XP vs. Vista

- gaming showdown!

We’ve all read that we shouldn’t, but the question in our head remains: Should we buy Windows Vista?

This small article helps you with your decision, if you’re a gamer like me.

The last couple of days I’ve been testing and measuring my most demanding games in both Windows XP and Windows Vista. Both Operating systems are 32bit and this is my testbench:

Intel Core2Duo E6320 1860 @ 2450
Asus P5N-E SLI
Corsair 4GB DDR2 PC6400 RAM
XFX 8800GTS 320 MB SLi
Seagate 300 + 320 GB SATAII 7200 RPM
Hiper Type-R 580 Watt Module

As you can see, this is a very up_to_date system, and performance should not be an issue.

I started out in Vista, testing 8 different games:

Battlefield 2
Bioshock
Doom III
Half Life 2
Far Cry
Lost Planet: Extreme
Need for Speed: Carbon
Oblivion: Shivering Isles

I did the testing using Fraps fps-measuring over a 20 second period. The results are the average of those 20 seconds. Then when I was done doing that, I ran 3DMark06. Finally I switched to XP and did the exact same things.

These are the results:

As you can see, Vista performs horribly in almost every single game, topping in Bioshock, with a performance loss of 67%!
This is not exactly surprising, but it confirms what you’ve probably read elsewhere a few times by now. Even 3DMark06 ran with a performance loss of 15% - a loss which I never thought possible, since 3DMark06 is optimized for both XP and Vista.

DirectX 10 didn’t really prove to be a huge pull for the system, except for Lost Planet, which in general, performed like crap. In Bioshock it ran fine under both DX9 and 10, but to be honest, I couldn’t spot ANY visual difference what so ever.

My final verdict is: Don’t buy Windows Vista if you’re planing on gaming. Not even if you, like me, have two DX10-compatible video-cards, because there is no visual difference so far. Perhaps Crysis and Far Cry 2 will make up for this, when they deside to show up too far into the future…