The Tests
We have a ton of Counter-Strike 1.6 players around here so I will address that first. Numerous “1.6’ers” have asked me about performance between the two operating systems and if they can switch and still get good frames in 1.6.


As we can see from the graph, Vista sees a drop of about 23% in frames per second. However, even at almost 200FPS in Vista it is very playable. This is of course on very good hardware - those of you running on your old Intel Celerons with 256MB of RAM would probably notice a 23% drop in frames. However, you shouldn’t (and I don't see how you even could) be running Vista on a system like that either way. So, if you have good enough hardware to run Vista well, your frame drops in 1.6 should be negligible.

Now we switch off to 1.6’s loved/hated stepsister Counter-Strike: Source, where we see a slightly different picture.


Source, as we know, is much more demanding on the CPU and GPU than 1.6, and getting solid and consistent frames per second in CS:S takes a fairly modern rig. In Vista we see a drop of close to 35% compared to Windows XP SP2. With Vista on my high-end system we see that CS:S is quite playable at right around 96FPS. This is of course with high levels of Anisotropic Filtering (16x) and Anti-Aliasing (8x multisampling). These could be dropped down, as could the resolution for those of you looking to get more FPS out of source or for those with lesser hardware wanting to make the Vista leap.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is a very demanding game graphically, which is why I felt it would make for a great comparison between Vista and XP. In this test we used High Dynamic Range lighting (HDR), as it is more demanding in Oblivion than Anti-Aliasing is.


We see that Oblivion is 13% faster in XP SP2 than in Vista. Not a big performance drop, but still somewhat noticeable; Something to keep in mind for those who play Oblivion.

Next up we have one of my favorites: Half-Life 2: Episode 1. The graphics and the eye candy in this game are top notch and rival that of any game out. Evidence of this can be seen from the fact that with nearly maxed AA and AF levels, as well as HDR, I get the lowest FPS out of any game I tested.

Not only do we see the lowest FPS out of all the games I am testing, but this is also the title that shows the biggest hit in performance and illustrates that Vista still needs some under-the-hood gaming tweaks. Vista is around 50% slower than XP in the Episode 1 tests.