What is your Vista niggle?

[the-void]

I purchased a couple of Vista books over the weekend. (Windows Vista: The Missing Manual and Office, O'Reilly and Windows Vista Administrator Pocket Consultant, Microsoft). After using XP for half a decade I suppose you become set in your ways. However after a weekend session with Vista and these books I feel I have finally found the true depth and breadth of Vista. I would like for this thread not to turn into a mindless knocking of Vista. But rather an outlet for that one thing that prevents you completely from giving up XP. Its like getting a bit of grit in your iced bun. The bun is still nice, but the experience of the grit has let prevented total satisfaction.

My niggle. My bit of grit. Is gaming on Vista. I have installed the Retail drivers from nVidia. And its still slower than it was on XP. I remember all the threads about saying it will all be ok when the drivers come out of Beta. Well, it didn't happen. I am not even sure if nVidia are ever going write decent Vista drivers, ever. The cynical part of me thinks poor DX9 performance in Vista is going to drive DX10 card uptake. I can understand fully why they are doing it, they are a business after all. Still, its a downer. Not so long ago I was singing the praises of XP, and now that I want to kick it into touch its lingering around like a bad smell. Typical.

 

[the-void]

Well, in nvidia's eyes, Vista hasn't even been released yet so the only drivers we have available are not very good ones. The Forceware 100 series which only works on PCI-E cards is apparantly quite close to XP drivers for speed and IQ, but again these are only in BETA but should go live on the 'official' Vista release date.

I want you to be right BlizzardX, I really do. But it doesn't look that way.
Where does it say they are BETA on the nVidia website?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_97.46.html

Windows Vista x86 RTM

ForceWare Release 95
Version: 97.46
Release Date: January 5, 2007
WHQL Driver

 

[the-void]

my 'niggle' is that pressing F6 in an explorer window doesn't take focus of the address bar

-anyone know how to force classic address bar?

Alt+D will take focus of the address bar. And you can still use the old classic xxx/yyy notation.

The new address bar is far better in my humble opinion. Breadcrumbs, and clickable too. Click on the tiny > option to bring a list of folders. No more clicking back to get to the folder you want.

 

[the-void]

Nice BlizzardX, nice. I was hoping for something like this. Those drivers are worse than the standard MS drivers that come with Vista! I honestly couldn't believe it when I installed them. (They even keep crashing!)

 

[the-void]

Haha they're much better than the BETA 1 drivers trust me! They where awful! Just using the 100.53's at the moment and they appear to be quite good.. A little bit of the pace in terms of 3Dmark but I'm gonna try them in some games shortly.

Gutted. Just tried those new drivers. Still the same. Admittedly this is still Oblivion I was testing with. Still averaging around 17-20fps. Sometimes dropping to 11-12fps, something that never happens under XP.

Personally I don't think we are ever going to get the same DX9 performance under Vista as XP. At least not with DX9 cards.

Still, all is not lost. I am migrating to Vista for primary use, and I will be dual booting a nLited XP partition to run my DX9 games. As soon as I get a DX10 card then it will be bye bye XP.