How bad is Windows Vista for us the normal Pc gamer? You know who you are, The guys that do not have the latest and greatest gaming rig out there but it is more than capable to keep High framerates on current games with the majority of eye candy turned on.
How come many people are having problems installing and running Vista on new and old systems? I know Nvidia has not released the best drivers yet(Have not tried Ati yet) but they are working on it(Latest 158.24) so I decide to finally install Vista(Ultimate) on my primary gaming rig which consist of a AMD x2 4400,1gb of Crucial Ballistix ram(Second gig is being replace by Crucial) a Evga 7900GT Superclocked video card(DX9) and a Evga Nforce4 Sli mobo(Nf41) a Audigy2 sound card and a 180gb Western Digital Hard drive(7200rpm) and a Sceptre 21 inch widescreen monitor with a default resolution of 1680x1050.
Well,according to the Vista system analyzer my rig scores a 4.2 with the max being 5.9. So I decided to go the dual boot option which would the easiest way to go short of adding a blank Hard drive,I dedicated 20gb of Hard drive space to Vista on my hard drive just for these test. The install went perfect except for the sound drivers which for some reason could not work correctly but that was a easy fix.
(Side note: Make sure you download all the drivers for ALL of your Pc's components,It would go a lot smoother)
P.s All the test I ran were run at the default resolution of 1680x1050 and max settings for video option and 4xAA and 16xAF(if supported)
So....first game from my shelf is from the Steam collection of games,Counterstike. This is one of my all time favorite shooters followed closely by the Battlefield series. I ran the built-in stess test tool as well as joined a online match that had 32 players online. Under Windows Xp the stress test gave up 146 FPS running max graphic settings at 1680x1050 resolution with 4xAA and 16xAF and playing online it gave me 90 fps average.
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Under Windows Vista the story was a bit different,With the stress test at the same resolution and settings as XP the result was......75 fps. Online the results were just as impressive,again same settings as XP......52 fps average. The differences are huge but the games are still very playable..even under heavy action.
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Next game I tried was Battlefield 2142.....It ran like crap at 1680x1050 with high settings on both XP and Vista which I can attribute to having 1gb of ram. So I will try this game later when I get my memory back.
Next game was Company of heroes under Xp this game ran beautifully at a smooth 60 fps and Under Vista it kinda chugged a bit but kept the framerate at a average of 30-35 fps.
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While I was at it I went ahead and Installed Shadowrun and Halo2.
Shadowrun really impressed me running on my machine with 1 gig when the recommend size is 2gb,And running those games at the max resolution and settings kept a smooth 52fps even under heavy action.
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Halo2 needs to be re-run with 2gb of ram because it ran like crap under 1gb...seriously.
I will update this post at a later date once I get my ram back,But from this quick test
on my 2+year old gaming rig which is still able to run a lot of games extemely well with Vista,but Vista does take a big bite of the cpu power which goes to show that you really need a dual core or quad core cpu. I want to also mention that I did not tweak Vista at all. Just straight out of the box setup under a clean 20gb partition on a pretty new hard drive.
Conclusion for now:Undetermined
Vista response is pretty snappy at the current system settings but it's still a work in progress.
*I need to redo the pictures because for some strange reason FRAPS decide to not take the screenshots when I wanted it too.
JesusM
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