September 21st, 2007

The quad-core project - Gaming still better under XP than Vista

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 5:52 am

Categories: DIY PC, Gaming, Graphics, Vista

Tags: Game, Quad-core, Microsoft Windows Vista, Oblivion, Games, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Microsoft Windows XP, Personal Technology, Operating Systems, Microsoft Windows

I had thought that if I threw enough hardware at Windows Vista that I would get similar gaming performance to that of Windows XP - I was wrong.

Windows Vista went RTM back in November of last year and it was released to the public at the end of January and things have improved considerably over the intervening months. More Vista compatible hardware has been released and many companies have been continually releasing updated drivers in an attempt to squeeze as much power from the new OS as possible. However, testing seems to suggest that Vista has a long way to go to before it can match XP.

Over at the PC Doc HQ we’ve been carrying out some testing on the quad-core systems that we built a little while ago (parts list here). The testing that we carried out was relatively simple but proved (to us at any rate) that XP is still much better when it comes to gaming that Vista.

Here’s the testing process we used:

• Install the OS (whether XP or Vista)
• Make sure that updated drivers are applied (especially the graphics card driver - we’re using ATI’s Catalyst 7.9 drivers for both XP and Vista)
• Apply all OS patches and updates (and on Vista we switched off Windows Gadgets)
• Turned the Indexing service off
• Install FRAPS 2.9.1 (which will be used to measure game frame rate)
• Install The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, including the Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isle updates and then applied the latest patches to bring everything up to date
• Defragged the system
• Set the scenery detail of the game to ultra high and the screen resolution to 1024 x 768
• Enlist the help of my kids (who know Oblivion cheats and how to get around the Oblivion world much better than I do!)
• Play a few sections of the game and see what the performance is like

It’s always important to follow, to the letter, the testing procedure that you’ve laid out at the beginning otherwise you screw up and waste time. This is what we (or, more specifically, I) did. The initial set of tests that we carried out had to be thrown out because we had missed out the step of installing all the patches for Oblivion and this resulted in the game running with different level of scenery detail under XP compared to Vista (which resulted in the game under Vista feeling a lot smoother and better).

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