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.'"

Comments

Re:An old adage:

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to know how much worse Vista is for older games designed for Windows 95/98 (almost everything past that I use DosBox for). XP breaks compatibility on several old ones, I'm wondering how much different Vista is. You'd think if they were smart, they'd drop as much legacy support as they could from the OS itself, but enable some emulation options for older software.

Frame rate perception

[Mprx]

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.

Re:Frame rate perception

[SighKoPath]

Motion blur is purely an artifact of recording devices.

That is why recording devices can get away with recording at under 30 frames per second. For example, movie projectors display at a mere 24 frames per second, with no perceived problems! Good luck playing any 3D game at that frame rate without noticing. However, if the game had motion blur, it would look just fine at 24-30 FPS.

The big question is, is this even practical? To me, it seems that running at the higher frame rates is easier than correctly rendering motion blur.

What about linux and OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

My (older) games won't even run on Vista

[Dr. Manhattan]

As I've said before, Vista has been horrible for games. And these aren't new, flashy, supreme games. These are games from a few years back, that should fit comfortably on the hardware, and I'm not cranking up the resolution or the detail or anything. The hardware I refer to: AMD Sempron 1.8GHz (allegedly equivalent to a 3GHz+ processor), 1GB RAM, 80GB disk, Geforce 6150 integrated graphics. Not (at all) a speed demon, I know, but I'm not asking for miracles. Look at the games I'm trying to run:

• Aliens versus Predator 2: Runs slow, audio is skippy. 90% of the time fails to launch properly.
• Tron 2.0: Slow, skippy audio. Seems to always launch into the game menu, but firing up a save game crashes the program much more often than not. Vista doesn't crash at this point, but it takes about five minutes for it to recover.
• No One Lives Forever 2: Actually runs okay, much of the time. But about 20% of the time it won't launch a saved game, it instead crashes to the desktop. At least it's faster than Tron 2.0 at crashing, and a relaunch usually (~90% of the time) is successful.
• Freedom Force: "This program is not compatible with Vista."
• Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich: Seems to run as well as NOLF2.
• Half-Life, Half-Life 2: Worked for the limited testing I did. HL2 is quite slow and jittery on this system, though. (Not totally surprising, but still...)

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.

Re:An old adage:

[Opportunist]

Actually, quite a while ago newer actually started to mean worse. Remember those old floppy drives? And how they lasted for an eternity and longer?

Have you ever bought one in the last, say, 5 years? And if, do they still work? Mine don't. But the one that came with my 486 is still doing its job.

Same applies to CD-Roms and a lot of other hardware. When I've learned something from my purchases during the last few years, then that newer actually means worse. Not better.