But it depends on the game. It has been no secret that games have been performing slightly worse under Vista than the same games do on XP. Some of these games have not seen updates in several months, for some the last update was before Vista released. Not all games were affected in the same way and the drop in performance is completely dependent on the game being played. Hard OCP took a look at what they considered to be an “average” mid-range computer equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 processor; 2GB of memory, a 320GB hard drive, all powered by a 380W power supply and tested with both a Geforce 7600GT and 8800GTS under XP and Vista.
Unfortunately they didn’t bother to run any of the Futuremark benchmarks in their tests which I think is very unfortunate but as some will tell you, artificial benchmarks are meaningless, it just depends on who you talk to. I don’t think they mean as much as actual in-game frame rates but it gives you an idea of what the system is capable of without having to do a lot of real work.
There are still no DirectX 10 benchmarks for Vista but I expect when games able to take advantage of that come on the market there will be a huge improvement in the performance on Vista for those games.
The game hit the worst by this was NFS:Carbon (I guess it’s a good thing I don’t like racing games) because it was hit by a performance drop by nearly 50% on Vista vs. XP. One game performed better by a slight margin… World of Warcraft scored better under Vista except for those two other games saw a minor performance drop on Vista but it’s nothing you would notice. Unless the game is dropping below 20fps on a regular basis then you aren’t going to notice any real difference.
Technically you can say performance is worse in Vista but also take into account that nvdia does not have a final version of their Vista drivers ready, at least not WHQL drivers and the performance drop is very minor on most games with the exception of NFS:Carbon (a game I don’t and never intend to play) and WoW (which performed better) which I also do not play.
Only time will tell if final WHQL drivers make a difference or how much (if any) improvement DirectX 10 games will see versus DirectX 9 only games.



Source:VISTA.BLORGE.com » Blog Archive » Vista lowers gaming performance