Vista vs XP

Indy500 · 25 May 2008 at 09:11

Dolph said:
People forget that XP is a seven year old OS, optimised for hardware that old. Vista does a lot more behind the scenes than XP did, and does it in a more advanced way, so to actually equal or nearly equal the performance of XP, it is clearly well optimised. Perhaps you mean the OS should do less and therefore be faster, but I'm not sure how that is progression.

You know Dolph, I first ran XP on an Athlon 750, with 256MB SDRAM, and a 40GB IBM hard drive, and while not instant, it was fairly quick. Not something I can say about Vista and a low-end PC from early 2007...certainly not an unmodified OEM install anyway.

The average user could probably do just fine with Windows 2000, to be honest - their requirements haven't changed a great deal over the years. That is what I resent - OEMs forcing Vista on the general public when they have no use for it.

Richdog · 25 May 2008 at 11:29

snowdog said:
Do you notice a difference between 244 and 272 fps? Or even between 74 and 109?

I thought so.
Notice running faster ? Placebo effect tbh, dump the fps counters, unless you truly see games running below 40-45 fps.

snowdog we are almost all performance computer users here... the point is not whether you notice it, but that the large performance difference exists... which could potentially affect framerates in more demanding games that will have a lower minimum than the games he testes. Performance users care about performance... you should know that. The OP has every right to bring it up.

Elevon · 25 May 2008 at 11:30

sr4470 said:
You know Dolph, I first ran XP on an Athlon 750, with 256MB SDRAM, and a 40GB IBM hard drive, and while not instant, it was fairly quick. Not something I can say about Vista and a low-end PC from early 2007...certainly not an unmodified OEM install anyway.

The average user could probably do just fine with Windows 2000, to be honest - their requirements haven't changed a great deal over the years. That is what I resent - OEMs forcing Vista on the general public when they have no use for it.

XP with 256mb is a joke,my brother has XP with Athlon 900,256mb and I can tell you its very slow and I have done all I can to make it fast with only 256mb of ram.

Vista is quick just like XP providing both have enough ram,I would never run XP with 256mb of ram,1GB I would suggest for XP.
Anybody here remember the minimum specs for XP when it was first released?(128 -256mb) now 99% of users here would not run that nowadays on XP,especially since hardware requirements have moved over the years on XP,1GB is quite average now for XP(and needed IMHO).

Elevon · 25 May 2008 at 11:35

-)G(-Sawyer said:
We have tested with so many games now and all are slower then XP I think the people who claim Vista has the same 3D performance level as XP have just come to except the lower speeds.

Funny how a lot of benchmarks on the net show Vista up there with XP,personally I have used XP for 7 years and Vista for over a year and have or see no real performance difference in gaming,so speak for yourself only.

I have my Vista running fast and sweet just like my XP over the years,I consider myself a hardcore gamer too.

Tomsk · 25 May 2008 at 11:46

98 vs XP vs Vista

Duke · 25 May 2008 at 11:54

Tomsk said:
98 vs XP vs Vista

Interesting read that. I expected 98 to beat XP. I wonder how much things would have changed if they used all latest drivers and SP/updates for each OS.

Elevon · 25 May 2008 at 11:58

Duke said:
Interesting read that. I expected 98 to beat XP. I wonder how much things would have changed if they used all latest drivers and SP/updates for each OS.

Notice the test rig,

Test System

* Processor
* Board
* Memory
* Video
* Hard drive

* Intel Pentium 4 2.8 Gig.
* Intel 864 Perl
* 512 MB DDR 266 SD Ram
* Nvidia 6800 AGP (Nvidia Ti 4400)
* Western Digital ATA/ (Seagate ATA R.I.P.)

512MB for Vista,good way to cripple it for testing,of course Win98 with 512mb is more then enough.

Elevon · 25 May 2008 at 12:03

Another XP v Vista benchmarks http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302500,00.asp

Final Thoughts
If you were expecting a huge drop in performance as your eyes scanned from the XP to the Vista results, well, surprise! As many a tech analyst predicted, Windows Vista's gaming performance conundrum has largely been solved, and it was mainly due to early graphics drivers.

In fact, I'd been planning to run a few other gaming tests, but the results from these were so uninteresting that further work didn't seem merited. Love it or hate it, Vista is performing far better than it used to.

Game performance, it seems, has been exorcised from your concern when choosing a Microsoft operating system.

Note the date 12th May 2008 so very new.

Indy500 · 25 May 2008 at 12:36

Elevon said:
XP with 256mb is a joke,my brother has XP with Athlon 900,256mb and I can tell you its very slow and I have done all I can to make it fast with only 256mb of ram.

I managed just fine for a few years on that, even with games. I guess your mileage varied...

Indy500 · 25 May 2008 at 12:38

Elevon said:
512MB for Vista,good way to cripple it for testing,of course Win98 with 512mb is more then enough.

You obviously don't see the logic in a fair test. The whole point is to use the same hardware thoroughout...

Elevon · 25 May 2008 at 12:43

sr4470 said:
You obviously don't see the logic in a fair test. The whole point is to use the same hardware thoroughout...

There is fair and fair,512MB is minimum recommended for Vista ,is it minimum for XP or 98,hell no.

Moot point anyway since 98 is phased out and 99% of users are on 2K,XP or Vista.

Sadgeek · 25 May 2008 at 14:51

sr4470 said:
You obviously don't see the logic in a fair test. The whole point is to use the same hardware thoroughout...

The fairest would have been to use the recommended hardware for each.

I would expect older technology to run well on the latest pc's given the step up in CPUs etc, which the newer OSs rely on to get through their numerous background tasks.

snowdog · 25 May 2008 at 14:57

Richdog said:
snowdog we are almost all performance computer users here... the point is not whether you notice it, but that the large performance difference exists... which could potentially affect framerates in more demanding games that will have a lower minimum than the games he testes. Performance users care about performance... you should know that. The OP has every right to bring it up.

Perhaps, I guess I'm not a performance user then but just a game enthousiast that likes to enjoy the finer bits of gaming instead of the problems

.

I paid a lot of money as most do for this PC and the games I play on it so I want them to run the best there can and that is on XP.

Fair enough, this is down to personal opinion

. For me ''fast enough'' is enough.

I run all my games with Vertical Sync on so the higher the frame rate the less chance there is of frame dropping below 60 Hertzs, because GTR2 on Vista drops below at points in the game it stutters and the same in TF2 but on XP both games run well with no stutters.

Ok sorry, I never use Vsync and never really think of it, so erm sorry for misunderstanding, although to be fair, you didn't mention vsync/ drops to 30 fps in your OP.

My post was about facts not claims as you put it try reading it again all I wanted was for someone to explain why Vista is slower.

Ok, I can't explain that, all I can do is confirm it

( for games then, for actual OS usage Vista is much faster for me).

Richdog · 25 May 2008 at 15:13

If there were no problems there would be no fun.

benjo · 25 May 2008 at 15:16

I recently went from XP64 to Vista Ultimate 64, and game performance is fine. Although i only tend to play CSS i wont really notice a slow down anyway

But GRID runs fine!

Amnesia · 25 May 2008 at 15:34

Elevon said:
Notice the test rig,

512MB for Vista,good way to cripple it for testing,of course Win98 with 512mb is more then enough.

but some of us have done our own tests.....i ran a time demo of an online game of rtcw which relies mainly on cpu power and vista managed about half the frame rates.

i have 2gig ram
8800gts
e6600

i used some random drivers for xp and the latest ones for vista.
vista was a fresh install with no junk to slow it down

FatRakoon · 25 May 2008 at 15:55

bledd. said:
try xp64, it's faster than both

BINGO!

Elevon · 25 May 2008 at 15:57

memory said:
but some of us have done our own tests.....i ran a time demo of an online game of rtcw which relies mainly on cpu power and vista managed about half the frame rates.

i have 2gig ram
8800gts
e6600

i used some random drivers for xp and the latest ones for vista.
vista was a fresh install with no junk to slow it down

Tests/Benchmarks are penny a dozen,who's right and who's wrong?

Some benchmarks from my previous post here http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302500,00.asp

I can only say in my case I have no performance issues with Vista.

Sidenote: I always game with Windows Defender real time scan disabled,also I use latest version of DX9.0c (March 2008) for my DX9 games.

Amnesia · 25 May 2008 at 16:45

Elevon said:
Tests/Benchmarks are penny a dozen,who's right and who's wrong?

Some benchmarks from my previous post here http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302500,00.asp

I can only say in my case I have no performance issues with Vista.

Sidenote: I always game with Windows Defender real time scan disabled,also I use latest version of DX9.0c (March 2008) for my DX9 games.

i did install the latest version of dx9...its all i installed extra(i forgot to mention).

maybe you can do some benchmarks and share them with us if you get some spare time.

preferably cpu intensive ones(possibly demos of online games where there are lots of players) they are usually the best ones to test the cpu.

quake unreal css tf2 ...games like that but online only side...you can always find demo's of the games on the net so all you need to do is run them.

maybe if someone else owns the same game they can compare results

-)G(-Sawyer · 25 May 2008 at 17:03

Elevon said:
Tests/Benchmarks are penny a dozen,who's right and who's wrong?

It means everthing when all tests show one os is faster in the test, what I was interested in is why it's slower as I no loger belive in the driver reason.

I know some people are happy with Vista and good for them but there has allways been a problem with Vista and games and considering we only really have Microsoft for gaming PCs I find it a worring trend for the furure.

For me as I said before I cant help but like a lot of the new bits in Vista and XP does look and feel old at times, but like when ever I buy something new like a CPU or a GPU I expect it to outperform the replaced parts and this is what bugs the hell out of me that my old XP outperforms Vista with my games.