Windows Vista vs Windows XP performance compared

Microsoft's latest operating system is now on the market for about ten months. Most people are still using Windows XP but within a couple of years Vista will probably be the most popular operating system on the market.

When Vista was just released many people complained games sometimes ran much slower in Vista than in XP. Both AMD and NVIDIA had several months to tweak their drivers so Firingsquad decided to take another look at Vista's performance to see how games are performing in Windows Vista and Windows XP.

As you can imagine, in the span of the past seven months quite a bit has changed on the Vista driver front and we’ve received quite a few emails asking us to revisit the topic. In fact, right after posting our first BioShock article, the Windows XP versus Vista requests streamed in; we received a few more requests after publishing our Quake Wars story as well.

Then, just last Friday, NVIDIA briefed us on a new driver they were putting the finishing touches on that was meant to improve their Vista performance in single-card and SLI. This driver was ultimately released just a few days ago in the form of ForceWare 163.69. Are immature Vista drivers still an issue for AMD and NVIDIA? That’s what we’re here today to examine!

The reviewer concludes that AMD's and NVIDIA's Windows Vista drivers have come a long way in the past couple of months:

After getting off to a less than ideal start, it looks like the graphics drivers from AMD and NVIDIA are finally shaping up well. A lot of people are probably still going to wait for the first service pack, but if you were holding off on upgrading to Vista due to the driver situation, the problem has mostly been resolved: AMD still has lingering scaling issues with CrossFire, particularly under newer DX10 games.