Vista...dismal game performance.

scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
edited November 2006 in Science & Tech
I was not sure where to put this , here or in gaming. But I feel it is more a "Windows" topic than a game topic.

I have been playing with Vista for a couple of months now. Mostly, I like it a lot. There are a few issues I hope will be resolved before they ask us to give up $400 for it.
This issue is likley to be helped by better driver support, but from what I am hearing it will never be the game platform XP was. Especially for lower end systems.

Here is what I have found. The following comparison was done on the same dual boot machine all hardware specs are identical only the OS and Forceware version changed between benchmarks. The hardware is as follows.
Abit NF7
Mobile Barton 2500+ @ 2.4 Ghz ( 200 x 12 ) Watercooled
2 x 512 mb OCZ PC3200 EL
Nvidia 6800 GT
Vista drivers are the latest Forceware 96.85
XP drivers are Forceware 81.98

I had noticed that while gaming the Vista performance was pretty "Stuttery" while playing Area 51 and the cut scenes between levels were un-watchable. I did not benchmark Area 51.
I then loaded F.E.A.R. and it has its own Benchmark. After using the "Auto detect" feature to set video options I ran the Benchmark in both OS's. Interestingly the Vista "Auto Detect" picked medium to low settings for everything while the XP Pro "Auto Detect" picked medium to high for the same options. XP even gave me some AA & AF ( 2X ) while Vista gave me none. As You can see from the screen shots below that XP kicked Vista's butt. And while these are not any "great" benchies it is a farly typical gaming rig. F.E.A.R. is perfectly playable at the settings and frame rates XP delivered. Not so in Vista , as soon as it gets a little hairy (like someone shooting at you) frame rates drop to the low teens and you die.
I Alt+Tab'd out of the game to check the perfomance in Vista's Task Manager and found that all of my memory was being used and it was hitting the page file pretty often.

So it looks to me that to play a game as demanding as F.E.A.R. You will need at least 2 gigs of memory a better video card and some good drivers.

Hopefully Nvidia will get us gamers some usable drivers in the near future.

Just my thoughts

Comments

  • CycloniteCyclonite Tampa, Florida Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    I can agree with you there. I haven't run any official tests, but I noticed while playing WoW mainly that it ran better in XP than in Vista. Now, one thing I noticed is a HUGE resource hog is the sidebar in Vista. I turn it off before starting up a game, and that helped considerably.

    I know Vista still uses quite a bit more resources, so that's obviously going to affect your game. Hopefully good drivers and some tweaking will get Vista playing more happily with games.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Vista's pretty interface is still loaded into memory when other games run. ****ty, huh?

    This is an article that might be interesting to you as well: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35218
  • edited November 2006
    Give the 3rd party hardware manufactures time to write non-beta drivers for their hardware before worrying about Vista performance. Remember that Win XP was a slow performer when compared to Win98 during its early stages.
  • ThraxThrax 🐌 Austin, TX Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    You'd figure an operating system with five years of development would be optimized to replace its predecessor. It's not the driver writing this time, it's the fact that the UI is hogging up 400mb of memory.
  • scottscott Medina, Ohio Icrontian
    edited November 2006
    Thrax wrote:
    This is an article that might be interesting to you as well: http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=35218

    Thanks , I have been following the articles from the Inquirer.


    Thrax wrote:
    You'd figure an operating system with five years of development would be optimized to replace its predecessor. It's not the driver writing this time, it's the fact that the UI is hogging up 400mb of memory.

    Exactly !! Look at the screen shots below. Same level loaded Alt + Tab'd out and took screen shot of task manager. Obviously 1 gig ain't enough to play FEAR on Vista.


    Scott
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