Hey triggerthat, have a read through
this article.
In my opinion, gamming on Windows Vista is now excellent and is exactly the same as Windows XP. Now I understand that some people are still having a few problems but I believe these are very far and few between these days and I feel that some people tend to over exaggerate things just a tad.
If you will be going ahead purchainsg Windows Vista and unsure on which edition to buy then
here is a great graph that compares all of the editions of Windows Vista with one another.
Now you may also be debating over to either buy the 32-bit or the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista. If you have a processor that is capable of handling 64-bit instructions then there is no reason to go for the 32-bit edition. You won't see a massive performance increase going from a 32-bit to a 64-bit operating system as of yet since many programs have been written for 32-bit architectures. However this will be changing in the future because with 64bit being more recognized, more and more programs will be written under 64-bit architectures. When programs are released that are written specifically for 64-bit, you will then start to see a performance increase from 32-bit programs.
As you may already know, you will also be able to address up to 128GB of memory with a 64-bit Operating System depending on the Edition that you purchase as opposed to a 32-bit Operating System which can address up to 4GB of memory natively but is then cut down to around the 3GB mark depending on your hardware.
A lot of people think that the only advantage of a 64-bit Operating System is so that can utilize more than 4GB of memory,
this is far from the case.
Now if you are worried about the compatibility side of things with the 64-bit version of Windows Vista, their is really nothing to worry about. The majority of the manufacturers out their have now released 64-bit drivers for their hardware and as regards to software, once again, the majority of software now work perfectly fine under Windows Vista.