So I have a nice new macbook pro. I love the looks and the OS. The one problem is (the lack of) gaming. Macs come with bootcamp so I’ve decided to buy windows. I’ve heard that Vista is a resource hog that makes games sluggish. Is this still true? To play bioshock, steam games, and the like, should I use Vista or XP?
I use XP myself. I have Vista on my work computer, but my gaming system at home runs on XP. I haven’t actually tried more than the new GalCiv game on my Vista box, but it IS a resource hog…though now that I’ve put 4GB of RAM into it it seems to be running a bit better.
-XT
I personally prefer XP, as I am using marginal hardware (other than a new video card) so I would just as soon not have a resource hog. For the time being, I think XP is the better choice. It doesn’t limit your options in any way and it seems to be quite functional.
There are lots of people who use Vista without issue, but once you slim down the prettiness to get better functionality, there aren’t a lot of benefits and there is a greater likelihood of difficult technical issues.
Also, it’s a lot easier to go from XP to Vista than the other way around.
The “vista is the devil’s anal sex toy! OMGZ Run for the hills!!” Police should be coming by soon.
In the meantime I’ll share my experience with vista as a PC gamer:
IF you were asking this question up to 6 months after the release of Vista I’d say wait. But now Vista is more secure than XP, is perfectly stable, and offers a few extra features which are really rather nice.
As long as you have decent hardware specs vista should be a smooth experience with no problems when it comes to gaming and some extras, specifically, Direct X10 gaming and DirectX10 hardware (some of the new video cards require Vista in order to pull off some advanced stuff, 3 way SLI for example). There are also parental controls built in in case this is a PC you share with the wee ones. What I mean by decent hardware specs is a dedicated GPU card which supports DX 9+, 2 gigs of RAM, and dual core CPU (doesn’t have to be very fast).
I play all sorts of games on my Vista rig from oldies (Betrayal at antara, Diablo 1 & II) to the latest games and just about everything in between. Vista handles everything very well. If it’s an old game, or one that simply was not made with vista in mind you might have to set the game to run as an administrator, or perhaps set it to run in XP compatibility mode. I personally haven’t had to do this for any of my games except Neverwinter Nights 1. Even betrayal In Antara (a game from 1997) will run without having to use compatibility tweaks. And these tweaks are available to you simply by right clicking on the game icon.
, so it’s not like you have to hunt them down in some obscure menu or anything.
Good gaming!
I just noticed you’re on a macbook Pro. I don’t know enough about Macs to know your system specs. But as long as you have 2 gigs of RAM, a dedicated GPU and a dual core CPU, you’re golden.
Also get an OEM version, it’s usually about $100 cheaper than retail. And since you’re on a Mac (and a notebook at that) upgrading is probably not much of a concern for you.
If you want to play games using DirectX 10 then get Vista. If you don’t care about DX10, then I suggest WinXP.
I have Vista and I feel my games are still slower than a similar XP system. The few games I’ve tried with DX10 completely killed my framerate anyway, and my PC is only a year old.
I don’t have any technical problems with Vista though. I play many old games as well as the new. I’ve not had any driver problems (touch wood), but then most of my equipment is reasonably new. It’s more friendly and prettier. You can turn off the infamous annoying features and most of the XP options are still there, albeit sometimes hidden away.
Actually, now that I think about it, there was a problem with the sound. For some reason Vista wont play sound through headphones and speakers at the same time. Each program/game has to specify which one to use, or use the default. A minor annoyance. I suppose it means you can set music (winamp) to play through the speakers while someone else plays a game using headphones. Not many games give you an option of which output to use though…