I saw an article from Tom's Hardware saying gaming in Vista is absolute rubbish. It's interesting that they say the drivers are "unstable" though with RTM Vista and current drivers. Personally I've not a problem with stability but only performance issues, these are unrelated items, stability does not mean performance, have the got their terms wrong? or did I just not look at the article at the right part?

In any case, I thought I'd post my own version here since I've access to a copy of Vista Business Edition before anyone else from MSDNAA. Generally graphics are slower by around 10%-20%, originally I thought this could be due to the AERO desktop but I've tried turning it off without any increase in performance. In regards to the current set of drivers offered by ATI and Nvidia, I'm not sure whether it is because they haven't optimised their drivers for performance yet or not but in any case I'm speculating that it is actually due to the DirectX 10 architecture. I've read an article from Microsoft that stated that DX10 actually is capable of offering 5-10 times performance increase, but the problem is now everything on your desktop is rendered using DX10 and so it requires more resources on your card, and if your card is not made for DX10 there will be issues.

One of the things that I find annoying in Vista is when you change screen, say... in Guild Wars you zone to a different area. The screen will go blank to refresh and renew a screen to display where as back in XP, this does not happen. Having said that DX10 now allows multiple programs to access what the graphics card has to offer, so I can have 2 games opened.

One of the MAJOR performance problem though is actually the amount of memory avaliable, because Vista takes around 500-600MB of ram, if you have 1.5Gb of ram, games will only be able to access 1Gb max. This is a major bottleneck for me when I was playing some recent games. I've upgraded from 1Gb to 1.5Gb not so long ago to enjoy better game play in XP as newer games can take up to and beyond 1Gb of ram. As such it advisable for anyone who play games at all that they have at _least_ 2Gb of ram. Otherwise your system will be suffering from a lot of hard drive access which can lead to stutter and severe lag in games as the game will be using the hard drive as both a storage and a memory device (page files).

Hope this helps. Don't forget to use the PCI Latency tool I'm using a v3.1 Build 2 and it works fine on Vista. It'll help with getting more performance from your graphics card.

Need a new CPU or graphics card? Get AMD.