Windows vista annoyances resolved

lyla · August 28th, 2008, 07:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Syncroneyes

Fine if you say so, it doesn't affect me. I don't give a damn if people ("serious gamers") actually want to play old games with old GPUs and play with second-rate visuals. However personally I think they are daft if they actually choose to experience games this way (or either too poor to afford the newer games/hardware).

Oh well then, I'll just carry on enjoying my better DX10 visuals with my awesome framerates and all the latest games titles too on my nice looking 64 bit OS?

Have to agree, if you want more FPS there are other ways to attain it without staying in the past. We could all be using Windows 2000 if we wanted that.

Sometimes these extra "eye candy" effects are worth more than 3-5 FPS. Think Shadows or similar, sometimes seeing the shadow of an enemy before they come into LoS is worth far more than having them switched off for 156 fps instead of 120fps. Same applies for some of the newer "eye candy". As for Vista vs XP, there have been a lot of Benchmarks since SP1 that prove in "most" things it is the same speed(within 3%) or faster, and I can guarantee the Graphics companies are putting more attention into how their drivers work with Vista than legacy O.S.

Some examples:

Throughout the testing the hardware platform has remained unchanged.

The data speaks for itself. At the top of the list is Windows Vista 64-bit, while at the bottom is XP SP2. In the middle we have XP RTM, XP SP3, Vista 32-bit RTM and Vista 32-bit SP1 fighting it out.

So it really isn't BLACK & WHITE, Some games are faster some are slower, it will also depend on your drivers/hardware. You should test for yourself on your platform which is better.

Syncroneyes · August 28th, 2008, 10:55 PM

I have a friend who is one of your supposed "hardcore gamers". He spent £2500 on an Alienware core 2 duo laptop with 2 x 8800GTX SLi inside, just so he could play Warcraft everywhere he went. BUT THEN he paid an extra £100 especially so he could have XP installed instead of Vista.

Its the stupidest f***ing thing I ever heard of, as he could have saved £100 and simply had Vista with DX10 and almost exactly same level of performance as XP (though I didnt have the heart to tell him as he was so pleased with himself).

I on the other hand saved up practically ALL of my money for ages so I could afford a GX2, then I traded my first 2 x 8800GTXs for another 9800GX2 so I could have a Quad SLi system, hell I worked my ass off for months just so I could buy my Vista64 rig in the first place (it had AM2 mobo first with the GTXs then I switched to intel quad core more recently with GX2s, but it has always been with Vista64 OS as I always believed it would give me both the best FPS AND the best eye-candy at the same time).

Why? - because I want to play all the very latest games at the highest resolution, with the very highest quality graphics AND with the highest framerates possible.

Now i'm pretty sure that makes me more qualified as a "hardcore gamer" than my mate with his XP laptop...?

lyla · August 28th, 2008, 11:33 PM

For warcraft I had to move my systems to Vista, XP on two different systems(with quite different hardware, and even XP installs, 1 shop bought, 1 homemade at different times), even clean installs would produce a fairly common bug of dissapearing ground/textures, or slow down after a while in SSC etc, once both machines were moved to Vista, never had a problem since, yet I spent 6-8months reinstalling/cleaning, trying with/without antivirus, driver revisions from 2005-2008, with no luck the same bug a LOT of people were reporting would show itself. So not only does Vista perform better on quite a few games/applications, it also resolved a driver/software issue with WoW for me.