Older Games Suck In Vista

[SpikedCola]

Whenever I try to play older games in Vista, such as the two listed above, they are really jerky, have a horrible colour pallet, etc. Even playing WoW, Ive noticed that I lost 20fps switching from XP to Vista. Because of this Im almost tempted to switch back. Is there anything I can do to improve gameplay in Vista? Ive noticed that I have DirectX 10 installed. Would rolling back to 9 help? Also, Ive tried running the games in compatibility mode, and disabling visual themes, and that didnt help. WoW Im not concerned about so much, because 35fps is still decent, but when I cant even play AoE anymore, it kind of p***es me off.

[prx984]

Some of my games won't even launch under Vista. I had to go and look for updates for a few (none available for a lot of them). Midtown Madness was relatively easy to get going, I downloaded an update for it for Windows XP. That seemed to do it.

[ssgatbliss]

I hear you, as a matter of fact I just switched back to XP a day ago. Doom 3 runs horrible, Halflife 2 is OK but has a large performance hit, EQ2 seems to run very well speed wise but it constantly crashes, even BF2142 is crashing on me at least once or twice an hour. Even some of Microsofts own programs don't work well. I have MSN for my DSL and many times the mail portion crashes upon startup or locks up in the middle of an e-mail. Flight Simulator X has issues where it was working fine then all of a sudden I'm getting Data Execution Protection errors? Microsofts highly technical troubleshooting staff told me to add it to the exempt list but guess what? Flight Sim X won't let add it so it remains a problem. For general everyday web surfing and e-mail using Outlook 2007 Vista is OK but I went back to XP until they issue SP1 or fix performance issues.

System is an Opteron 185 OCd to 3.05 Ghz with watercooling. 2GB mem, raid 0, X1950 Pro GPU, X-fi Plat sound card.

And I liked the look and feel of Vista but I can't justify keeping it installed with all the issues I'm having.

Edited March 14, 2007 by ssgatbliss

[SpikedCola]

Decided just to bite the bullet and go back to XP. Vista needs some work.

[KevinGT]

There was an article about Vista in an issue of PC Magazine from halfway through 2006. One of the topics was game performance. Although nothing was mentioned regarding XP games being slower, I remember reading about how the original XBox, with it's 733MHz PIII and 64MB of RAM, was able to run Halo 2 so well. It had something to do with how the software was able to talk directly to the hardware, without having to go through the windows graphics device interface, or whatever the fudge it's called. Games written specifically for Vista should do the same thing. Back then, they cited something like a 30% performance boost. As long as that doesn't turn out to be complete and utter BS, I don't think I'll mind keeping my dual-boot config just so I can play XP games in XP and Vista games in Vista.

Unless you can't keep XP on a separate partition due to Windows Upgrade (and even that can supposedly be circumvented), there's no reason not to have both.

Edited March 19, 2007 by KevinGT

[bluescreens]

There was an article about Vista in an issue of PC Magazine from halfway through 2006. One of the topics was game performance. Although nothing was mentioned regarding XP games being slower, I remember reading about how the original XBox, with it's 733MHz PIII and 64MB of RAM, was able to run Halo 2 so well. It had something to do with how the software was able to talk directly to the hardware, without having to go through the windows graphics device interface, or whatever the fudge it's called. Games written specifically for Vista should do the same thing. Back then, they cited something like a 30% performance boost. As long as that doesn't turn out to be complete and utter BS, I don't think I'll mind keeping my dual-boot config just so I can play XP games in XP and Vista games in Vista.

Unless you can't keep XP on a separate partition due to Windows Upgrade (and even that can supposedly be circumvented), there's no reason not to have both.

Xbox is fast because all games can be targeted and optimized for exactly that hardware, and because games written for it can guarantee certain things - certain performance, certain timings, and certain hardware being always available. It can also talk directly to the hardware, without having to go through a full DirectX library and significant other abstractions that are in Windows.

I have a tough time with any claim of "games written just for Vista being 30% faster" -- there's no magic library that makes it 30% faster, nor an optimization or link that would be required in XP and not in Vista that would make things that much faster. That's a _huge_ jump in modern terms!