 New thoughts on Vista...and Nvidia.
I cannot express enough thanks to Regeneration for his fine efforts. I was excited to learn that NVidia finally released new drivers that are good for something besides the 8-series cards (162.18) as I still have 7-series cards; every version after 91.47 sucked worse and worse until 162.18. His tuning only made them better and I'm using those now. If the 163.69's came out as well, but with more fixes from NV to start with, they must rock!
I despise Microsoft as one should despise any entity with as many felony convictions as they have. But, I don’t hate Windows. It’s not perfect, but neither is my beloved Linux. I know that everyone is down on Vista, and until the last week this has included me. I’ve created many a nasty post since testing Vista early this year. But, I can verify that on the exact same machine, Vista is obviously faster now and with quicker response to user input than when I first reviewed it back in February. NVidia's drivers have gotten much better though I know that they still have a ways to go. When Regeneration gets the Vista drivers down, life with Vista will get much better.
The thing that I am curious about is that though I still read about this everywhere, I am currently no longer seeing significantly more performance in XP than in Vista. Using the XP Pro Essentials 2 installation CD and the NGO 162.18’s, I’m seeing the highest synthetic scores (’06 = 9205; great for this hardware), along with the highest in-game frame-rates I’ve seen in the two years since I put this thing together.
In Vista, using the latest factory drivers, I score 8850 in’06, notably less but not tragically so, and I see a few FPS less in most DX9 & OpenGL games. The little trick to make Vista automatically kill all of the desktop composition & theme when 3D apps are launched sure helps! However, possibly due to the different rendering engine in Vista, though my FPS tends to be a bit lower in Vista it also appears to be more consistent. It never gets as high…but it also never drops as low as it does in XP.
Although I read plenty about it, I am also not having serious stability issues either (though it is not as stable as my XP installation). I had no issues installing, updating, with drivers, etc. However, MS has had five years to sort out XP; I hope that they get it together with Vista.
The bottom line is that unlike when I tested early this year, and very much to my surprise, I am gaming quite happily and effectively in both XP and Vista in both new and a bit older games (2004) using both DirectX and OpenGL rendering. Since at some point this will be ‘Windows’ (at least until its replacement in 2010), and since DirectX10 is a good thing, I hope that the improvements continue. I know that Regeneration will make his contribution to things as soon as he’s able.
I would like to give a loud ‘FU!’ to the combined developers/co-conspirators of BIOSHOCK. I love the game, but since on my PC it runs using DX9 in either OS, there is no logical reason for it to run so much faster in Vista than in XP other than the game being designed specifically to do just that. I believe that this was done for the same cheesy, sleezy reason that Halo 3 is Vista-only. These are sorry, desperate attempts to force gamers to switch to Vista, and to buy new video cards…again. Like I said, I despise Microsoft…and come to think of it I don’t care much for NVidia either beyond liking their video cards. | 
