Busting Vista Myths

[Cutthroat]

Originally posted by: jkr266

Originally posted by: rchiu

Originally posted by: loup garou

Originally posted by: rchiu
If gaming under Vista is slower is just a myth, why the latest anandtech QX9650 OC review says XP scores ~10% higher than vista on general graphic performance?

LOL, the best part about that article is that just below the graph you're touting is another graph that shows Vista 10% faster than XP at rendering performance in Cinebench. Whatever. Whine all you like.

Well in the other graph, the reviewer said CineBench is optimized for 64 bit and that's where the performance gain come from. Plus 3dmark06 is the industry standard on measuring graphic performance the ties to gaming performance where Cinebench and rendering is more cpu intensive. So pointing anything out that's not favorable to vista is whining? Okay, I guess everyone should just shut up and go use vista like you tell us to eh?

3Dmark is the only benchmark i have seen to give any significant difference between vista and xp in terms of gaming performance. firingsquad has a review testing performance differnces, from a few months back. As you can see in actual games vista is within a few percent on pretty much every game they tested. Vista is probably even closer now with even newer drivers. The only people who think 3dmark is anything but a pretty suite that isnt really ll that useful are futuremark themselves.

With Nvidia 169.25 and SP1 RC1 I have beat my old high score from XP.

XP high score - 12046
Vista high score - 12320

 

[tcsenter]

Originally posted by: soonerproud
My rule has been if your hardware is more than 2 years old, don't even bother with Vista on it because many OEM's are not providing Vista drivers for them.

Huh? All graphics hardware capable of supporting Vista's WDDM requirements have WDDM drivers, except for Intel GMA900. Any other graphics hardware that doesn't have WDDM drivers aren't capable of supporting it.

So the Vista Capable PC is really not Vista capable, unless Windows Explorer and Notepad are one's notion of productivity and multimedia apps.

 

[ChronoReverse]

Another thing to note is that in the earlier days of Vista, the Nvidia drivers were really immature and showed a rather large margin between XP and Vista. ATI's margin has consistently been smaller though (and in some cases negative). Too bad ATI didn't have a competitor for the 8800 for so long (technically they still don't but the 3850 is an excellent mid-ranged card) such that a large proportion of people had Nvidia cards.

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: tcsenter

Huh? All graphics hardware capable of supporting Vista's WDDM requirements have WDDM drivers, except for Intel GMA900. Any other graphics hardware that doesn't have WDDM drivers aren't capable of supporting it.

So the Vista Capable PC is really not Vista capable, unless Windows Explorer and Notepad are one's notion of productivity and multimedia apps.

I was not just talking graphics hardware in that statement. A lot of OEM's are not providing other drivers for Vista on older hardware. If any drivers are missing on an older PC it is not Vista capable according to Microsoft's own specs. This is why I said that there are PC's that are technically capable of running Vista, but lack proper drivers to do so.

This doesn't change the fact the vast majority of people will be getting Vista with a new PC. So this issue mainly only affects enthusiast. A good enthusiast will do the research before buying Vista to make certain that they have all their ducks in a row for running it.

EDIT:

I think I finally got what you are saying.

A Vista capable PC will just turn off Aero and use the same GDI rendering as XP. It will still render the screen normally as I have observed this myself on some early models this year with Vista Basic because they did not support Aero.

 

[jonmcc33]

Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

 

[Pabster]

Originally posted by: Cutthroat
With Nvidia 169.25 and SP1 RC1 I have beat my old high score from XP.

XP high score - 12046
Vista high score - 12320

Shens! Vista scoring higher than XP? I don't believe it!

 

[Cutthroat]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: Cutthroat
With Nvidia 169.25 and SP1 RC1 I have beat my old high score from XP.

XP high score - 12046
Vista high score - 12320

Shens! Vista scoring higher than XP? I don't believe it!

OK, I'll prove it as best I can...

My Futuremark Result Browser:camera: Note:, I do not have an E6600, Futuremark screws up it's auto detection.

Vista 12320 3D marks breakdown:camera: Note,I cannot show the breakdown of the XP score because I can only have one published project at a time. However, here's the basic breakdown of the score...

Vista
3DMark Score
12320

SM 2.0 Score
5506

SM 3.0 Score
5762*

CPU Score
2883

XP
3DMark Score
12046

SM 2.0 Score
5536

SM 3.0 Score
5461*

CPU Score
2833

As you can see, the breakdown of the scores is very similar, but the standout is the SM 3.0 score on Vista is 300 marks higher.

 

[Pabster]

Originally posted by: jonmcc33
Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

Probably at least half of the new PCs sold. And Vista runs just fine with 1GB.

 

[Griffinhart]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: jonmcc33
Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

Probably at least half of the new PCs sold. And Vista runs just fine with 1GB.

True, but I wouldn't game on a 1GB Vista Box... then again, I wouldn't game on a 1GB XP box these days either.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: Griffinhart

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: jonmcc33
Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

Probably at least half of the new PCs sold. And Vista runs just fine with 1GB.

True, but I wouldn't game on a 1GB Vista Box... then again, I wouldn't game on a 1GB XP box these days either.

Hell, I paid $27 for 2gb of DDR-800 the other day. Memory is cheap, dont skimp.

 

[wiin]

Originally posted by: jonmcc33
Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

Mine:
K7S5A motherboard
512mb RAM
64mb graphic memory
2 hard drives:
c: Vista Ultimate
d: XP Pro

Got no complain here.

 

[ChronoReverse]

If you were only using the XP partition sure. There's no way Vista is worth using if you only have 512MB of RAM.

 

[jhbball]

Good post. I'll be switching over to Vista when SP1 is released.

 

[johnnyjohnson]

This troll is not convinced. Vista is a dog as far as I'm concerned and I have tried it out extensively. I don't like being forced to do things the way Microsoft wants me to do them, and that is what Vista feels like as I try to do things in it. Besides the eye candy, it simply doesn't offer me a compelling reason to switch to it, plus it's slow. Benchmarks in the article about the 45nm Core Duo that Anandtech just posted show that XP is about 10% faster across the board over Vista. That is significant. I am using a custom slipstreamed pared down version of XP that weighs in under 300MB on the installer disk. Try that with Vista. I have my system tweaked for speed and it flies. No desire and no need to go to Vista. It's great news that XP will be supported for another 5 years.

 

[QueBert]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: jonmcc33
Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

Probably at least half of the new PCs sold. And Vista runs just fine with 1GB.

lI was at Best Buy and they have A LOT of bottom end Vista PC's, which are probably the biggest sellers. They had a whopping 512 megs, I saw at least 5 models for sale with 512, and they were the best sellers according to the sales dude there. Which makes sense because the price was the lowest.

when XP came out most people I know who bought "new" pc's got 128, 256 if they were lucky. new computers with new OS's never keep up with specs it seems.

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: johnnyjohnson
This troll is not convinced. Vista is a dog as far as I'm concerned and I have tried it out extensively. I don't like being forced to do things the way Microsoft wants me to do them, and that is what Vista feels like as I try to do things in it. Besides the eye candy, it simply doesn't offer me a compelling reason to switch to it, plus it's slow. Benchmarks in the article about the 45nm Core Duo that Anandtech just posted show that XP is about 10% faster across the board over Vista. That is significant. I am using a custom slipstreamed pared down version of XP that weighs in under 300MB on the installer disk. Try that with Vista. I have my system tweaked for speed and it flies. No desire and no need to go to Vista. It's great news that XP will be supported for another 5 years.

You buy a Microsoft OS so should expect some things to be done the way they designed the OS,if you don't like it then go over to the competition,new operating systems always have changes its called progress and new design.
As to benchmarks dont' take them too serious,I have seen all sorts of benchmarks and FUD ones too,nothing beats using an OS yourself for real facts and information,personally I find my Vista x64 faster then my XP OS(one reason while I don't pay too much attention to benchmarks regardless of the source).As for tweaking I never needed too,only thing I did was disable Windows Denfender real time scan(set to scan once a week).

You go on about slipstreamed XP 300mb size ?..I don't see the point of this since hard drives are so cheap now even for a big 300GB size,and we all know how much faster Vista installs compared to XP,look at history operating systems have always gotten bigger with time,remember ram and HD prices are mega cheap nowadays,you want to compare DOS 6.22 size to XP?..point is I expect Vienna to be bigger in size when its released but then hard drives will be bigger too for the price.


As for XP being supported for another 5 years ,I personally think they should start phasing it out,it has had a good run ,remember we have Vista that's nearly a year old plus Vienna down the road at some point.
There are things you can do with Vista that you can't do with XP,no matter what the die hard XP users tell you(I won't bother going over what they are since they've been posted a hundred times already).

I always get from some of my friends that are still on XP questions on gaming like does game XXX run in Vista or does it have game problems in general,I normally answer by saying that game runs fine and I have 49 games installed and have yet to find a 32 bit game(for my Vista x64) that I can't run or without good performance,they hear a lot of FUD about Vista for gaming which I'm happy to correct them about,also I end up gaming online with them.

I wonder what FUD will pop up when Vienna is released,time to ponder :frown: .

 

[HermitGuy]

I think I'll Just throw my two cents worth into this seemingly never ending debate. I've been running Vista now for almost a year (not counting betas) with good results across the board. Stability has been excellent and games have run fine, I don't worry about frame rates as long as they run smooth to my eyes and this has not been a problem for me in Vista, although I'm no major gamer.
As far as program compatibility is concerned almost every thing I've loaded has installed and ran with no issues. The one big exception was a utility suite program that the maker said was Vista ready and it clearly was not, but it is running well for the most part now. Hardware compatibility has also been good in both Vista32 and now Vista64, the only exception being a scanner that I knew would not work when I moved to 64 do to lack of a 64bit driver, but it did work fine in 32.
Over all I find that I like the look of the interface better in Vista than XP, I never did like the look of XP that much even though I liked XP as an operating system. I also find some of the under the hood improvements to be worth while, the hard drive management comes to mind as well as better memory management. In conclusion I'd have to say Vista for me has been a good upgrade just as XP was when I moved to it.
This was not meant to be a real technical review I'll leave that to the guru's in this forum, it's just my every day use opinion to be taken as you please, because we all know what they say about opinions don't we.

 

[jonmcc33]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: jonmcc33
Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

Probably at least half of the new PCs sold. And Vista runs just fine with 1GB.

Just fine? No, it runs but I wouldn't call it "just fine".

Originally posted by: wiin

Originally posted by: jonmcc33
Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

Mine:
K7S5A motherboard
512mb RAM
64mb graphic memory
2 hard drives:
c: Vista Ultimate
d: XP Pro

Got no complain here.

Wow. K7S5A? That's an old one there. I hope that's not your main computer. I wouldn't even use that for basic web browsing on Windows XP.

 

[jonmcc33]

Originally posted by: QueBert

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: jonmcc33
Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

Probably at least half of the new PCs sold. And Vista runs just fine with 1GB.

lI was at Best Buy and they have A LOT of bottom end Vista PC's, which are probably the biggest sellers. They had a whopping 512 megs, I saw at least 5 models for sale with 512, and they were the best sellers according to the sales dude there. Which makes sense because the price was the lowest.

when XP came out most people I know who bought "new" pc's got 128, 256 if they were lucky. new computers with new OS's never keep up with specs it seems.

"Sales dudes" at Best Buy generally have no brain. That is why they are working for Best Buy and don't have a real job.

 

[kanad1]

I for one had to contend with running Vista on my integrated GMA950 about 4 months ago when my gpu died on me. When I booted into Vista for the first time with my on board graphics, I was disappointed to see Aero disabled and was delighted the very next minute to see that Windows Update had downloaded latest Intel Disp drivers which enabled Aero! I used onboard graphics in Vista for 3 months with Aero enabled and was very happy with its performance. Obviously, I couldn't play any games but I wanted to see how good Vista was at it so I installed Return to Castle Wolfenstein. A pretty old game, I know but has some very cool eye candy! It run satisfactorily, to say the least, at maxed out settings with 34 - 55 fps, while in XP, it dished out a constant 90fps on the same drivers. So, bottomline: Vista does not suck. Get a good PC and watch it run, literally!

 

[johnnyjohnson]

Originally posted by: Mem

Originally posted by: johnnyjohnson
This troll is not convinced. Vista is a dog as far as I'm concerned and I have tried it out extensively. I don't like being forced to do things the way Microsoft wants me to do them, and that is what Vista feels like as I try to do things in it. Besides the eye candy, it simply doesn't offer me a compelling reason to switch to it, plus it's slow. Benchmarks in the article about the 45nm Core Duo that Anandtech just posted show that XP is about 10% faster across the board over Vista. That is significant. I am using a custom slipstreamed pared down version of XP that weighs in under 300MB on the installer disk. Try that with Vista. I have my system tweaked for speed and it flies. No desire and no need to go to Vista. It's great news that XP will be supported for another 5 years.

You buy a Microsoft OS so should expect some things to be done the way they designed the OS,if you don't like it then go over to the competition,new operating systems always have changes its called progress and new design.
As to benchmarks dont' take them too serious,I have seen all sorts of benchmarks and FUD ones too,nothing beats using an OS yourself for real facts and information,personally I find my Vista x64 faster then my XP OS(one reason while I don't pay too much attention to benchmarks regardless of the source).As for tweaking I never needed too,only thing I did was disable Windows Denfender real time scan(set to scan once a week).

You go on about slipstreamed XP 300mb size ?..I don't see the point of this since hard drives are so cheap now even for a big 300GB size,and we all know how much faster Vista installs compared to XP,look at history operating systems have always gotten bigger with time,remember ram and HD prices are mega cheap nowadays,you want to compare DOS 6.22 size to XP?..point is I expect Vienna to be bigger in size when its released but then hard drives will be bigger too for the price.


As for XP being supported for another 5 years ,I personally think they should start phasing it out,it has had a good run ,remember we have Vista that's nearly a year old plus Vienna down the road at some point.
There are things you can do with Vista that you can't do with XP,no matter what the die hard XP users tell you(I won't bother going over what they are since they've been posted a hundred times already).

I always get from some of my friends that are still on XP questions on gaming like does game XXX run in Vista or does it have game problems in general,I normally answer by saying that game runs fine and I have 49 games installed and have yet to find a 32 bit game(for my Vista x64) that I can't run or without good performance,they hear a lot of FUD about Vista for gaming which I'm happy to correct them about,also I end up gaming online with them.

I wonder what FUD will pop up when Vienna is released,time to ponder :frown: .

I used nLite to tweak XP. I stripped out a lot of the unnecessary background services in XP for example. Outlook Express is gone. Menu delay is set to zero. You name it, I tweaked it. My XP OS flies on a 3.4GHz Core Duo. If you tried it, you'd agree. Speed is important to me. I don't buy into the "speed improvements" that MS supposedly put into Vista. An OS that can fit into 284MB (that's how big my XP installer disk is) is going to be faster than an OS that requires 4GB of installer disk space (I'm exaggerating here, but Vista comes on a DVD not a CD). I'm sure in certain situations Vista can be faster than XP, but overall? Nope. I just downloaded the Crysis demo, which the developer says requires a 3.2Ghz P4 in Vista, but only 2.8GHz on XP. The slowness of Vista is well documented.

Someone else made the obvious point that we should be using whatever OS works best for us and not get into OS debates. But the debates are here as evidenced by the fact that this thread was started in the first place. XP is the OS I prefer at the moment because it does everything that I need it to do and it does so with speed. In a few years it's quite possible I might decide to migrate to Vista. But for now? No Vista for me.

 

[Dadofamunky]

Originally posted by: johnnyjohnson
I used nLite to tweak XP. I stripped out a lot of the unnecessary background services in XP for example. Outlook Express is gone. Menu delay is set to zero. You name it, I tweaked it. My XP OS flies on a 3.4GHz Core Duo. If you tried it, you'd agree. Speed is important to me.

Maybe you should write up a new thread discussing how you did it! Details please. I'm always looking for ways to tweak and speed up my aging but still peppy XP system.

I am doing a new build, and I think it will run Vista.

 

[Dadofamunky]

I nominate this for Sticky. Hope some more updates are forthcoming.

 

[Nothinman]

An OS that can fit into 284MB (that's how big my XP installer disk is) is going to be faster than an OS that requires 4GB of installer disk space (I'm exaggerating here, but Vista comes on a DVD not a CD).

The amount of disk space required for the system is completely orthogonal to the speed at which it operates.

Nope. I just downloaded the Crysis demo, which the developer says requires a 3.2Ghz P4 in Vista, but only 2.8GHz on XP. The slowness of Vista is well documented.

Yea because the system requirements that companies put on software is always extremely accurate...

 

[blackangst1]

Originally posted by: jonmcc33

Who would use Vista with only 1GB RAM?

Just fine? No, it runs but I wouldn't call it "just fine".

Yes. Just fine. Unless youre going to throw in encoding and shit, it DOES run just fine. I pretty much know for a fact you havent used Vista in a 1GB memory environment to back up your statement, so pfft. My mother has 1GB and she even uses scanning, pic editing, and other stuff JUST FINE.

Your lack of knowledge not only makes you look foolish, but it gets old.