XP vs. Vista
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Between the top of the line hardware and your extreme gaming lies the operating system. Not all operating systems are the same; all will give you different results in gaming or any other task you perform. So when a new one comes out, gamers want to know what effect it will have on their favorite pastime. We'll take a look at Microsoft's offerings in this article.
Microsoft has a massive hold on the operating system market. Nearly every game is made to run on a Windows operating system, so how well do Microsoft operating systems perform with games? Today we will test games and benchmarks to see how well Windows XP and Vista perform and see which will be crowned king.
XP is definitely the old veteran by now. It was released in 2001 and, in computer terms, that is old. Vista is the new kid on the block; it was released in January of 2007. It is still very raw and many believe it was rushed and not finished when it went gold. Now that it has been out 10 months, much has changed and been tweaked.
When Vista was released, it delivered an abysmal performance with games. The video card drivers weren’t tweaked and at times felt rushed. Games in Vista were horrible and many people reverted back to XP to satisfy their gaming needs. It’s time to see how things have been going with Vista. I’m hoping we see Vista’s performance catch up with XP’s great performance, or Vista may never catch on for gamers.
What caused Vista to be so bad at games? Well to begin with, the drivers for Vista had to be totally rewritten from the ground up. When XP was released, ATI and nVidia could build upon the drivers for Windows 2000. Granted, they didn’t really take gaming into account on 2000 until XP came out, so there was lots of work to be done.
Vista drivers didn’t just have to be done for games, but also for the Vista glass effect. This is mainly handled through the graphics card, so that was probably a bigger priority for the companies than tweaking for games. The hardware was also redesigned for Direct X 10. This is a huge plus for DX 10 games, but it was another hurdle to get good DX 9.0 performance.
ATI and nVidia have had months to tweak and make Vista as good at gaming as XP is. It's time to see if they have succeeded.
Next: Testing >>
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