No doubt, Vista is slower and is expected to always be slower then XP. They
moved the vide driver back outside of the kernel (generically speaking),
which is the way things where back in the NT4 days. This gives better system
stability (no rogue drivers causing crashes) at the cost of performance. I
believe Microsoft's numbers are that Vista will run 5-10% slower than XP. In
alot of cases, you'll never notice that 10% slower part. After all, if you
were getting 100fps and now get 85, it's still smooth and pretty.
Though it doesn't mean a whole lot, my 3dmark06 score under vista is 5989
versus XP's 6063
Lots of games work, I just installed and played Battlefield 1942 (which is a
DX 8.1 game) and played a bit with it. Other games works, but have issues, I
still can't get FEAR to give me constant performance in the benchmarks and
it has the jerky feel I had when I played it on my old X800XT card. But
Doom3, HL2, Battlefield 2 and 2142 all play fine. I played about 4 hours
last night on BF2142 on max settings and I couldn't tell any difference than
when playing under XP (after all, 100 fps is slower than 150 fps, but still
plenty fast)
Like Byron said, things will start to smooth out over the next 2-4 months.
once ATI and nVidia get their drivers better tuned. Other than just playing
around and testing, I personally wouldn't recommend moving purely to Windows
Vista until summer. You're really not going to miss anything other than a
bunch of headscratching and frustration. If you haev the option to
Dual-boot, then that would be my suggestion.
