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

An old adage:

[Knight Thrasher]

'Newer' doesn't necessarily mean '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.

Useless comparison

[GreenEnvy22]

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.

Re:Useless comparison

[sbate]

It is not useless if you have a 2gz P4 Nvidia system and you wonder what would happen if you "upgraded". The article was interesting had a wide range of games and had Christmas tree graphs that showed how lame Vista is in game performance and how little you get for your money by "upgrading". It is fair to say that on newer computers you get about the same performance as your old computer so you will not be losing anything. I cannot for the life of me think about anything worth upgrading to vista for a home PC yet. It is not any safer and is more annoying and has the same printdriver scanner support as Ubuntu. When I upgrade my work computer it will be to Ubuntu and my gameing rig to an DS and PSP duct taped together back to back.

reason

[spykemail]

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 :).

Lower frame rates = higher security

[Cathoderoytube]

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?

Re:Lower frame rates = higher security

[Deadplant]

You are being killed by an Orc.
Allow or Deny?

DENY DENY DENY!!!!

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

[MotherMGA]

What the article does not state is that there reason for such slowness is that behind the game, Vista is poping up the message:

"You are attempting to refresh the screen. Cancel or Allow?"

Re:Frame rate perception

[Floritard]

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.

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.

Re:Frame rate perception

[Mprx]

LCDs are worthless for any game that's dependent on fast reaction, such as first person shooters. Modern first person shooter design is moving towards deemphasizing twitch, for example by adding autoaim and weapon spread and slowing the game down, but play an oldschool fast FPS like Quake 3 on a CRT at 120Hz vs. an LCD at 60Hz, and you'll see it makes an enormous difference. Not only is the perception of smoother movement important, but latency too. With an LCD, a frame is buffered in the graphics card for 17ms, buffered in the LCD for at least 17ms, and then displayed over at least 5ms. With a CRT running twice as fast, the frame is buffered in the graphics card for only 8ms, not buffered in the CRT at all, and displayed over an average of 4ms (the top of the screen almost immediately, and the bottom after just under a whole frametime). That's 38ms added latency for a top of the range LCD, and 12ms added with a moderately good CRT (truly fast CRTs will do 200fps or more). A slow LCD can add 100ms or more (see "LCD input lag" discussion). Human visual reaction time is about 200ms to 250ms, with the highly gifted going slightly faster, and those tired or under the influence of depressants a lot slower. To be competitive at a twitch-heavy FPS you'll need to be reacting around 200ms (one reason why twitch is deemphasized now, so player genetics is not so important). The additional 26ms latency from choosing a fast LCD over an average CRT is a significant chunk or your reaction time, and enough to affect your average success rate in twitch-vs-twitch situation.

Re:Frame rate perception

[ozphx]

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.

Re:Frame rate perception

[Mprx]

CS is much slower paced than Quake 3 or similar.

To improve the frame-rate of games in Vista...

[tygerstripes]

First, you compile Wine to run in Vista...

Windows Vista compatability

[My Iron Lung]

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?

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.

Immature Drivers

[SpryGuy]

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.

Re:duhhhhhhhh....

[Lonewolf666]

The difference is that Windows 2000 (or XP) had some real improvements over Win 98. Most importantly, support for more RAM and better stability. It had some problems with driver availability at first, but that is the only drawback I can recall.

With Vista, you get the same driver problems, less stability than before (as the predecessor is stable enough and much harder competition than Win 98 was) plus some compatibility problems. The only advantage might be the new GUI design. I say might be, because that is a matter of taste.

So I guess Vista will have a much harder time replacing XP than XP replacing 98.

"Wonder as to the cause"?

[Minwee]

Wow. Games which were designed, tested and optimized for XP run better on XP.

What exactly is there to wonder about?

How to upgrade XP to Vista for free:

[Opportunist]

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.

Stop with the "human eye can't see X" bullshit

[CaseM]

How many times does this have to be debunked before this myth will go away?

Manufacturing and QC

[blueZ3]

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.