Vista SP1 vs XP SP3 Gaming Performance: Vista wins again!

[raskren]

Is there anything you aren't an expert on ANova? I find your technical input as accurate and useful as your social commentary.

Same here.

The idea that RAM utilization is corellated with program inefficiency is a very 1990's way of thinking. I just checked my Windows Calendar and it is, in fact, 2008.

[Fourjays Veteran]

I have no interest in Vista (it offers nothing that interests me at all over XP), but all these "Vista sucks", "XP Sucks", "Vista vs XP", etc threads are getting boring. Give it a break and let people use whatever OS they feel happier with.

[+Batfink Subscriber²]

I don't know about everyone else, but I would really like it if future releases of OS's were say 5-10% faster than those they replaced. I know you get loads of new features (and bugs) in a new OS (look at OS X 10.5 for an example 10.5.2 was a massive bug fix) but why do we not demand significant speed boosts

[rajputwarrior]

vista has been a little :s for me, hl2 stutters, don't know why and the single player of cod4 doesn't start... its a little confusing... but other then that vista sp1 has been awesome

[waruikoohii]

I think my Firefox is telling me to go to Newegg

That's flawed logic because Firefox doesn't gain from using all of that memory. Firefox does its caching thing and leaks the rest, which can add up to a very sizable amount (I've seen it use over 1GB...not on my system, I've never used Firefox long enough to let it go over 400MB). Firefox benefits from the caching, but the rest is wasted memory.

Vista gains something from its memory use. The more memory you give Vista, the faster it gets. No joke. I run Vista on my box with 2GB RAM. It screams. The only time it doesn't is when I open some application that I hardly ever use and it has to go to the disk to access it. Even then it's faster than XP was.

[Mikee99]

Yeah... you get 10+ more frames in games when using XP... so what?!

Um... No, you don't. The benchmarks prove that you get no more frames per second in XP than you do in Vista.

Strange, every other bench mark I read has XP sp2 and sp3 owning vista w\SP1...now one random benchmark comes along and all the vista users feel like they can justify their purchase? lol

if i posted every article showing XP>Vista there would be a thousand threads :laugh:

What benchmarks are you referring to? Just about all benchmarks from August of 2007 onward have shown that Vista's game performance is very much so on par with XP, or better than XP by a frame or two per second (primarily in the 64-bit benchmarks).

[ANova]

Same here.

The idea that RAM utilization is corellated with program inefficiency is a very 1990's way of thinking. I just checked my Windows Calendar and it is, in fact, 2008.

No. That is not what I am referring to. There is nothing new about ram caching, except that it's new to Windows.

[NEVER85]

Yeah, because it needs it to run decent.

Your ignorance is outright laughable. I've put Vista on machines with less than 1 GB of RAM and they run just as well as XP. Do yourself a favor and try to learn something about how Vista actually works before subjecting the rest of us to your ridiculous opinions about the OS.

[Mr. Gibs]

Ah so you'd rather programs be inefficient and gobble up ram huh. Well guess what, if your os needs gigs of ram what happens when a program needs it as well? Buying more is like throwing wood (and your money) on the fire.

Your OS needs Gigs of ram? WTF?

Vista runs fine with 1g of ram even with the odd game here and there...and its memory management is far better than the one in xp.

[notuptome2004]

Ah so you'd rather programs be inefficient and gobble up ram huh. Well guess what, if your os needs gigs of ram what happens when a program needs it as well? Buying more is like throwing wood (and your money) on the fire.

in Vista if let say your running 2gb of ram ok and your running Program A witch needs 1.2gb of ram then ya run program B that needs 1gig of ram well the lovly thing is that vista can run on minimal amounts of ram itself so Evan if vista runs out of ram unliek windows XP it wont BSOD and or Freez or lock up it will keep going and i pearsonly have tested this throughout windows vista betas and up till and now and as a program request the use of more ram vista can release the ram . let me post some tidbits from the memory management stuff shown on Wiki of the under the hood stuff changes in vista

Memory management

* Windows Vista features a Dynamic System Address Space that allocates virtual memory and kernel page tables on-demand. It also supports very large registry sizes.

* Includes enhanced support for Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) and systems with large memory pages. Windows Vista also exposes APIs for accessing the NUMA features.

* Memory pages can be marked as read-only, to prevent data corruption.

* New address mapping scheme called Rotate Virtual Address Descriptors (VAD). It is used for the advanced Video subsystem.

* Swapping in of memory pages and system cache include prefetching and clustering, to improve performance.

* Performance of Address Translation Buffers has been enhanced.

* Heap layout has been modified to provide higher performance on 64-bit and Symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems. The new heap structure is also more scalable and has low management overhead, especially for large heaps.

* Windows Vista automatically tunes up the heap layout for improved fragmentation management.

* Lazy initialization of heap initializes only when required, to improve performance.

* The Windows Vista memory manager does not have a 64 kb read-ahead cache limitation unlike previous versions of Windows and can thus improve file system performance dramatically.

Windows Vista features Prioritized I/O which allows developers to set application I/O priorities for read/write disk operations, similar to how currently application processes/threads can be assigned CPU priorities.[42] I/O has been enhanced with I/O asynchronous cancellation and I/O scheduling based on thread priority. Background applications running in low priority I/O do not disturb foreground applications. Applications like Windows Defender, Automatic Disk Defragmenter and Windows Desktop Search (during indexing) already use this feature. Windows Media Player 11 also supports this technology to offer glitch-free multimedia playback.

so on per application request vista can dynamically release ram to another program Evan if it is being used it will then optimize how it all works .

[Shadrack]

Lets face some facts. For those who hate Vista, no amount of colorful bars and numbers is going to convince them otherwise. They've swallowed too much FUD, and they are welcome to use whatever OS they prefer.

Well said!

[ANova]

Your ignorance is outright laughable. I've put Vista on machines with less than 1 GB of RAM and they run just as well as XP. Do yourself a favor and try to learn something about how Vista actually works before subjecting the rest of us to your ridiculous opinions about the OS.

So have I and I know very well how Vista works, you apparently do not. Furthurmore, you know nothing of ignorance.

Notuptome, once again, I am not speaking of memory handling capabilities, IO processes or superfetch. I am talking about overhead.

Edited May 13, 2008 by ANova

[notuptome2004]

So have I and I know very well how Vista works, you apparently do not. Furthurmore, you know nothing of ignorance.

Notuptome, once again, I am not speaking of memory handling capabilities, IO processes or superfetch. I am talking about overhead.

what overhead ther is none because again as applications need it Vista will Evan give the application if needed the ram itself is using to stay up and running

i call that less overhead and more intelligence

[zerologic]

So far my games run well on my Vista PC. Have to install the new nvidia drivers tonight and see if they make a difference.

[Carlos11]

Vista wins? Where? I see basically equal graphs well within the margin of error.

Vista still hogs up memory as well.

The sad thing is you don't get it. When 98 came out people weren't praising 95, when 2000 came out people weren't praising 98. People like XP because it's a good os, not really hard to figure out!! Vista, not so good.

If Win7 is better than Vista and XP people will like it and move to it, if not than people will stick with XP again (or in your case and many who seem to love Vista unconditionally stick with it).

Sorry but back in 2001 people in forums like this said about XP most of the things they say against Vista: poor performance, requiers better hardware, my game won't run, low frames, I'll let dual boot 98/XP and so on.

Same here.

The idea that RAM utilization is corellated with program inefficiency is a very 1990's way of thinking. I just checked my Windows Calendar and it is, in fact, 2008.

Oh! Yes. That's indeed a 90's "sickness". How to know you're infected? Simple: you don't use an application because you think it's using too much RAM tho you can't see any lack of performance and, of course, you use more task manager than any other software. :)

[Brandon Live Veteran]

The sad thing is you don't get it. When 98 came out people weren't praising 95, when 2000 came out people weren't praising 98.

You obviously weren't around when Windows 2000 was released. VERY few enthusiasts/gamers installed it in the beginning, or at least most went back to 98. They complained about its memory usage, they complained that it was BAD for gaming, they complained that it lacked OpenGL support, and they complained that it took eons to start-up.

Of course, most of those issues passed, or were made irrelevant in XP. By then the driver quality and hardware had caught up.

[bobbytomorow]

Yawn - more FUD from the Vista haters.

haha I love this one. Yeah people really "hate" an inanimate piece of software, you got it figured out people are just out to get Vista yeah sure. If you were to look at my sig you would see that I use Vista, I also use another version of Vista at work, I have no personal vendetta towards something I don't even need to pay for, I simply tell it like it is, XP works better, its faster, it uses less overhead and Vista offers nothing tangible over XP...there is simply no compelling reason to use Vista over XP. People don't like your os of choice, deal with it.

Yes I know it uses more memory, but so what? Memory is dirt cheap nowadays - you can get a gig for 30 bucks!

Thats great logic, hey everybody gas prices went down lets all go out and buy a hummer!

[EnzoFX]

A lot of FUD in here.

Vista is better, people can't seem to accept it. My only wish is that they overhaul the UI for win7.

[stezo2k]

how does 1 more fps in crysis makes vista win? the graphs look very similar if you ask me. for general usage xp is faster

[Doli]

For me Psychonauts played better on vista than XP. For example loading screens were choppy in XP but smooth in Vista. Strange since its an old game.

[Blackhearted]

Vista wins? Where? I see basically equal graphs well within the margin of error.

Exactly what i see.

There's no "win" here when the difference is ridiculously small. Win would be if the difference was noticeable, such as say... 10-20% across the board. Which doesn't happen here. If anything it's just finally broken even if these are accurate.

[toadeater]

You obviously weren't around when Windows 2000 was released. VERY few enthusiasts/gamers installed it in the beginning, or at least most went back to 98. They complained about its memory usage, they complained that it was BAD for gaming, they complained that it lacked OpenGL support, and they complained that it took eons to start-up.

Of course, most of those issues passed, or were made irrelevant in XP. By then the driver quality and hardware had caught up.

Yes, maybe Vista will eventually improve thanks to Windows 7, if they both share the same kernel.

What's going to be the difference between them anyway? Is Win7 just Vista SP2, or is it truly different (improved!)?

[Brandon Live Veteran]

What's going to be the difference between them anyway? Is Win7 just Vista SP2, or is it truly different (improved!)?

Sorry, no hints (not yet anyway) :) 7 is a pretty cool number though.

[notuptome2004]

Brandon can you confirm that Windows 7 will be based on windows 3.11 just so we can have internet

[Mikee99]

I simply tell it like it is, XP works better, its faster, it uses less overhead and Vista offers nothing tangible over XP...there is simply no compelling reason to use Vista over XP. People don't like your os of choice, deal with it.

That is not a fact, but your opinion. I personally disagree. I find that Vista works much better than XP, and I frequently use many of the built-in features present in Vista (such as desktop search) that are not present in XP (or require a clunky 3rd party add on to give XP the functionality).