Vista still lacks the gaming performance of XP
Vista is still lagging behind in XP when it comes to performance of the system, some would say general performance is affected as well but gaming performance takes a bigger hit.
ZDnet put Vista and XP to the test by building a powerful gaming system, loading the operating systems and then playing games, lots of games. The computers consisted of a Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad processor, Asus Striker Extreme motherboard, a Sapphire Radeon 2600XT 256MB graphics card (okay, I would have expected better), 2GB of PC2 6400 memory (also would have expected better), two 150GB Raptor X hard drives and of course, Vista Ultimate Edition and Windows XP Professional.
They could have done better hardware wise, that’s a pretty weak graphics card and the memory could have been 3GB and the faster PC2 8500 kind. Those two things basically ruin the whole thing. In my opinion a nvidia Geforce 8800GTX graphics card would have been a better choice.
The computers were tested with the latest ATi drivers with all OS patches and updates applied. The indexing service was turned off, details in the game were set to “ultra high” with a resolution of 1024 x 768 (yeah, can’t really expect much out of a 2600XT card).
The hardware isn’t the point though for the test, higher rated hardware should have been used, I’m sorry but it should have. The point is that the frame rates dropped to a minimum of 34fps under XP and 25fps under Vista where it took longer to recover.
Be that as it may, tossing a more powerful graphics card behind the problem should solve most issues ZDnet had and I am very surprised and disappointed that they didn’t. Performance will still be less under Vista but as long as it does not drop below 20fps, most people will be perfectly happy.
Related Posts:
September 21st, 2007
[...] dzawacki@wisc.edu wrote an interesting post today!.Here’s a quick excerptVista is still lagging behind in XP when it comes to performance of the system, some would say general performance is affected as well but gaming performance takes a bigger hit. ZDnet put Vista and XP to the test by building a powerful … [...]
December 10th, 2007
you say the memory pc6400 is weak in this system, the asus stryker extreme motherboard does not support pc8500 memory , the highest memory speed supported is 800MHz DDR2, SO it would be a waste of money to go with the higher mem, what good is 1066mhz if it is unsupported??