TechGage took a few popular games through the benchmarks on Windows Vista. How does Microsoft's new operating system affect gaming performance? In some cases quite a bit, in other cases not much at all. It looks like it's very dependant on what game you are running. Here's an excerpt:

As with most articles of this nature, we can't fully give a conclusion because so many factors come into play. Though as it stands, we can learn a lot from this simple round of tests. First is the fact that Vista is not going to be an OS for an ultimate gaming machine anytime soon. This is something that you should consider before you throw a bunch of cash at a new computer and then pick up Vista along with it.

The Vista NVIDIA drivers used during testing were just finalized the other day, the result of a string of tireless days of bug smashing. Vista is not necessarily a harder OS to develop for, but because coders need to learn the new architecture, we can expect to wait a while before our PCs are "perfect". Even with these "final" drivers, SLI is still inoperable and may not be for another few weeks. Even at that time, nobody is going to know whether it's going to equal the performance we currently see on XP. Even with my simple one card testing, we can see there is a lot of work to be done, both with the drivers and perhaps with games developers releasing updates that better support Vista.

So, I've said it before and will say it again. Vista is a good operating system... but it's -far- from being even 90% reliable. When going from an XP machine to Vista, it feels like you just went from a Toyota Celica to a Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano. The only problem is, that it feels like your new Ferrari borrowed your Celicas engine. We'll let the numbers speak for themselves.

In the end, if you are making the move to Vista and are a gamer, you may as well prepare to partition your hard drive to dual boot. You are not going to want to go through the hassle of making your games run smooth in Vista, or go through the trouble of tweaking to make it happen. Hopefully within the next two months, NVIDIAs drivers will be much more refined and -all- games should run as they do on XP, or at least close to it. I regret not having an ATI card on hand to perform testing there as well, but it may not be a far stretch to expect a similar experience there.