XP SP2 vs. Vista RTM vs. Vista SP1: Gaming benchmark
February 28th, 2008
By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Here are the benchmark results that many of you have been waiting for - a look at how well ten popular games work on XP SP2, Vista RTM and Vista SP1. It’s been nearly a year since I took a look at the state of gaming under the Vista OS.

The last time I compared XP SP2 to Vista, I was disappointed with Microsoft’s new OS as a gaming platform because I could get far more bang for my bucks out of XP than I could out of the new OS. Partly I put this down to immature drivers, but on the whole I was convinced that at the core of the problem was Vista.

So, is Vista worth bothering with as a gaming platform? The tests will be carried out on the AMD Spider platform that I have set up in the lab (Phenom 9700, Radeon 3850 graphics card, 2GB of RAM …). I’ve used this system as the platform for a number of benchmarks I’ve run over the past week (for a full spec, see this post).

Here’s the deal. I set up three images for the system - one based on XP SP2, one on Vista RTM and one on Vista SP1 (all 32-bit flavor). On each of these images all the updates provided by Microsoft were installed. The installation of drivers in addition to those supplied by Microsoft was kept to a minimum (XP SP2 required more drivers than Vista).

ZDNET Blogs
complete article