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Vista vs. XP Game Stability and Performance
boyko.at.netqos writes "HardOCP does a side-by side comparison with a battery of games to check stability and framerates in Windows XP and Windows Vista. In addition to the lowered framerates in Vista, they had stability issues in Need for Speed: Carbon and Prey. From the article: 'For some titles, especially Company of Heroes and Need for Speed, we saw dramatic framerate discrepancies. What's more, both of these titles have recently released patches! Other titles showed a slight, but essentially negligible difference, such as BF2142, World of Warcraft, and Prey. Really, there was only one instance where Vista was able to pick up a few more frames than XP — World of Warcraft at greater than 90fps, where the human eye can't even see the difference. To see this overall trend against Vista is very interesting and makes us wonder as to the cause.'"
'Newer' doesn't necessarily mean 'better.'
As discussed in the actual article, this review is useless. All it shows is that Nvidia systems perform much slower on Vista then XP. They then go on to conclude that Vista must be slower then XP. It's quite well known Nvidia's drivers for Vista have been absolute trash, while ATI has been on the ball. While Vista will be slower for most games even with ATI hardware, the difference is far, far smaller.
I just don't see a compelling reason to upgrade to Vista. I already have Mac OS X and Windows XP, why should I buy a new version of Windows when I can already play games on XP and work on OS X? I realize that at some point I'm going to need to upgrade because Windows-only developers will leave XP behind, but still. That won't be for a while.
:).
Most of the games I play are classics at this point anyway, unless Blizzard's new game requires Vista I think I'll be ok
Haiku for you!
I think the people doing this test should really have a look at the vista manual. If they did they'd know the OS was designed to block suspicious looking frames from the games we play to keep your computer secure. This generally means a slight performance hit. But hey, if you're willing to shell out hundreds of dollars on upgrades for an OS, what's a few more hundred to buy an even new video card that'll allow you to play games with performance comparable to those on a machine running XP with less powerful hardware?
I have nothing compelling to say
Games designed for XP work best on XP? I'm amazed!
The human eye is an analogue device, and does not see in frames. Because computer games generally do not feature realistic motion blur, we can see a benefit from increased frame rates well above the 72fps which would be sufficient with perfect motion blur. Accurate motion blur can be thought of as "temporal antialiasing", analogous to the spacial antialiasing supported by modern graphics cards.
First, you compile Wine to run in Vista...
Meta will eat itself
I'm playing all my games with specs quite similar to the ones in the article (slightly better processor, exact same 8800 GTS card). Between XP and Vista, I've honestly noticed very little, if any, difference in my game performance. I run the settings quite high.. the only real issue I've had is that Sim City 4 will simply not work under Vista.
I'm not trying to be a troll here, but when you're playing a game in fullscreen, isn't it basically getting your machine's full attention? What's Vista doing that makes XP so saintly in comparison?
it was the exact same thing when xp was released. like every windows, when it's first released it's slower, with worse support etc... than the previous one.
now why aren't we all still on win 98? because win xp has better support for faster pc's, where win 98 got problems with 1Gb mof ram, windows xp doesn't, windows xp supports all the newest things now etc... and in a year or so the same will go for vista.
by then the support for vista will be good, just about anything will have stable drivers for vista, the patches for vista will have made it a decent OS, a computer that runs vista smoothly with all nice things turned on will be very affordable, and the first games using directX10 will suddenly make vista interesting for gaming...
if they can say the exact same things next year, only THEN vista would have a huge problem, but these "problems" are common to every new windows released...
TFA says that Vista is not a very good gaming OS, which may be true compared to XP. Is Windows XP and Windows Vista in competition with each other? Maybe, but they will not be for long unless MS is stupid. So, the fair comparison would be to compare these games running on Vista, Ubuntu and OS X!
So, really, only two games actually run well enough to bother with: NOLF2 an FFvTTR. (Oh, okay, HL2, Blue Shift, Opposing Force work all right.) Obviously I'm not a huge gamer, and I know this is a low-end machine, but oy. My previous experience was with XP on a dual Athlon MP 2600+ system (2GHz real clock), 1GB RAM, GF5700LE card. A better system (and a lot more expensive when I got it four years ago) but not that much better.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I'm certain the cause is the immaturity of the video drivers.
I was forced to upgrade to Vista at work, and I've expeirenced all sorts of driver related problems, from inablity to recover if the monitor is unplugged and plugged back in (or KVM's away and back), to repainting issues in several apps (most notably, Visual Studio 2005). In addition, I've seen some very poor performance in many instances, including the much-"Wow"-ed feature of 3D task switching.
I'm sure most of these issues will be ironed out over the next year or so as the drivers become more optimized and stable.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
There are quite a few games made for win98/95 that I sometimes like to pull out and play. And there are quite a few of thatm that fail to run well inder win2k/XP.
X-Com Interceptor is one of them. There are lots of others too.
--Coder
Wow. Games which were designed, tested and optimized for XP run better on XP.
What exactly is there to wonder about?
Once upon a time, it was us Mac users making comments like the emphasised part from the article summary (my emphasis):
"Really, there was only one instance where Vista was able to pick up a few more frames than XP -- World of Warcraft at greater than 90fps, where the human eye can't even see the difference. "
Ah, the good old days, when it was all so simple.
1. Download some free theme that looks like Aero. Watch out for malware.
2. Remove half your ram.
3. Clock the CPU down a few notches.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I really wish they had posted the driver version(s). Now I have to assume that they are using the May 8800 drivers and not the earlier releases or betas.
How many times does this have to be debunked before this myth will go away?
Back in the day, "hi tech" devices like floppy drives and CD-ROMs were manufactured by companies that had a reputation to keep and some notion of quality control. With the massive move of manufacturing to China and the victory of the generic device (and price over all other considerations), that's no longer the case.
If you buy a CD drive from Frys made by NewCoTech and it fails, it's pretty unlikely you're going to remember NewCoTech when you're out buying a replacement. Even if you do, chances are that by then NewCoTech will have renamed itself GoodTech and you'll buy another piece of junk all unknown. Basically, it's the luck of the draw these days, and as far as I can tell, there's no Chinese word for "quality."
I've basically come to the point where if I can't find a non-China manufactured product, I generally won't buy whatever it is. The exception are inexpensive throw-away items that I don't need to last. If there's no other option (computers, for example) I buy a branded product where I know that the brand has a reputation to uphold. Even that's risky. I've had branded stuff that was made in China die on me, and
Made in China is the new Made in Taiwan from the 70's, or the new Made in Japan from the 60's (for those who are old enough to remember). For something like a plastic toy that my daughter is going to play with for a year, it's fine. For anything you need to last, find something made somewhere else.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
No need to wonder about the cause: most of the hardware manufacturers didn't spend any time on Vista drivers until after it was released.
We already knew ATI had really crappy driver support, but this is pretty disappointing on nVidia's side. They had generally always had top-notch drivers, but now we see they have fallen into the "just as bad as everyone else" category.
As far as Vista is concerned, users can easily use XP's drivers. You lose some of the Vista features (like Aero), but if you are worried about gaming frame rates, what the Windows UI looks like probably isn't your biggest concern.
Vista itself is solid. The poor driver support by all the non-Microsoft companies is the real problem. Geez, you would think these companies weren't given years to work on this stuff.
The old model for video drivers has been in use since Win98, and essentially has not changed since then. During all that time, the video card companies have been optimizing their drivers to run faster in that architecture. Significant speed boosts have occurred in the past simply due to driver updates, even as much as 20-30% for some types of games.
In Vista, however, the driver model is completely different. As a result, many of the optimizations that had been done in the past are no longer valid and have to be completely re-written. Some of those optimizations have been ported over to the Vista drivers, but many have not. Even looking at the differences in performance from Nvidia's last 3 Vista drivers, you can see significant performance improvements. AMD/ATI is also showing the same thing, although they seem to be a little ahead of the game compared to Nvidia (although AMD/ATI does not have to deal with several different branches of its drivers, as they still have a unified driver set, unlike Nvidia who now has the 8xxx series driver set and the 7xxx and before series drivers, and thus have 2x the amount of work to do).
We are far from the point of the drivers being mature in any sense, as significant improvements have been made on each release since Vista has been available. I don't see this trend ending soon.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
That the Nvidia logo and slogan "the way it's meant to be played" will have a disclaimer on the bottom
like most car commercials, or tacked on to the splash screen?
I can see it now:
The way it's meant to be played*
*may be slow, buggy, prone to BSODs, catch fire, lock up, eat power supplies for lunch, cause
your computer room to be hot, supper to be cold, hate Vista and long for XP/AMD/ATI and stability
is not guranteed until a week before the next OS is out.
So there, THUPBPBPBPB!
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
World of Warcraft at greater than 90fps, where the human eye can't even see the difference.
Actually, provided that your screen has a refresh rate at least equal to the game's fps, you can, because of the motion blur it creates. That's why a game at 25 FPS doesn't look quite as smooth as a game at 60 FPS, while nothing looks smoother than a movie at 25 FPS.
One day, maybe, true motion blur will be in every then-gen game, and we'll all have our games running at 25 FPS and think it's perfectly fine.
You just got troll'd!
My solution years ago was to search online for a utility called "reforce". This scans your video card and monitor and allows you to select the scan/refresh rate for every resolution possible.
There also is a option to make everything - all 40 modes or so 60hz. This is highly recommended as it cuts down direct X crashes and issues by at least a factor or two. All you have to do then is go to the video card and turn the V-sync on. The games will all only work at 60hz at this point as well, which increases your video speed(less to process, more available overhead for more complex scenes).
Ie - instead of the yo-yo 20fps in one area and 100 in another, you get a more stable 60 with occasional drops to 40-50 for a second or so. The net effect is a 20-30% speed difference, or easy to shrug off. The other, it's a 80% drop and our brains process this as a major slowdown.(even though we can't easily see beyond 60FPS(and comprehend it), our brains still process the information and see the tearing and so on.
What you want is a constant and smooth experience. This allows you to aim better, move better, and of course, have less headaches and eye strain.
Note - those graphs are always averages. If you look at a graph of video performance over time, it looks like a EEG or close to it in most games - so the values are often deceiving.(100+fps in some areas and 20fps in others nets 50fps. I'd rather have 50fps all the time)
> That the Nvidia logo and slogan "the way it's meant to be played" will
> have a disclaimer on the bottom like most car commercials, or tacked on to the splash screen?
I've tried complaining to nVidia about a bug in their drivers. They're unreachable. The support forums have no employees, so it's users trying to help users. They have no e-mail and their feedback form is still 'under construction'. They refer you to your OEM for all questions, which of course your OEM (someone who slaps chips on a PCB) can't answer. nVidia are your typical company in a death spiral: They antagonize their current users because they know that won't affect them until next year. Meanwhile they hope clueless n00bs come along and continue to buy their products.
Since the nVidia drivers are shonky in Vista (and for that matter XP), the answer is easy: ATI.
I wanna see this article again when DX10 becomes mainstream
That's something I'm actually wondering about. But if it is the case, then explain to me why I sometimes see car wheels going backwards IRL (not on TV)?
Here's an interesting article:
So it seems that your eye might, in fact, see in frames.
You perceive no problem because most film makers take that into account when filming. Which is why you very rarely see horizontal pans with stuff like people in them. Some movies do them (Matrix 2, I think, has some awful horizontal pans with Smiths in them), and the issues become very obvious.
There are a lot of toys from my childhood which are still usable and can whithstand another round of playing by my doughter now in essentialy same condition - and good condition (with the exception of toys meant for older children then she currently is - that is undersandable).
But the stuff we buy now ussualy does not survive even first round of playing without major damage.
And I do not think my dougter is playing somehow differently that I at her age.
So that means current stuff is junk - it is not what it is advertised to be: toy for children.
Last thought: What do our children learn from playing with toys which breaks easily and often and are replaced easily and often? Good consumerism?
hany
There are many reasons for Vista performing badly with many games: 1) Vista is not actually a new operating system. Microsoft dropped the Longhorn kernel from Vista in favour of a slightly tweaked version of Server 2003's kernel. Server 2003 runs games pretty well (better than XP in some cases) 2) All the extra rubbish that is in Vista interferes with performance. All the DRM, graphical gimmicks and security stuff packaged with Vista, which you can't turn off, adversely affects the performance of the games you play 3) DX10 has to emulate DX9. DX10 is so different from DX9 it has to actually emulate DX9, eating up even more processing power. Not only are you running DX10 on your vista machine, you're also running DX9, which slows things down enormously. In my opinion MS have shot themselves in the foot with Vista. They could have made it better than XP but instead they've bloated it with all sorts of stuff that lets them control how you use your computer. Halo 2 is going to be a big disappointment (paying to play online, wtf is that about?), and I can only hope that this project gets somewhere so I can play all the great new games without having to use an inferior operating system.
Um, actually, it's a Dell C521 purchased two months ago. And I upgraded the RAM for it, too. Imagine what it would be like with only 512MB...
Here's the system requirements for Aliens vs. Predator 2: "Pentium 3 or Athlon 450 MHz or higher, 128MB RAM or higher, 16MB DirectX 8 compatible 3-D video card, 1.3 GB hard disk space, 4X CD-ROM drive or greater,16 Bit DirectX 8 compatible sound card". This machine should be well above that. And yet, it runs as if it really were at the minimum specs.
To be fair, I only bought it so my wife could have her own machine to run Office on. It performs acceptably for that. But you might want to, y'know, actually read what I posted before you run off your mouth.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!