XP or Vista ? (for gaming)

If your video card supports DX 10, go with Vista. Since you are looking at the 8800 GT, or even if you get another video card in that price range, it will have DX10, so Vista is the best choice.
 
If you are buying a new OS right now, there's little reason not to make the jump to Vista. That being said, Vista x64 is a great way to go.
 
well I was gonna go with Vista but then I heard it doesnt have DirectSound and that causes probs ?
 
Hi. I recently switched to Vista to use DX10. After many frustrations with things that didn't work well for me under Vista (ex Cool n Quiet, Folding @ Home SMP client, didn't play nice w/ my network) I upgraded back to Windows XP SP2 and I couldn't be happier.

In most cases you will not be able to tell the difference between dx9 and dx10 in visual quality, but you will notice the performance drop.

Also I noticed Vista was always pinging my hard drive even while my computer was idle.

So yeah, I recommend XP.

Also, the permission thing that Vista uses was causing a lot of programs to lock up, so I disabled it. What's the point of extra security if you have to turn it all off anyway?
 
djkest said:
Also I noticed Vista was always pinging my hard drive even while my computer was idle.
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That's perfectly normal for two reasons...first, if it was a relative new build, or you installed a lot of software, Vista was optimizing the drive. Second, Vista polls the optical drives every second or so as part of the autorun features, so rather than giving up on the OS so quickly, you could have simply turned off this feature.

Vista had some early issues, mostly due to poor driver support (which would explain much of the issues above). Those issues are a thing of the past for the most part.
 
Vista gaming offers, for the most part, the same performance as XP does. I've used Vista for awhile now and I can't complain.
 
Vista is about to get its first service pack, and XP is about to get its last. While XP will be pretty well supported for years to come, its user base and support base are going to continue to shrink. Vista drivers and support are now becoming the priority for manufacturers.

As to the heart of the matter, I've played (at least a little bit) on the sig rig under Vista 32bit at 1920x1200 with maximum details and at least 4xAA and performance has been great, even with DX10 in the games that support it

S.T.A.L.K.E.R,
HL 2, HL2 E1 & E2
DiRT
TimeShift
UT3
COD4
FEAR and both exspansion packs
BioShock
Lost Planet

Now games that I couldn't run at max resolution and settings

Call Of Juarez,
Crysis

Now I don't play online a lot, so COD4 and UT3 might be games that you'f wan't to tweak for ultra fast action, but they run so smoothly all maxed out at 1920x1200 that they'd probably be ok.

I'm a very happy Vista user. I have it installed on two desktops and a tablet pc. Getting good drivers was the hard part early on but I think that we're past that for the most part. Running with at least 2GB makes a huge difference, and 4GB would be even better, especially wih Vista x64.
 
The performance Issue I had with Vista was in Guitar Hero III, which by all accounts is poorly coded. The way vista is set up it would occasionally slow down while I was playing a song. When you're playing a 5 min long song and trying to hit every single note perfectly, you just can't have that.

I played Crysis (demo), Bioshock, and WIC in Vista. You won't notice any difference in speed between the two for those games, at least in DX9 mode. I did think Vista was actually better than XP at alt-tabbing, I liked the mouse-over preview, never really used aero glass except to show other people. I really enjoyed using Vista, but the minor incompatibilies and system freezes were enough for me to switch back. Much of the freezes did go away after I disabled all the security functions. I also mentioned the network, it didn't want to interface w/ my XP running machines. Finally, it did, but I tried for an hour and couldn't use the shared printer on another machine that I use for everything.
 
Depends on if you have a copy of XP, or you have to buy whichever one you're going to install. If you have XP, I'd stick with it. Otherwise if you have to buy an OS anyway, might as well go with the latest and greatest.
 
Latest and bloatest. Latest and buggyest. Latest and slowest.. take your pick. :D
 
Also I noticed Vista was always pinging my hard drive even while my computer was idle.
Click to expand...

Mine used to do the same thing until i downloaded all the updates for it. One of the patches seemed to have stopped the excessive hard drive use at idle.
 
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