New Gaming Computer. Vista or XP?

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For Gaming, which OS is better?

  • XP

    Votes: 1 100.0%

  • Vista

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    1
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I went with Vista because of DX10.1 and to be DX11. After some benchmarks I knowticed Vista is much faster then XP.

The only big problem at the beginning of Vista was drivers, every OS has its problems, thankfully Vista fixed itself with SP1.
 
I was very undecided about getting Vista for a long time. Like the OP I needed a second OS. It has been declared by Microsoft that they want to stop producing and supporting XP so part of my reasoning for purchasing Vista was longevity, I didn't want to buy another copy of of XP only to have it lose support in a year.

I purchased an OEM copy of Vista 64, and it installed exactly like it was supposed to. No problems that were caused by the OS. Everything I use works just fine, even my ancient printer. It installs a heck of a lot faster than XP, partly because my version was 64. The overall UI is very handy, but takes a bit getting used to because they move some stuff around.

I found this 250+page guide to whats new in Vista, and it is quite remarkable how significantly different the OS works compared to XP. It seems they took the basic features and improved most of em and added quite a few more.

If anyone is still on the fence about Vista, its worth it over XP, though I hear your computer needs to be pretty new.

Q6600, P5Q Pro, Radeon 4850x2, Raid 0, 4GB ram.
 
For Gaming go Vista. Face it, its the future. No point in sticking with XP. Gone are the days when Vista was giving compatibility problems and all that stuff.... Its become lots better with SP1. And for gaming and music, get Vista Home Premium. Ultimate is Home Premium + business features + stupid ultimate extras(the only ok thing thing in Ultimate Extras is Dream Scene which lets you play videos instead of a desktop Wallplaper{totally unnecessary}) Home Premium ought to suit you just fine. And make sure you get adequate RAM. For games like Crysis in Vista, I'd recommend 3-4 gigs...
 
http://weblog.infoworld.com/sentinel/archives/2008/08/bursting_the_vi.html

Better than 1/3 of people buying machines with Vista installed are taking it off "upgrading" to XP.

Enuff said.

This is not news. Since Windows 3.11 every subsequent OS has performed more slowly than it's predecessor, so there's no surprise here. Windows 95 was slower than W4WGs (by 37%), Win98 was slower than Win95. NT 5 (Win2k) was slower than NT4 by a wide margin. NT5.1 (XP) was slower than Win2k. Vista is slower than XP. Why, all of a sudden should we expect Vista to break the streak ?

Can a machine do "a" task faster on Vista than on XP ? Sure, "Train it" to do one particular thing so that it prefetches 50-80% of the data as the machine boots so you have a Vista machine that has a 50 yard head start in a 100 yard run. But do what it's not expecting you to do and watch the alleged Vista performance advantage crumble. This is the same "trick" MS pulled with IE to "prove" that it was faster than the competition. When you boot windows post Win9x, half of IE was preloaded making it "seem" to have faster loading time when you actually clicked the icon. Then we had folks like litepc.com debunk it by showing vast performance increases across the board when the parts of IE that preloaded were removed.

Think of ya PC like a car's engine.....think of Windows as your load. Two cars with the same engine take a trip, one has 3 people in it (XP). One has 5 (Vista). All things being equal which one gets the higher mileage ? Which one goes faster from 0 - 60. We don't need a stopwatch to time this. More bulk, larger memory footprint, more processes running, it goes against all common sense that, running on the same hardware, the bigger load will will somehow be faster. If commonsense ain't enough find one one publication that has published a test showing otherwise.
 
Jack - You may want to reread the article - It's not 1/3rd of 'people', it's 1/3rd of enterprise users. Software standards being what they are at most corporations, the surprising number isn't 1/3rd are being downgraded back to XP, it's that 70% are keeping it.


It's the exact same stuff every time there's a new OS:

Intel upgrades to Windows 2000 six months after Windows XP was released:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2002/01/10/intel-chooses-w2k-over-winxp

Sluggish corporate adoption of Windows XP:
http://www.computerworld.com/printthis/2002/0,4814,74276,00.html

Microsoft offers new licensing terms and other incentives to jump-start stalled corporate XP adoption:
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/18821819

Three years after release, XP uptake still too slow:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39151481,00.htm?r=8

Four long years after XP release, more corporate desktops still using Windows 2000:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Windows/XP-May-Catch-Up-to-Win-2000-by-Years-End/


Screw the car engine analogy. Think of it in terms of the cheap bastards running corporate IT nowadays.. PC turnover is what... a 5 year cycle at most places?
 
"Performed more slowly..."

Yes, on the same hardware, new versions of Windows will definately perform slower than old versions. A 5 year-old computer is better served running XP than Vista. However, on new hardware Vista will perform about the same or in some instances better than XP. It's no surprise, sure... but as memory footprints have increased, so has the amount of memory in standard PC configurations. Most PCs now come with at least 1GB of RAM.. a lot have 2GB or more. Just a couple years ago, 1GB was considered to be at the top of the scale... now it's at the bottom.

While Windows has grown with each new version, the hardware running it has also "grown". Of course, if you insist on keeping old hardware to run new software... it's going to appear to be very slow.
 
I'm using both XP and Vistabut whenit comesto gaiming Xpisbetter since I don't have yet a DX10 card still waiting it at the post office.

I was able to play Crysis with my ridiculous PC on Xp but on Vista I lost my sound and the games goes crazy.

I think that Xp is better for gaming up to now since the majority of the games have DX10 and DX9.

I think that it will be better to have both just in case since Xp seemed to be more rapid than Vista who eats all the RAM.

Better not to install lots of things on Vista though as all these will eat up your RAM and you will have little left to play today's games.

 
The debate go's on. I have a HP with Vista 64 running a Nvidia 8800, a Toshiba laptop with Vista 32 and a Falcon Northwest with Windows xp 32 all with Nvidia cards. I work for a modeling simulation company. With that in mind here is my take. First I would say let the need or the software decide which OS. It's not so much that Vista or Xp is better, it's more a matter of how well the (games in your case) are written for said OS. That being said as we move into 2009 there are games that will take advantage of direct X 10, which by the way is volummetric smoke and light and "godray effects" like the lights coming through the clouds. Games like ArmA for example do not run well on Vista esp Vista 64. Games like Crysis run fine on both OS, you just don't get the DX-10 effects on XP. However Crysis is a perfect game to compare DX9 vs DX10. From there you can decide if DX10 is worth your while. I do not like Vista's attempt at security, the fact is it's not more secure so much as it is paranoid. You have to undo the security features, esp if you plan to mod. On that subject it is the modding of games like Gears of War and HL2's Hammer editor and ArmA that prompted me to go back to XP as ArmA runs much better on XP again it's the software not the OS. Note ArmA2 coming out next year will not take advantage of DX-10. I know the original writer of this thread had made his choice, however I know there are others who are still making that choice. If your out there please be more specific about your set up and I can research it to give a better answer. Again only my opinion based on the 10 gaming computers I have.
 
What security features do you have to undo? I've been running Vista on both my laptop and desktop and have yet to come across any need to disable any sort of security. If you're referring to UAC and for some reason you still can't run a program... then you simply run it as administrator. Yes, it will prompt you everytime you run it that way... but at least you can run it and you don't have to disable anything.

DX10 wasn't a deciding factor for my upgrade. I always eventually upgrade to the latest version of Windows simply because I like to run the latest version. There's no better way to familiarize yourself with it than to run it. After all, a lot of machines coming across my bench are coming with it now.
 
xp without a doubt i use both xp and vista, like most gamers I choose xp for gaming. Vista I use but hate to many reasons to dislike, if you are useless with computers and like wasting time then go with Vista.
 
If you weren't useless with computers... you'd be able to fix whatever "issues" you're having with Vista and you wouldn't be here complaining about it. Vista games just as well as XP... the only difference is that some of your ancient games won't play anymore. All the games I play regularly run just fine, however.
 



Fixed

 
vista comes with DX10 thats y i would choose it. and because i got vista ultimate for $86 bucks in a combo deal with my mother board. i would have paid alot more for xp
 
It doesn't work. It never did. The APIs between XP and Vista are completely different... Vista can run DX9... but there is no DX10 for XP, nor is it likely that there will ever be. I know of one person that tried to install this so-called DX10 for XP and it just completely hosed his system. If DX10 is a must for you, then so is Vista.

I cannot in good conscience recommend an OS approaching a decade in age on new hardware. (Mind you, this just proves how good XP was... even when all the Vista detractors were bashing it back when it was released for the same reasons they're bashing Vista now.) However, there is no longer any reason to recommend XP over Vista... a year ago it was a different story... but things change. Bugs are fixed and drivers are improved. Unfortunately, people's attitudes are much slower to change.

 
Ah... The corpse of the Alky Project.... You *are* aware the developers have abandoned it, and have "donated" the code base "to the community", right? Depending on where you happen to stand on the issue, this is alternately translated any number of ways, from "..just you wait - 'The Community' is gonna stick it to Microsoft, Yeah!!".... all the way to "LAWWWWLLLL!!!! Lewzerz Phailed and Bailed"


The simple truth is the now long~cancelled Alky project wrote some libraries and a bridge to do software translation of DX10 calls to DX9 so that an XP box can run DX10 content. From a technical perspective, there's a few problems with this:

(1) The entire point of Direct X is that the game can 'speak' directly to the hardware for best possible performance. This means the game access your video card directly, bypassing the operating system, for the shortest execution path. Adding in the overhead of a software translation layer defeats the entire reason for Direct X's existence.


(2) There is functionality in DX10, such as unified vertex and pixel shaders, which does not exist in DX9. The visual effects can often be replicated, but again there is significant overhead in reading what the DX10 command is, parsing it out into the various params needed for the set of DX9 calls needed to perform the effect, and then coordinating and sending those calls so the effect can be rendered. Understand that this is not a trivial task. So, more performance loss in the software layer.


(3) There are only a couple DX10 games on the market anyhow. And NO, "DX10 mode" on current DX9 games isn't the same.

- - The way it works is in two parts: Firstly, there are a certain subset of certain calls which aren't incompatible and can be added to a DX9 game. The second part is that when running a DX9 games, Vista uses 9Ex and not DX10. 9Ex is an API set that uses the WDDM and allows Direct3D 9 applications to access some of the features available in Windows Vista. (Cross-process shared surfaces, managed graphics memory, prioritization of resources, text anti-aliasing, some advanced gamma functions) In plain language, what these "DX10 Modes" do is make these few extra calls available in an otherwise DX9 game. Programmers then may, or may not, take advantage to add a little extra functionality. Usually it amounts to something on the order of the water looking a little shinier, or whatever.

In plain English: If you can take the same CD and install it on a DX9 XP box, and a Vista box, then it is NOT DX10. It is 9 with (the potential for) added 10 calls from the 9Ex subset of the spec. If it were really DX10, it would not run on an XP box at all. Now, how many games are out there now which don't run on XP at all?? yeah...



In summation: You're making much ado about a dead project that doesn't actually bring any added performance to the table and never really could in the first place.


If you're happy with XP, then by all means stick with it. I don't care one way or another, really. But the Alky project is dead, gone, and never really stood a chance of doing much more than it already accomplished: FUD for the Anti~Vista crowd and to create publicity for it's creators.
 
Independent confirmation:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1931918,00.asp


DX10 will use much faster dynamic link libraries (DLLs), and won't incorporate older versions of DirectX, as is done today. DirectX 9 will be supported side-by-side, through DirectX 9.L (basically, that's DX9 for the Vista driver model). So right there, without using any new features, DX10 should be more efficient and faster.

The DX10 graphics API will usher in unified vertex and pixel shaders, and introduce the concept of "geometry shaders" that can act on not just single vertices, but whole triangles and their adjacent vertices. Developers will be able to stream out data from the GPU and reuse it without needing the CPU to do a single thing, so a lot of the CPU load seen in current graphics drivers and games should be reduced. DX10 should allow for more flexible and granular graphics memory access, and in general allow GPUs to be far more flexible and powerful than before.

Perhaps one of the best features of DX10 is the removal of capability bits, or "cap bits." Today, graphics cards don't have to support everything in DirectX 9 to be a "DX9 graphics card." There are lots of optional features, and the drivers have to report to the OS exactly what it can and can't do with a set of cap bits. This has been a huge headache for developers, as different cards all support different features, or perform the same operations in different ways. In DX10, either you meet the spec or you don't—no more supporting only these or those texture formats, and this or that shader model but only with this level of precision.
Click to expand...
 
Back when the thread started, I would've said XP. But now w/ SP1, DX10 not sucking, and M$ no longer giving a damn about XP updates/bug fixes/customer support, vista is the wtg. I haven't had any complaints with Ultimate.
 
With the changes in market and OEM copies of home premium (basically the entire OS without ultimate fuzz that is useless anyway) is under $100, vista is absolutely the choice now. 64 bit as well, I have not encountered anything thats not in the process of transition. If you have a decent PC, vista is absolutely worth it.
 
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