Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
Hugo Elias has an excellent demo of this effect on his site. Check it out and tell me this spinning cube doesn't look more real with the motion blur. It's a little eerie. I've seen this effect in some footage for that new game Little Big World among others. It's a framebuffer effect I believe. I wonder if its inclusion in more game will have any effect on traditional framerate requirements for believable motion. Might get by with less as you say. Then again, to do it correctly I believe you have to render even more frames than are actually made visible. Much like good anti-aliasing requires oversampling the image, this temporal anti-aliasing would require oversampling frames for the objects at high velocities. And to the other reply, yes we want it to look like we're playing a recording. Reality is boring, the typical approach is to emulate a movie experience. Lens flares and high-dynamic range lighting. You view is referred to as a "camera" in most games. These aren't things you see in real-life. The object is to go theatrical.
How many times does this have to be debunked before this myth will go away?
Bullshit.
I'm phx in the rage-quit lineup. We're in the top 5 teams in Australias main amateur CS ladder. I use a 24" Dell 2405FPW LCD with an "unacceptable" grey to grey of around 18ms. The majority of our lineup use LCDs.
Competetive team gameplay like CS is about team prediction and buy strategies. Being able to shoot straight, quickly, and handle individual prediction is a minimum requirement.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.