....double clicking for me isnt very hard so i'll tell the os myself what i would like to load.

Lots of people dislike the disk thrashing, especially on startup. There's not really any reason to. Your disk isn't going to die because it's being used more - otherwise Google and Facebook would be replacing disks constantly. And Vista prioritises IO requests from applications over Superfetch, so it's not going to slow you down. It's a psychological thing - people just aren't used to the disk being accessed when they're not doing it.

Being able to double-click an icon yourself has nothing to do with it. The point is that if you click that icon often, Vista will have preloaded the app so it launches faster. With XP, you'll have to wait.

 

[Amnesia]

Anyone dual booting ! Am on every one ignore list

Please dont make me tie this OS to a motherboard only to find out I should have used my last XP licence.

i did dual boot with vista for a while....fps were pretty close to xp in most games but in terms of reponsiveness it wasnt close.

i used vista for apps and other stuff....just not for games.
this way i wouldnt need to clogg up my xp installation and always remained very fast.

 

[Amnesia]

A game that's running at 10fps will still be unplayable at 15fps.

sorry for quoting just 1 line but what you're showing there would be a 50% increase which is again a massive difference.

that same 50% difference would be 40fps on a first person shooter which is pretty much unplayable and 60fps which would be perfectly playable.

btw im not saying xp is 50% faster...was just wondering where this 3fps come from

 

[Mattus]

sorry for quoting just 1 line but what you're showing there would be a 50% increase which is again a massive difference.

But it would still be unplayable That was kinda my point... if your framerate is low enough that you actually notice an extra 5fps, the game is probably unplayable anyway.

3fps is a number that I pulled out of the air. It actually exaggerates the problem a bit - this review shows that the difference is normally less than 3fps. And bear in mind that it's from 2007 - the gap has got narrower still since then.

 

[Fire Wizard]

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.

The amount of RAM the system will be able to address will be due to weather you're using a fully functional 32-bit or 64-bit system.

one of the most annoying things i found with vista is what you pointed out....when i double click an icon i want all available resources running it.....not vista doing its own thing in the background.

i also dont like my load times increased because the os wants to guess what im going to do....double clicking for me isnt very hard so i'll tell the os myself what i would like to load.

If you would like to know and have more of an understand of some of the changes in Windows Vista, then the following three part series should be a good start.

Inside The Windows Vista Kernel System: Part 1

At a Glance:

* Thread priority and scheduling
* File-based symbolic links
* Canceling I/O operations

Inside The Windows Vista Kernel System: Part 2

At a Glance:

* Memory management
* Startup and shutdown
* Power management

Inside The Windows Vista Kernel System: Part 3

At a Glance:

* Reliability
* Recovery
* Security

whats with the uac or whatever its called... ?

User Account Control, a very much needed feature. It's there to force software developers to to start coding their applications so they work in a standard user environment and to also enable users to run in a standard user account.

and whats with running apps as admin so often ?

There are some applications that will inevitably require administrator privileges due to the nature of them. However, there quite a few applications that do not and request administrator privileges completely unnecessary. This is down to the developers taking shortcuts and simply not coding their applications correctly. UAC is there to fix this.

tbh if you dont feel an app is safe then you shouldnt run it and it would have been better if the option was to run it in a safe mode rather than doing things the other way around .

Would you care to expand on what you have written above please. I'm not quite understanding on what you mean.

 

[Amnesia]

3fps is a number that I pulled out of the air. It actually exaggerates the problem a bit - this review shows that the difference is normally less than 3fps. And bear in mind that it's from 2007 - the gap has got narrower still since then.

no offense to you but i wouldnt always go by reports from websites but i'd rather ask ppl on forums.

now im not sure but is that before sp1 for vista ?
i remember testing 2 games with mp timedemos before sp1 for vista...counter strike source and rtcw but there was over 100fps difference in both of them compared to vista.
i do remember posting the results in the windows forums too.

 

[Amnesia]

Would you care to expand on what you have written above please. I'm not quite understanding on what you mean.

hi

ive already had this discussion with you about a year ago....

 

[Mattus]

no offense to you but i wouldnt always go by reports from websites but i'd rather ask ppl on forums.

Conversely, if I was deciding between XP and Vista, I'd trust a review with detailed numbers and a documented testing process a lot more than I'd trust hearsay and opinion on a forum. Hearing someone say 'I used both and XP feels faster' isn't exactly very convincing without the evidence to back it up. You don't know which other factors were involved, either.

Forums are how a lot of misconceptions about Vista spread in the first place. One person misunderstands how SuperFetch works and posts that it's thrashing his hard drive pointlessly. Ten people repeat it and before you know it you're battling a tidal wave of FUD.

On the other hand, you can't really debate what Fire Wizard's saying. It's pretty sound fact.

 

[Amnesia]

well what that review you posted claims....is pretty much the opposite of what my tests came to conclude

as for firewizard

yup he will copy+paste/write how vista is meant to work and how good it is.....but in practice it just isnt always as a good as it sounds.

 

[Mattus]

well what that review you posted claims....is pretty much the opposite of what my tests came to conclude

as for firewizard

yup he will copy+paste/write how vista is meant to work and how good it is.....but in practice it just isnt always as a good as it sounds.

Well... to make decent decisions, people really need facts and evidence.

Your tests may well be valid, but until you give detailed numbers and write a description of your methods which proves that it's a fair test, like the review does, I'm going to believe the review.

Similarly, it may be that Fire Wizard isn't always right - but he backs up his claims with factual evidence, which is more than I've seen from anyone defending XP. Gut feeling alone doesn't really cut it. You have to prove him wrong, not just say he's wrong!

 

[jigger]

But it would still be unplayable That was kinda my point... if your framerate is low enough that you actually notice an extra 5fps, the game is probably unplayable anyway.

3fps is a number that I pulled out of the air. It actually exaggerates the problem a bit - this review shows that the difference is normally less than 3fps. And bear in mind that it's from 2007 - the gap has got narrower still since then.

But that was pre SP3, the gap could have increased further.

From what Ive seen (not sure what I believe) worse case looks to be around %30 and some games go from playable to needing a resolution drop.

It's a sad state of affairs, when you think of the development time between Xp and Vista, we really shouldn't be having this discussion.

Anyone dual booting or have a copy of XP and a spare hard disk ?

 

[Mattus]

But that was pre SP3, the gap could have increased further.

You mean the SP3 that was nothing more than a roll-up of previous fixes and a few unrelated networking and security updates?

 

[Fire Wizard]

as for firewizard

yup he will copy+paste/write how vista is meant to work and how good it is.....but in practice it just isnt always as a good as it sounds.

Care to say what sort of things you're referring too?

As for the our previous discussion, I couldn't remember discussing anything with you. So, I had a search back and it would seem you have changed your user name since then and I think I found the thread you were referring too. Though, it doesn't really answer some of the things I am having a problem understanding in this thread. Peoples viewpoints change as well.

 

[Amnesia]

Well... to make decent decisions, people really need facts and evidence.

Your tests may well be valid, but until you give detailed numbers and write a description of your methods which proves that it's a fair test, like the review does, I'm going to believe the review.

i dont have the test numbers anymore but i did them on a fresh install of vista and the xp wasnt very old......the games had already been installed and could be run by clicking the exe for rtcw or launching css from steam so they didnt have different settings or configs.

now im not trying to convince you to believe my tests so much but simply saying them tests what they did are nothing but lies....im not the only person who tested vista vs xp and all of us found vista to be a lot slower.
this is ppl i know in rl not someone who i met on the internet.

but personally i find that general opinion on forums is a lot more accurate weather it be for reviews of games /hardware or benchmarking.

Similarly, it may be that Fire Wizard isn't always right - but he backs up his claims with factual evidence, which is more than I've seen from anyone defending XP. Gut feeling alone doesn't really cut it.

i wasnt saying that firewizard was lying....my appologies to him if thats how its come across.
what i meant was he is very knowledgeable and does have all the facts and links to back up his claim but no matter how jazzy he makes vista sound....it just isnt always as good in practice as he can make it sound.....think of him as a car salesmen

 

[Amnesia]

Care to say what sort of things you're referring too?

btw there was a couple of threads.
the things im referring to is the disk thrashing which i dont like....the pre loading apps for me...the annoying uac...the slower response time of vista.

ive had answers from you in the past about why things are the way they are....and they are there to benefit but like ive said in the above post.

in practice i just dont feel any benefit to it and find it more of a hindrance.