I read alot of reviews about how the performance is better on xp than on vista , but i never thought it would suck that much.
3Dmark06 says it all
13800 on vista
14500+ on xp
wtf ? Should it be that much different ? , what about all the other new game on vista , they'll have to to suffer that performance difference as well in dx10.
I just hate to be playing with that much less performance for the sole reason of dx10 monopoly ...

Apparently service pack 1 will make things better.Some people are running the beta and can already see improvements.

i use vista 64 and its runs good. i play cod2/cod4/hl2/company of hero's opposing fronts all maxxed out on my 20'1 widescreen. plus i play cnc3 and wow and ton of other games. and i dont have any problems. i like vista more then xp. if you have a problem it fix's it for you. see i had a problem with vista install but i did not cry about it. i googled it and found out it was doing it because of my usb hub. but other then that. its been soild. now this is coming from someone that swear's by xp. but i like vista better so does a friend of mine and he was not going to switch until he saw my computer run vista. and he is using 4200+ 2gb 250gb 8600GTS and he plays cnc3 and such. and does not have problem's.


Brian

I run Vista x86 on my laptop, which has a Core 2 Duo U7500 and the 945GM integrated graphics- so no gaming. It does have 3 GB RAM though. It originally shipped with Windows XP and there was an upgrade coupon for Vista x86. I also dual-boot x86_64 Linux (OpenSUSE 10.3) on this machine. Here are my observations:

General snappiness
Vista: Usable but not very fast. Roughly like running XP on a 1 GHz Athlon with 1 GB RAM. HDD performance is significantly the worst of the group for no known reason.
XP: Reasonably quick for the specs and very usable. Similar to my old 2.2 GHz P4-M notebook.
Linux: A little faster than XP, but not vastly so.

Stability
Vista: Pretty stable- only one BSOD, caused by upgrading a driver. Explorer is more stable than in XP, as are most other programs.
XP: About as stable as a rhinoceros on PCP due to terrible XP drivers for some of the hardware. I probably spent more time looking at blue screens than actually doing work.
Linux: A sheet of bedrock is less stable than this OS.

Drivers
Vista: Everything works and works well and was installed and configured from out-of-the-box.
XP: Drivers technically exist, but you would not want to use them. Installation is painful as you need a second computer and a USB stick to get drivers- no appropriate LAN or WLAN drivers are on the install disk.
Linux: There is no driver yet for the Wacom USB multi-touch tablet, which is a major malfunction. Everything else is fine and was automatically installed and configured from out-of-the-box.

Resource usage
Vista: 950-1100 MB RAM usage at idle with NAV Corporate in the background; ~12 GB HDD used for the OS.
XP: 470-600 MB RAM usage at idle with NAV Corporate in the background; ~2 GB HDD used for the OS.
Linux: 180-230 MB RAM usage at idle. ~3 GB HDD space used for the OS.

Multitasking
Vista: Decently smooth and a hanging task will not hang the system and/or explorer. The HDD throughput is commonly the limiting factor.
XP: It can recognize two CPU cores and technically run things on them, but would rather run one intensive task at a time. A hanging task will generally hang explorer and sometimes the system.
Linux: The gold standard of the group for smoothness and performance; more programs on Linux are SMP-aware than on Windows.

Overall ranking
Vista: 7.5 points out of 10. It's surprisingly not bad. It's a heck of a pig but seems to have fixed most of the instabilities of XP. Most importantly, everything works.
XP: 2 points out of 10. Faster and leaner than Vista but too unstable to be usable. Multitasking is not very fun.
Linux: 7 points out of 10. It's the fastest, leanest, most stable, and most capable OS of the bunch but the one driver is lacks is very important for my usage.

Running Vista 64 with SP1 RC and it's pretty quick. I have no complaints. If I turned off the eye candy along with the stuff I've already turned off it'd be very close to XP's performance.

From my own observations:

Vista Home Basic on a new laptop purchase. Laptop has 1GB ram, 80 GB 5400rpm SATA hdd, Intel GM965 chipset, and 1.73GHz 533 FSB Celeron M 530 (the new Merom-L). When comparing the performance of this to my old Inspiron 1200 laptop: 600MHz Pentium M Banias, 256MB PC2700 DDR, 30GB 4200rpm hdd, and Windows XP Home, I find the old Dell running circles around the new laptop when it comes to just general usage. The new laptop is much faster for CPU intensive tasks of course, but boot times with XP is half that of Vista, and programs also launch sooner. I would put XP on the new laptop in a heartbeat if I didn't think it might screw with the warranty. And besides, we all know Vista is the OS of the future. Sooner or later, I'm gonna want Vista on this new laptop, so I figure I'll deal with the subpar performance now, so that I don't find myself wishing I still had Vista when I finally need it.

Vista has a lot of potential, but it still has a lot of small bugs that need to be ironed out before it can replace XP as top operating system.

I have yet to run into a problem with Vista 64.

None.

Ok, I will be truthful, there was a small problem.... I could not decide what picture that I wanted for my Desktop Background, and my old stock picture was not a widescreen picture and looked like crap when I stretched it to fit on my new monitor. Oh, that really ain't a Vista problem, but I blamed it on Vista.

A lot of people blame Vista for problems that are not related to the OS, so I just thought I would add my own problems to the list.

3Dmark06 is a tool.

I ran StevieD2007 on Vista and XP. On Vista StevieD2007 scored 5 while XP scored 1.

But on StevieD2006 XP scored 4 and Vista scored 2.


Obviously I can tweak my own #'s by changing the parameters that I test or my testing methods.

Now I am not saying that 3Dmark06 is wrong, but think about computers for a moment. Two years ago a single core processor was the norm. Today a Quad core processor is common place. A testing method from two years ago (or last year) may not be properly optimized to handle the current hardware or produce the best results with the newest OS. Bottom line, the next version of 3Dmark may give totally different results that favor Vista over XP.

Yes, it is common knowledge that Vista isn't optimized for performance. The peeps using the beta SP1 say it's better. I haven't seen any benchies tho. I do know there are some items in the knowledge base which are supposed to improve HDD I/O and the like. But I haven't played with the beta service pack because I don't want to be bothered with potentially having to get rid of the thing before installing the production version.

I can't make a direct comparison to XP since that is on a different (and stupidly old) computer. But I've run both 32 bit and 64 bit Vista on the exact same machine. In actual look/feel/location usage, they're the same except for 64 bit's pathological hatred for unsigned/expired digital certificates. Used to be able to shut that off.... No longer, tho. MU has contributed his observations about the 32 bit stuff on the same machine. So I'll use MU's choice of categories to add V32~V64.


General snappiness: Booting is roughly the same and under a minute in all cases, but in and of itself 64 Bit Vista is noticably quicker than 32 bit. By this I mean OS functions in 64 bit are faster than their counterparts in 32 bit. Not an "Oh My God" difference, since in usage on my machine 32 bit certainly wasn't slow. But it was enough of a difference that it was readily apparent under casual usage.

Applications look/feel/seem to run about the same. It's well documented that Vista is a few percent (5??) slower than XP with the same HW. How much of that is drivers or Vista not yet being understood/optimized, and how much is inherent to the OS hasn't been figured out yet. And I'm a user, not a technician, so that stuff's beyond my current knowledge and willingness to isolate. I play the games I played before, smoothly and at perfectly usable frame rates, at my monitor's 16x10 native resolution. That's good enough.

As for differences running 32 bit apps on a 64 bit OS: There *HAVE* to be. But I'll be damned if I could point to anything. There has to be a performance penalty translating between the two. Has to be. But I also know that at a low level, common commands which are less than 32 bits long can be grouped and run in pairs. Do they offset? Is there an advantage?? Would be good to know. But as a user I also know it all runs. Smoothly, and quickly too. So meh...

You wouldn't want the added overhead on a marginal system for sure. But if it's the difference between 100 frames per second, and "only" 95?? Benchmarkers care. But in the world at large? Who gives a rat's...


Stability: I know a lot of people (seem to?) have a lot of issues with Vista. But I have to wonder if a lot of it has more to do with not taking an Operating System change as seriously as it should be. I cut the cord CLEAN - New machine, on new hardware, which I verified beforehand as being compatible and having stable drivers. So I have been rewarded with no OS crashes at all, either on 32 or 64 bit.

I know that driver incompatibilities are a real issue. But while the complaints are abolutely based in reality, it is a little mystifying to me when it's entirely blamed on MSFT & Vista and comes from people who should know better. The makers of said devices are the one's responsible for drivers and compatibility. I decided that the ONLY REASON we don't ahve good drivers for Vista is because 3rd party makers want to force you to buy new stuff instead of paying their employees to extend the old stuff. But the common denominator is Microsoft, and ripping on MSFT sells magazines, gets web page hits, and is good for increasing popularity, so there you have it.

If you think I'm exaggerating: If a vendor supplies a POS driver, written by monkeys high on LSD, and it's installed on XP and (obviously!) fails: People see a bad driver and scream at the vendor, who eventually gets a clue there's an issue and wanders off to spank his... Wellllll... bad example, that one... But you understand where I'm going: People know what a bad driver looks like when it's on XP, they identify it as such, and go after the idiots who wrote the bad driver. But when there's a bad driver on Vista, it somehow magically becomes entirely Microsoft's fault. Like I said: I understand the basis, but shame on the people doing this who know better.


Anyways: I know it's not everyone's experience, and that there are certainly issues. But personally, with no OS related crashes I have to rate it a 10. I've had a couple apps crash ('The Witcher' crashed last night while transitioning areas. And Yah - I was emotionally crushed by the experience. Ten thousand forum posts to follow... ) Anyways - The couple times something has crashed, only that app has been affected. The OS has always stayed operational.


Drivers: I have a relatively bare-bones system: No RAID, just a great big honkin HDD. An SATA Optical, and one big GPU. And I betray my dinosaur roots by still having a FDD, even if it just sits inside a drawer for BIOS flashing. Anyways: November 2007 is a BIG difference from January 07. I have fully functional and stable drivers for everything. But again: I don't expect old stuff to run on a new OS. Any doubts merely served as an excuse to go shopping and were therefore happily solved with the Credit Card. I do know that Vista 64 still doesn't like many/most wireless networks, and that Creative only *just* released audio drivers which are stable enough to be worth using.


Resource usage: Both 32 and 64 sit at about 1.25 GB RAM used of the 4 I have available, counting Anti Virus and normal stuff operating in the background. (3.25 'seen' for V32) This is almost twice what XP used on the old POS box. But Vista is also hugely aggressive about utilizing system resources, pre-caching whatever it thinks you may use. So I consider that to not be representative of what the OS needs. Memory used for caching is surrendered whenever something wants/needs it, so...



Multitasking: I have the same experience as MU: Decently smooth and a hanging task will not hang the system and/or explorer. I will add that I have a fast HDD and gobs of RAM, so neither throughput nor I/O have been an issue for me.


I would like to add a bit on Networking: Both the 32 and 64 bit installations detected, and auto-configured themselves to my LAN with no interference from me at all. No buttons to push. No questions to answer. No addresses to provide. Plug it in, and a few seconds later it's done and fully operational. Easy. Easy. Easy. Like most of us: I've spent more than a few hours swearing at anything and everything while dic*ing around with Microsoft networking on my old XP box. I have wireless devices all over the house, *and* I have the wife's iMac to deal with. Anyone who's also done this is fully aware of the headaches I was VERY happy to not have to deal with.

There's also a very nice set of troubleshooting tools in Vista. Nobody seems to talk about these much, for some strange reason... The improved Search function is also GREAT. Greatly limits digging through menus, sub-menus, and sub-sub menus to find things. Type the name, and there it is.



Overall ranking: MU said "7.5 points out of 10. It's surprisingly not bad. It's a heck of a pig but seems to have fixed most of the instabilities of XP. Most importantly, everything works." I agree with this, tho lean more towards an 8. It's not perfect. It is a few % slower than XP, and uses more resources doing it. DX-10 isn't being used much. And I have to mention the hassle factor of having to dig through (yet another) multi-thousand page manual to find things I already knew how to do in XP.


Anyways.... Tired of typing. Heading off to get another glass of Kool Aid.

I had several brushes with Vista. My impressions? It restores itself from crashes much better than XP (a bit like Windows 98 was less unstable than 95) - but it's a pig.
Thus, right now, all my computers run Linux. I have problems running some pieces of hardware (Intuos3 tablet sometimes works, sometimes doesn't), but then I had much more choices words for Vista when it silently rejected Vista drivers for a wifi dongle roigh out of the box (while the same dongle was plug'n'play on Linux) and forced me to a 2 hours debug, package decompression and manual install of said 'not working' driver.
Moreover, I enjoy tinkering - but I hate fighting with a computer to make things work, and get no return. At least Linux returns explicit logs and error messages when something happens; Windows doesn't. Thus, fixing something under Linux is usually easy; un der Vista, making hardware work is now, 'Plug n Pray'.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

Vista needs more ram to do the same job as xp. FPS isn't really lower on vista, but loading times and program ending times are longer and loading pauses are more of an issue. 2gb on a xp machine feels roomy, but just feels 'adequate' on a vista machine. Thats the issue in a nutshell.

OMG some stoned nut has replied to a thread 6 months later......well done klonedesu and then spoonboy.....heheh I might try and reply to a thread from 1982 and see if people run with it.....lol

Its still a pretty contemporary topic.
I've been wondering about just how bad the difference is myself. I currently have XP w/ 2GB ram and I dont think I want to upgrade to Vista just yet.

It's still more aggressive/intensive with your resources, but it appears that much of the initial performance difference was due to less than optimal drivers:

http://www.extremetech.com/article [...] 495,00.asp

Yes. My Vista machine, just by turning it on, uses 800+ mb RAM.

Vista is a lot better though after SP1.


Windows 2000 Professional is still my favorite OS though!