Welcome to another edition of my Windows Vista blog. Today I am going to take a break from the “what’s new” theme and the features of Vista to take a glance at what everyone has been asking about: gaming in Vista vs. XP.

Play or Be Played
The fact is that the majority of our readers out there are gamers. Many of our readers have migrated from our very successful eSports site, which explains why much of our hardware and tech coverage focuses on the gaming aspect. The fundamental connection between gaming and hardware boils down to one thing, the operating system. There just aren’t massive quantities of hardcore gamers out there running Ubuntu or OSX Tiger. Like it or not, when it comes to PC gaming, Microsoft’s Windows platform is the place to be. Hence, any time a new version of Windows comes out there is a transition period between the last release and the newest; not just in a hardware support and software bugs aspect but in the gaming performance aspect too.

I remember vividly when Windows XP came out and how few of the people I played Counter-Strike and Quake 3 with wanted to make the switch. Many gamers, justifiably, felt that Windows 98 and Windows 2000 were better operating systems for gaming. And for a while they were on-point with this train of thought. However, eventually the curve caught up and the new kid on the block, XP, became the standard. Assuming Windows Vienna isn’t rushed out the door, Vista will most likely become the next standard in gaming - especially with DirectX 10 being a Vista exclusive.

So how is the transition going? Is Vista ready to game on? I will take a look at some benchmarks on various games and benchmarking suites to see how Vista and XP compare on the graphics front. Using this information I will make some recommendations on what your OS of choice should be.

I will be focusing on some of the current games that are quite popular here on GotFrag, as well as some of my personal favorites. Tests will include Counter-Strike: Source, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, Oblivion, Call of Duty 2, the always loved Counter-Strike 1.6, and a couple 3DMarks thrown in for good measure.

Test setup is the following:

• Processor: E6700 Core 2 Duo at 2.66GHz
• Motherboard: eVGA 680i
• Memory: Crucial Ballistix DDR2 1000 2048MB
• Video: eVGA 8800GTS Superclocked
• Power: Antec NeoHE 550W

Software Configuration:

• Vista Driver: 101.41 WHQL
• Windows XP SP2: 97.92 WHQL