As you can see, some games fared better than others with the new OS. For some titles, especially Company of Heroes and Need for Speed, we saw dramatic framerate discrepancies. What's more, both of these titles have recently released patches! Other titles showed a slight, but essentially negligible difference, such as BF2142, World of Warcraft, and Prey. Really, there was only one instance where Vista was able to pick up a few more frames than XP - World of Warcraft at greater than 90fps, where the human eye can't even see the difference. To see this overall trend against Vista is very interesting and makes us wonder as to the cause.

We wanted to look at image quality because we were interested in how the games actually "looked" as much as we were interested in how they "performed." This is something that hasn't been looked at much critically, and, it appears, for good reason. Between the implementation of the same graphics driver on the two OSes, we found that was no difference in the appearance of the game.

This article is not to slam Vista and label it as a poor gaming operating system. However, we will say that at the current time, gaming is not what it could be on Vista. Given all of the variables, it's hard to dismiss the fact that Vista is the common denominator. Many (including us) have pointed at poor driver support being the Achilles heel of Windows Vista. In this case, we used two different graphics drivers and got essentially the same results: worse performance in Vista. If we then say, "Okay, maybe it's not the graphics drivers," then at what else do we point the finger? Chipset drivers? Hard drive access? RAM? Though we've seen upgraded chipset drivers improve system stability, it's rare that we see it improve gaming performance.

In the end, it looks like the the new, bulky, poorly supported operating system is at the root of it all. This is not to say that this is a final verdict. If Microsoft keeps to its pattern, we can expect a service pack that may do some Spring cleaning with the OS and improve its ability to support better performance in games. We think that we'll also see more driver and patch revisions from graphics chipset designers and game publishers.