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Fireblade
02-11-2007, 16:00
First of all... I've put this thread in the 'Gaming' section - rather than the 'Software' section, simply because the tests/benchmarks carried out in the article in question, are primarily gaming related, as opposed to comparisons of the OS's themselves.

Secondly... I know it's a month old article now, and some of you will no doubt have read it already... but this Custom PC XP vs Vista (http://www.custompc.co.uk/features/601358/xp-vs-vista/page1.html) article (dated 2nd October 2007) is well worth a gander by those who haven't read it before.


They basically benchmark a number of well-known games under XP and Vista, to see how they compare.
The [unsurprising to many, I'm sure] 'in a nutshell' result, is highlighted in bold below!




James Morris puts Windows XP and Vista head to head in a gruelling set of benchmarks to see which Microsoft operating system runs your games and applications the quickest.

Windows Vista's slower application and game performance compared with that of Windows XP is very worrying.

This is particularly the case for Nvidia; in many of our game benchmarks, the difference between its hardware's performance in XP and Vista was far more pronounced than that of ATI.
Perhaps this disparity was acceptable (or at least, expected) when Vista first appeared - it's pretty par for the course with a new version of Windows until drivers are optimised.
However, now that Windows XP is close to being discontinued, at least for pre-built PC's, we'd have hoped for a step forwards rather than backwards in overall speed.

Still, unless you're willing to put your faith in a DirectX 10 hack for Windows XP, if you want to play the latest games with the full benefit of the latest graphics hardware, you'll increasingly have little choice but to upgrade to Windows Vista.
As I've intimated already... the results are not a complete surprise to those of us who have experienced similar problems running [certain] games under Vista.
And they're the main reason why many of us [gamers in particular] choose not to rely solely on Windows Vista - but instead, dual-boot XP and Vista, allowing us to fall back to the OS we know our games will run on!


Roll on Vista SP1?

Tom
02-11-2007, 19:20
It's only going to be a fat load of updates in one package, that's easy to check/manage for IT teams the world over who value stability.. When Windows Update doesn't decide to update itself for you. :rolleyes:

For what it's worth, Phoronix compared the latest ATi driver for Linux against the latest for Vista earlier this week. You might be surprised to see the results (http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=11337) :D

Open Source drivers, more OGL games and Wine's increasing support are all good things for Linux gamers :)

LSG501
02-11-2007, 20:32
ATI may not have the fastest card, but they do have the best vista drivers, something thats pretty much been the case from day 1.

Its also a concern for me as the card I will get when its bloomin released is an nvidia (best performance at price, plus its shorter than the ati card) and I want to upgrade to a 64 bit os to make better use of both my cpu and my ram in 3d modelling.

NVIDIA are basically riding on their fastest card publicity machine and forgetting the important things.

Fireblade
02-11-2007, 22:52
Its also a concern for me as the card I will get when its bloomin released is an nvidia (best performance at price, plus its shorter than the ati card)...

Purely as a matter of interest...which one are you getting?

Are you waiting for the updated 8800GTS (end of this month maybe?)... or the 98xx series?

[M]uuhh
02-11-2007, 23:17
Open Source drivers, more OGL games and Wine's increasing support are all good things for Linux gamers :)Linux gamers? Technically their playing a Windows game on a Windows Emulator so technically they are not Linux gamers. :P its all good untill you have a GFX card thats not support by any Linux drivers, namly X800PRO's

brumster
02-11-2007, 23:37
Can't say I quite share the concerns - tried Bioshock before the Vista move, and after, and no difference whatsoever? 8800GTS, C2D 1.86GHz, 2Gb RAM, nothing special.... perfectly stable, too.

[M]uuhh
03-11-2007, 01:21
brumster has a point, if you get 100FPS with XP and 90 with Vista. it actually doesn't matter unless you like to count numbers, because as long as you have over 30FPS your eyes c ant tell the difference. Does Vista actually effect gaming performance to the player? i doubt it. does it effect benchmarks? Yes.

Tom
03-11-2007, 01:31
uuhh;423327']Linux gamers? Technically their playing a Windows game on a Windows Emulator so technically they are not Linux gamers. :P its all good untill you have a GFX card thats not support by any Linux drivers, namly X800PRO's
How about you RTFA (http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=11337) first?

"What's that? Native Linux clients? Open.. What? GL? OH." :rolleyes:

And AMD have opened up the specs for their GFX cards, both old and new, to the FOSS community. They're evening writing a driver for the new HD cards, in partnership with Novell. Give it a few months and you'll be eating those words about lack of graphical driver support.

The binary driver's got better too, as TFA shows. Historically I'd never advocated purchasing ATI cards because of their drivers. It's going to get much better. ;)

[M]uuhh
03-11-2007, 02:00
in a few months? by my post was made today, a few months is a long time in the computer world so i would expect things to change and get better, including none Linux OS. im not some Linux hater, i love my laptop with ubuntu and compizfusion and wine. however im not able to install linux on my 2nd PC due to the GFX card but i still like it, im not bashing vista just stating the facts as they are for me right now :) so i wont be eating any of my words :)

Tom
03-11-2007, 13:24
uuhh;423345']in a few months? by my post was made today, a few months is a long time in the computer world so i would expect things to change and get better, including none Linux OS. im not some Linux hater, i love my laptop with ubuntu and compizfusion and wine. however im not able to install linux on my 2nd PC due to the GFX card but i still like it, im not bashing vista just stating the facts as they are for me right now :) so i wont be eating any of my words :)
My main point was, you did't even read the fine article. Given that all the benchmarks were run on an X800XL chip, which Wikipedia tells me was released after your X800Pro. Given that there's what, 4 different ATI drivers available now? Surely one of them supports your chip?

And as for eating your own words; it was in a future tense. You know with the community given the specs under an open source license, it will get better. Intel did the same not so long ago, and their driver support is good enough for Dell ;)

[M]uuhh
03-11-2007, 18:22
my X800pro is nto supported. If i install any drivers for them in ubuntu i get a corrupted scree. this is not just on one X800. this is on both of them i own. the oen in my shuttle and the Toxic version on my 2nd PC.

Tom
04-11-2007, 15:29
uuhh;423386']my X800pro is nto supported. If i install any drivers for them in ubuntu i get a corrupted scree. this is not just on one X800. this is on both of them i own. the oen in my shuttle and the Toxic version on my 2nd PC.
The X800Pro uses the same chip as the X800XL? As I've been saying, it's all getting better. Support for cards has been improving of late; when was the last time you tried? :)

[M]uuhh
04-11-2007, 16:58
last tiem i tried was on the release of ubu7.10. i am planning to try again in a few weeks if i hear good things :)