Vista still lacks the gaming performance of XP

Vista is still lagging behind in XP when it comes to performance of the system, some would say general performance is affected as well but gaming performance takes a bigger hit.

ZDnet put Vista and XP to the test by building a powerful gaming system, loading the operating systems and then playing games, lots of games.  The computers consisted of a Intel Q6600 Core 2 Quad processor, Asus Striker Extreme motherboard, a Sapphire Radeon 2600XT 256MB graphics card (okay, I would have expected better), 2GB of PC2 6400 memory (also would have expected better), two 150GB Raptor X hard drives and of course, Vista Ultimate Edition and Windows XP Professional.

They could have done better hardware wise, thatâ€™s a pretty weak graphics card and the memory could have been 3GB and the faster PC2 8500 kind.  Those two things basically ruin the whole thing.  In my opinion a nvidia Geforce 8800GTX graphics card would have been a better choice.

The computers were tested with the latest ATi drivers with all OS patches and updates applied.  The indexing service was turned off, details in the game were set to â€œultra highâ€ with a resolution of 1024 x 768 (yeah, canâ€™t really expect much out of a 2600XT card).

The hardware isnâ€™t the point though for the test, higher rated hardware should have been used, Iâ€™m sorry but it should have.  The point is that the frame rates dropped to a minimum of 34fps under XP and 25fps under Vista where it took longer to recover.

Be that as it may, tossing a more powerful graphics card behind the problem should solve most issues ZDnet had and I am very surprised and disappointed that they didnâ€™t.  Performance will still be less under Vista but as long as it does not drop below 20fps, most people will be perfectly happy.

I agree that those specs are unusual. Firstly, there is no point in having a Quad processor, when the other specs are not relatively high - only 2GB RAM and a medium-range graphics card.

I find that the processor doesn't really make much of a difference in the actual performance of the game (assuming that the other specs are good)- for me, the real difference is only seen when many programs are open and running at once.

What does make a difference to the game is the RAM and video card. Thus, there is no point in having a Quad core processor if the other specs aren't good enough to actually allow you to take advantage of the processor's speed.

The systems built seem to be biased towards the CPU, and not towards the graphics card and the RAM, as it should really be.
My XP system has a slower CPU, but better graphics card and RAM, and I reckon that gameplay will be better on it that on ZDnet's XP system - my CPU is already superior to most games' recommended specs (let alone minimum), and so it will be my graphics card and RAM that make a difference.