An extensive test of Battlefield 2, FEAR, and World of Warcraft on both Windows XP and Windows Vista has revealed that gaming performance is far better in Windows XP than in Vista, according to Bigfoot Networks. The results also showed that Vista’s networking stack not only didn’t improve online game play, it often introduced more lag than its predecessor, Windows XP.

The tests were performed on a variety of systems, with games on the same map, on the same servers, with the same number of players, and at the same time. Testers were monitored to ensure that they were on the same team during gameplay, and that they followed each other closely.

The performance data collected showed rgar Vista online gaming performance is worse that online gaming in XP.

The white paper published by Bigfoot Networks gives two primary reasons as to why online gaming in Vista is worse.

First, Vista’s networking stack has a lot of new features, and as a result has gotten “fatter” and more bloated and convoluted than ever.

Second, Vista’s networking stacks does not fix any of the problems inherent in its interfacing that causes online games to under-perform. In fact, Vista’s new networking stack completely ignores improvements to the network protocol of choice: the UDP network stack.

The white paper also indicated that “Nearly every enhancement of the new Vista Stack is focused on TCP/IP throughput improvement, instead of UDP/IP latency improvement (which would help online games)”.

Another test was conducted by bypassing the networking stack on both Windows XP and Vista using LLR Technology with a Killer NIC network card.

Yet again, the data showed that the Vista network stack was inferior to the XP stack. Bypassing the Vista network stack yields bigger benefits in performance than bypassing the XP networking stack.

Bigfoot Networks also looked at the performance of some non-game applications to see how they performed, and discovered that they were equal or better in Vista that in XP. It appears that only the online games perform worse in Vista than XP.

Related:

Vista lowers gaming performance

Microsoft Windows 7 maybe less of a hardware hog than Vista

Vista still lacks the gaming performance of XP

nvidia recommends hotfixes for Vista

Vista-only game cracked to play on Windows XP

Entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 5:31 am under Vista.  Print This Post

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