New PC- Windows Vista or XP Pro??

hey all,
basically i need some advice. I am purchasing a new gaming machine and i
need to know which OS to choose, i have experienced XP Pro and know that near
enough all games work on it.

However, can anyone give some advice and information as to what Windows
Vista is like?
-Is it better for games?
Is there any difference?
-Any bugs invloved with gaming and Vista?
-Which is ther better choice?

thanks guys, any info would be appreciated
=] ~sc0pes//

"Scopes" <Scopes@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news72166AA-6C6E-43A5-942D-C200880107DF@xxxxxx Opinions about Vista run the gambit from it sucks to it's not too bad.

Here's what I say, meh.

I dropped Vista on a machine because I got a freebie from a MS rep, it's
good. I use it as my main gaming machine, but there are things about it that
I occasionally wonder why I put up with it.

Games, for the most part, run just fine. I dropped the OS on a dual core
system, where I had a single core under XP before, so obivously, for me
games ran better on my new system.

I got Halo 2 and Shadowrun going, because I could, returned Halo 2, and
Shadowrun is not played too often (RIP FASA, we'll miss your
Battletech/Shadowrun licenses). So far these are the only 2 Vista Only
games, so game selection is not going to enter into the equation for you.

Some older games have compatibility issues in Vista, but they are few, and
usually a little tweaking fixes the problem.

Other stuff I'm noticeing like Video playback is kindda messed up, and
Vista's Audio driver support and I suppose Video card are kind of bad. Vista
drivers don't run at Kernal level anymore, they run at User level. so I get
audio popping that annoys me and i'm pretty sure it's because some program
is effecting my audio drivers.

Cost, Vista costs the same as XP more or less. If you get XP, get XP Home,
no reason to get Pro unless you need to connect to a domain server. For
Vista, go with Home Premium, no reason to get Ultimate really.

64-bit support in Vista is getting rave reviews, and while it has problems,
lots of people have reported great success using it. Games like Crysis will
ship with a 64-bit version, how cool is that, 64-bit is finally starting to
push into the main stream. If you get Vista Ultimate it comes with the
32/64bit version. if you get Home Premium Retail you can send away for
64-bit DVDs, and if you get OEM/Systembuilder, you can choose which version
you want.

Not sure if you're going to build your system, if not most systems come with
Vista, but if you really want an XP box, just ask, Best Buy for instance can
order XP systems for you, takes like a week to get them in.

Bugs, well every game that ships has bugs, ask any software developer. Games
are WAY too complicated not to have bugs. Vista itself is LOADED with bugs,
but so is Windows XP, but both have been patched decently, but that's not to
say you won't encounter problems with either.

IMO, If you can't wait for some of the new games coming out, get Vista, give
yourself some time to learn the OS before the Vista only stuff comes out
that you really want. SP1 is supposed to be out next year, preliminary
reports are saying it's looking good.

If you aren't looking towards the future, but more towards that huge closet
of great games you want to get out and play again, get XP.

-a

My two cents, if is you are happy with XP stick with XP. DX10 may be the
future but it's still a ways away.

I've dual boot between XP and Vista since Dec 06 and I pretty much stay on
XP anymore. Like Andy noted, I got to a place where I had to ask myself why
suffer a performance loss and other "little" things with XP does all that I
need, especially from a gaming standpoint.

One of example, that is not even worth the energy to figure out, is the
girlfriend's system. It had a AMD 3800+ and ATI X850. I also set her to dual
boot and she had used Vista since Jan. But last month she installed World of
Warcraft and found the video performance horrible at times. So I figured the
X850 was too old and got her a nVidia 8800 GTS 320 and the performance
didn't change. I applied all the latest drivers and the microsoft hotfix to
increase performance, but WoW was under performing.

Booted under XP and it plays as smooth as you want, under even higher video
settings. I'm sure I could have spent time under the WoW forums and located
some tweaks and changes, but why waste time on it ? I would have thought 9
1/2 months all the performance bugs would have been resolved, but apparently
not.

I've played a boat load of games under Vista32 and Vista64 and find that the
compatibility is pretty good. Just a performance loss and if a game is going
to mis-behave, it's going to misbehave under Vista while XP just dances
along.

So I say wait until you find a game that you really want that takes
advantage of Vista's DX10. Which will probably be a while longer, especially
if you don't have a DX10 video card


"Scopes" <Scopes@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news72166AA-6C6E-43A5-942D-C200880107DF@xxxxxx

"Dale White" <dale.white@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eazHX3Z%23HHA.1484@xxxxxx Heh, when you consider that Vista has been in planning for 3 years, and the
beta was out for at least a few years before release there's no reason WoW
runs as bad as it does. Blizzard probably didn't figure may people would
adopt the OS. This coming from a game that runs on Mac as well as PC.
Yeah, sometimes its fun to tinker along with Vista. I setup the Media
Center, plugged in my TV to my video output and I can watch DVR (standard
def) while playing games. XP Media Center will do the same though.

Have fun.
-A.

I doubt that Blizzard felt Microsofts new OS would not have many adopters. I
suspect they are having the same problems as all the driver mfgs, that Vista
is a massively more complex environment to live in. Heck, even MS's stuff
doesn't work reliably sometimes, I still crash in office occasionally and am
suddenly unable to burn a data cd, though dvd's work just fine.. Despite the
amount of testing/work I suspect it will be years before everyone
understands all the complexities.

Mark


"Andy [YaYa]" <android8675@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:EFDA7D55-2709-4F81-A381-55B591AD8323@xxxxxx

Well, color me noob, but Blizzard seems to have went with a game that is
playable even on older crappy hardware, like my laptop. it would surprise
me, if there attitude is really that it's not worth the trouble to
fix\tweak. As I would expect them to want their game to continue to appeal
to every man woman and child.

What is weird to me, is I've played more graphic intensive games like
Battlefield 2 and 2142 under vista and while the performance is slower, it's
not almost a day and night difference. I'm not really sure what WoW is doing
to make it under perform, especially to the point where an upgrade from a
X850 to a 8800GTS wouldn't cover it up.

I almost care enough to start digging into it, almost being the key word.


"Mark" <mark_butler@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:78165CC8-4F43-4549-AE47-F7EF8CC7974F@xxxxxx

"Dale White" <dale.white@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%232d2oNu%23HHA.2004@xxxxxx Yeah, gotta weigh the pros and cons as well as cost of doing the fixes, and
you're right the reason there's 10 mil subscribers in WoW is because there's
10mil computers out there that can run the game. haha.
2 words, Gerbal Tech.
They might figure it out eventually. During Vista development whenever a
game I was working on was having problems I had an engineer at my beck and
call up in Redmond. We could show him the problem and he'd do a fix for us
either OS side or in our code. It was really nice. Microsoft really wanted
to make as much software as possible run in Vista at launch.

-A.