XP vs Vista

Posted at: Tuesday 2nd October 2007 by James Morris

James Morris puts Windows XP and Vista head to head in a gruelling set of benchmarks to see which Microsoft operating system runs your games and applications the quickest.

We installed version 1.007 of ALchemy on our Windows Vista PC, and tried the three games from this month's performance tests that are affected by the lack of EAX - F.E.A.R., The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Far Cry. With F.E.A.R., the flat sound we'd had to endure in Vista was returned to the immersive audio of Windows XP, complete with ricocheting bullets and echoing explosions. Full support for EAX Advanced HD was available. Again, the effect of having hardware sound mixing wasn't quite as obvious with Far Cry, since it doesn't use Advanced HD. Oblivion was even less noticeable, as there's no obvious EAX audio setting. However, for games that make heavy use of EAX Advanced HD, ALchemy will be a great relief, and it removes one of the impediments of a Vista upgrade for X-Fi owners.

Over and out

Although we've been impressed with Windows Vista as a technological achievement, our testing this month paints a less rosy picture. If you were hoping to read this month's test and gain the confidence you needed to upgrade to Windows Vista tomorrow, our conclusions are far from clear-cut. We still think that once you get used to it, Windows Vista has a more streamlined interface than XP and technologies such as SuperFetch contribute to a more responsive feel. It's very tricky to quantify it with a benchmark, but it's a consistent enough experience to imply that Microsoft has got Vista right from a usability perspective.

However, Windows Vista's slower application and game performance compared with that of Windows XP is very worrying.

This is particularly the case for Nvidia; in many of our game benchmarks, the difference between its hardware's performance in XP and Vista was far more pronounced than that of ATI. Perhaps this disparity was acceptable (or at least, expected) when Vista first appeared - it's pretty par for the course with a new version of Windows until drivers are optimised. However, now that Windows XP is close to being discontinued, at least for pre-built PCs, we'd have hoped for a step forwards rather than backwards in overall speed. Still, unless you're willing to put your faith in a DirectX 10 hack for Windows XP, if you want to play the latest games with the full benefit of the latest graphics hardware, you'll increasingly have little choice but to upgrade to Windows Vista.