New Gaming Computer. Vista or XP? - Page 4

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best way to find out is if you have both Operating systems.

in 3dmark06,pcmark05 and sciencemark

i scored higher with Vista. than i do when i switch over to XP.

my vista out performs my XP sp2, SP3, and another comp with same specs running xp corp edition.

If anyone tells you Vista is Garbage. then disregard anything else they say.

then again. even with vista being new. Windows 7 will be out soon

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.

http://weblog.infoworld.com/sentin [...] he_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.

"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.

Go for XP!

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] efault.asp

http://www.extremetech.com/article [...] 498,00.asp

Gaming performance is largeley the exactly same in viusta s it is in XP.

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.

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.

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/article [...] 918,00.asp

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.

Basically theres feck all difference but Vista does seem more "responsive" and a bit faster than XP.

Unless you want to go with 64bit for 4gigs+ of ram and 64bit CPU then Vista 64 is what you should go with. But theres not much difference as things stand at the moment.

I'd say it depends whether you're looking to get top performance out of today's games, or top performance out of future releases. If you're looking at the current games out there, go with XP. It's more stable, better supported and has a huge range of drivers to fulfill your needs.

If this is more of a build for the future, I'd personally go with Vista - just because that's got a brighter future than XP for supporting next gen games, even if it is a bit troublesome and flawed at the moment. It should come in to its own in future years, as long as it isn't outdone by the next version of Windows too soon.

As far as I'm concerned, it's personal preference. But honestly, I don't understand why one wouldn't take a newer OS over a decade old OS. Just that notion...it boggles my mind. But what do I know.

You're still mired in last year. While it's true that a few old games won't work on Vista, the driver compatibility issue is no longer an issue... even Creative got off their lazy asses and finally wrote some decent Vista drivers. OSX is almost an apple to oranges (no pun intended) comparison. I've never liked Apple's locked-in, locked-down approach to PCs and I never will. While it's great for people that just want something that works... it's absolute crap to enthusiasts that want to do something more with their computer other than admire it's looks. Linux has made some significant strides forward in the ease-of-use department... but until the day you can do whatever you want to do simply by double-clicking... it will never become mainstream.

There's nothing wrong with XP... other than it's age. To me, it simply makes no sense to buy brand new hardware and stick aging software on it. Yes, XP is "mature"... but then so is Win 95, 98 or ME. If you're going to use that argument, you might as well still be running 3.1. Mature it may be, but it's also approaching the end of it's life cycle. Once Windows 7 is released, driver and software support for XP will start to slow... much like it did with Win9x.

Vista's "problems" continue to be blown out of proportion. People insist on making the past the present.

Now that I'm building my first PC post-Vista I'm glad to see it's ready. I think it would be foolish to let it's wretched launch influence me.

Great discussion and arguments, I'm in the new hardware = Vista crowd.

Creative has finally produced functioning drivers... so point 1 is moot.

As for the other 2... haven't tried, so I can't address those.

Creative's fault... not Vista's.

My older XP machine had way more problems than my Vista one. Its been almost a year since i last reinstalled vista and Ive had ONE BSOD from OC'ing and thats it

"Several months ago..."

Right there is the single largest problem with the benchmark you found. You need to find benchmarks that take into consideration both SP 1 on Vista and the latest drivers available. Bad drivers was the biggest problem that kept XP ahead of Vista in benchmarks. That has since been corrected and the difference is now negligible.

One important thing to consider is that XP-64 had very poor driver support upon release. Things have improved thanks to Vista 64... but you'll probably have better luck finding drivers for Vista than XP on the 64-bit side.

Did you even look at it? The benchmarks include SP1 (which made many tasks slightly slower, actually). The fact that many benchmarks were so far behind XP x64 even 5 months ago makes me wonder at your statement that everything has "since been corrected and the difference is now negligible". Why, after 1.5 years of vista was the problem still not even close to fixed, and yet now just 2 years later everything is COMPLETELY fixed. Please provide some sort of evidence here...

"I'm sorry... but any benchmark comparison that begins with "Several months ago..." means little to me. People are still bashing Vista based on 2 year-old information and it gets a little annoying after a while. They like to hop on the XP bandwagon and tell us how great it is... meanwhile 6 years ago they were all saying the same things about XP and were still trying to cling to 98. So you'll have to forgive me if I seem dismissive when such things are said."

Several months != 2 years, and if a problem isn't fixed the first year and a half why is it so reasonable to assume it has been completely fixed in the next few months?


"I also have an issue with synthetic benchmarks... they don't give you a complete picture. My system as it is now had 32-bit XP on it for a while... so I've had time to compare XP-32 to Vista-64 on the same hardware. I notice no difference at all. My games run just as good as they always did... even better when you consider I upgraded from a 17" LCD to a 22" widescreen LCD. Not noticing any drop in performance at higher resolutions certainly convinced me."

I'm not sure how this applies (unless you aren't talking to me here) because I was talking about the XP-64 vs Vista-64 comparison . Even the benchmark i pointed to shows that XP-32 performs much worse than XP-64.

Thanks for the links Scotteq. The only reason I bothered to consider the post I did was because it was much more recent than anything else I'd found and the enormous graph of info he put together (and his supposed methodology) looked pretty meticulously done.

It seems to me that Vista will work fine with games (which is what I'm mostly interested in) but I have this worry in the back of my mind that maybe XP-64 would perform a bit better. I'm considering buying an OEM copy but it's hard to justify another $120 on just a hunch like this. It'd be nice to find some sort of recent benchmark.