Windows Vista gaming performance
I installed Windows Vista yesterday, and once I got all my stuff installed it was running quite smoothly — until I tried to play a game, then everything went to hell. The game in question is Day of Defeat: Source, from Valve Software. On Windows XP Pro SP2, this game ran smooth as butter in my screen’s native resolution of 1680×1050 with all of the bells and whistles turned on. On Windows Vista RTM it was like treacle. I was getting no more than 20 frames per second, with the latest drivers from nVidia installed. On XP i was getting a solid 60fps (60fps ceiling caused by having vsync turned on and my LCD’s default refresh rate being 60Hz).
The hardware I’m running this on is as follows:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Abit AB9 Pro motherboard
2GB DDR2 RAM
nVidia 7800GTX/256MB
Certainly more than capable of running this game at very high settings. Vista’s “experience” rating widget rated this system 5.3 overall.
I really hope the crap performance is down to nVidia’s Vista drivers rather than Vista itself. For now, if you’re a serious gamer, steer clear of Windows Vista. DirectX 10 games won’t be out for months yet anyway, by which time things will have been ironed out. I’ve gone ahead and reinstalled XP on my computer for the time being. I’m quite disappointed, as I have Vista RC2 on my laptop (on which I don’t play any games) and I quite like it for day to day running.
Feckoff.net » Windows Vista released on January 30th, 2007
[...] Today is January 30th, Windows Vista’s official date for release to the unwashed masses (i.e. you and me). I’m still waiting for my free copy from Technet, but even then I will be holding off on installing it until I hear that nVidia have pulled their thumbs out of their asses and written some proper drivers for it (see previous post). The version I installed last week was the Enterprise edition, from work, but I don’t think that would affect the 3D performance. [...]