Lastly, we have Call of Duty 2; a game that is played competitively and has a solid following here at GotFrag. I actually just got into playing this on Vista and found that the game is a blast on either operating system. Let’s see how the two OS's stack up.


These are interesting results to say the least. This game’s performance is nearly identical on both operating systems. We can draw a couple conclusions from this. The first obviously being that if you play COD2 on XP, you should expect to get about the same performance with Vista. The second being that depending on how a game is rendered coded, it is possible to have nearly equal performance on Vista and XP regardless of driver differences. This also proves that not all games will face a drop off in performance on Vista.

Now we will check the synthetic standards in game benchmarking with Futuremark's 3DMark05 and 06. While these show no in-game/real world performance indications, we should still be able to draw some conclusions from them.



First off, we see that neither operating system has a huge leg up in these tests, and that 05 shows a bigger difference than does 06. This demonstrates that in the modern features of 3DMark06 Vista seems to compete on the same level as XP SP2.

Conclusion
So what can I recommend to my fellow gamers out there? If you want to make the switch out of interest in Vista, DirectX 10, and have decent hardware you should be ok. If your hardware is middle of the road and you question the need for Vista then wait on it. You will be just fine in XP for some time. Those of you with top of the lines rigs waiting with baited breath for DirectX 10 games like Crysis and Hellgate London should definitely consider giving Vista a look if you already haven’t.

We will definitely keep checking back on tests like these later down the road with new driver releases, faster graphics cards, and of course DirectX 10 games which should be Vista’s bread and butter. It will be interesting to see when the performance of games in Vista catches up and or surpasses XP. Being a betting man I would say for many games it will be sometime later this year. I do want to remind our readers that XP and its drivers have had 5 and half years of tweaking and we are comparing it to an operating system that has been on shelves for less than two months. The improvements will come but it won’t happen overnight.

There you have it, Vista vs. XP head to head in some of todays most popular and demanding games. It is clear that Vista still has room for improvement. New games obviously should see more improvements as developers code for DirectX 10 and are able to harness more of Vista’s graphical power. As far as current games most of the work comes in on Nvidia and ATI’s (whom I didn’t have a chance to represent in these benchmarks) part tweaking their drivers and pushing the most out of Vista. It will take some time just as we saw years ago with XP which was hated by gamers when it first came out. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come with Call of Duty 2 and the 3Dmark tests which show that Vista can have just as good performance as XP.

Thanks for joining me again for another of stop in my “Life with Windows Vista” series. Come back for issue 5 when I show off some interesting tweaks and tips for Vista and more of the new features I have yet to scratch the surface of.



Related
Life With Windows Vista: Issue 1
Life With Windows Vista: Issue 2
Life With Windows Vista: Issue 3
Vista Coverage