General Discussion

I'm thinking of acquiring a copy of VISTA - DX10 is enticing. Is it worth the hassle in terms of speed improvement?

I'm running 32bit xp on a quad core and would be switching to x64 vista but dont have the patience for hassle :P

its okay to have VISTA as long as you have lots of RAM...

Only if you have several DX10 games, or are  planning to buy several DX10 games. At the moment DX10 is the only reason to go Vista.

Even with lots and lots of memory,  you will still see a performance hit, with Vista as opposed to XP, I own a copy of Vista64 Ultimate, but after installing it, with all the latest drivers, I see a 10-15% hit in my game performance.

But it looks pretty

Originally posted by grimboj

I'm thinking of acquiring a copy of VISTA - DX10 is enticing. Is it worth the hassle in terms of speed improvement?

I'm running 32bit xp on a quad core and would be switching to x64 vista but dont have the patience for hassle :P

why do you want to use vista instead of windows xp?Do you find it is ok in use?Can you say more about vista?lol

I would skip Vista entirely.  I dont think there are any DX10 exclusive titles and the difference between DX9-10 titles is negligible. 

With crysis- it turns out DX9 could do everything DX10 features brought on, but the developers purposefully disabled full eye candy features on DX9.  They can be unlocked with a change to an .ini file I beleive- google it.  I'm just using this as an example of the mediocrity of DX10.

Windows 7 is due out sometime in 2010, and DX11 is supposed to come along with it.  Vista can pretty much be skipped entirely.

Originally posted by Soupgoblin

Only if you have several DX10 games, or are  planning to buy several DX10 games. At the moment DX10 is the only reason to go Vista.

Even with lots and lots of memory,  you will still see a performance hit, with Vista as opposed to XP, I own a copy of Vista64 Ultimate, but after installing it, with all the latest drivers, I see a 10-15% hit in my game performance.

But it looks pretty

 

what year are you in?  you need to update your video drivers, the perforance gap was eradicated a long time ago.  The decrease in speed was due to drivers.  Vista and xp get the same gaming performance in everything but opengl games.

Originally posted by xDarc

I would skip Vista entirely.  I dont think there are any DX10 exclusive titles and the difference between DX9-10 titles is negligible. 

With crysis- it turns out DX9 could do everything DX10 features brought on, but the developers purposefully disabled full eye candy features on DX9.  They can be unlocked with a change to an .ini file I beleive- google it.  I'm just using this as an example of the mediocrity of DX10.

Windows 7 is due out sometime in 2010, and DX11 is supposed to come along with it.  Vista can pretty much be skipped entirely.

Having an MSDN subscription, I would say you will be very disappointed to know that the next version of windows is going to have the same "issues" that many see in Vista.

Part of the issue is that the items that slow down Vista are the very same items that people scream about why Linux is so much better than Vista. Two great examples are:

• The desktop UI runs within it's own process space. This leads to a much more secure environment (but not completely). It also allows the UI to recover in the case of most driver level crashes. The drawback is that since there is more overhead - it is slower than making direct Kernel level calls. GNU/Linux has the same issue with running games directly within XFree86. However, they have had many more years of refining on this system.
• The entire Windows user philosophy of "How much memory do I have free?" is flawed. If you aren't using memory - It is a complete waste. Vista now sees this and utilizes every bit of memory you have. The PROBLEM with Vista's approach (compared to Linux) is that MOST of the memory it uses caches the Windows Search index. Which is used to speed up searching. Something that is entirely useless to the power gamer. Also, since most game developers do not yet realize how to properly allocate non-paged memory, Vista does not release extra memory from it's caching mechanism for games until Vista realizes that the game is throwing excessive page exceptions (swapping back and forth between sections of memory).

Also, the "purposely" disabled portions of DX9 are in fact not true. There are some sections of the interface that are polymorphic - allowing the system to identify what it has access to or not by different registry and ini file settings. All this does is make the games "think that you have direct X 10  features" installed. If the game really tries to use them, it will either crash or default to a direct x 9 method instead. But, it is still direct x 9. Most because the driver itself is responsible for the new shader support - not windows.

Originally posted by xDarc

I would skip Vista entirely.  I dont think there are any DX10 exclusive titles and the difference between DX9-10 titles is negligible. 

With crysis- it turns out DX9 could do everything DX10 features brought on, but the developers purposefully disabled full eye candy features on DX9.  They can be unlocked with a change to an .ini file I beleive- google it.  I'm just using this as an example of the mediocrity of DX10.

Windows 7 is due out sometime in 2010, and DX11 is supposed to come along with it.  Vista can pretty much be skipped entirely.

actually, no Crysis can't do everything in dx9 that it can in dx10.  That change opens up a "very high" detail level in crysis, but it's not the same as the very high on a vista machine

Originally posted by grimboj

I'm thinking of acquiring a copy of VISTA - DX10 is enticing. Is it worth the hassle in terms of speed improvement?

I'm running 32bit xp on a quad core and would be switching to x64 vista but dont have the patience for hassle :P

I switched from Windows XP 32 to Vista 64-bit Ultimate myself. I never bothered with XP 64 since too many games had issues with it.

But, I don't seem to have game compatibility issues with Vista x64 at all.

Couple things though:

Regardless of what ANYBODY tells you. After the release of a hotfix before SP1, it is no longer possible to load unsigned drivers unless you hold down the F8 key while loading windows. What does this mean? Well, sometimes - older hardware will not have a real driver available. When this happens usually someone like myself will hack together a driver from Windows XP 64-bit that happens to work with Vista x64. However, since the driver is not digitally signed by Microsoft, it will no longer install in Vista 64-bit. Unless you hold down the F8 key while loading windows and choose the "Disable signed driver support" option.

Does this apply to you? Well, simply put - if your hardware is from within the last 1-2 years you shouldn't have an issue. But check your Hardware vendors websites for Vista 64-bit drivers. The 32-bit versions will not work.

Secondly, because of the memory caching - I would suggest having atleast 2 gigs of memory. Also, be sure to disable Windows Search, Readyboost and Superfetch. These will DOG your system. Not because of taking up two much memory, but scanning your hard drive almost 100% of the time kills game performance.

Also, if you know anything about Services - visit www.blackviper.com/WinVista/service411.htm to see what most of the services do and which ones to disable to free up resources. I've used his site a few times and it's helpful.

Finally, DO NOT install Symantec Antivirus of any kind in Vista 64-bit. I have tried. Twice. It works fine for a while, but after some time you will notice that your performance will drop by atleast 25%. I switched to ESET NOD32 which has a 64-bit build of their antivirus software. Not that you would need a 64-bit build, but .. it's nice to use the extra performance when scanning memory.