I am planning to buy a laptop, and I dont know if I should get vista or XP. I am hesitant to get vista because of all of the people saying the OS itself takes up tons of RAM. How does the performance of the same RAM, or all the other parts for the matter, perform on vista vs XP. I want to get a computer that would give me the best plafrom to develope games on, which would mean that i want to have the best performance out of the hardware to do 3d modeling, coding, and all that stuff. I do not care one bit for the difference of how vista looks, or all the new 'features' that they have finally stolen from apple. I just care about the hardware performance, and what would be the fastest. So basicly, would i be better off getting a laptop with XP over vista to get more performance out of my hardware.

Quote: Original post by bovinedragon
I want to get a computer that would give me the best plafrom to develope games on

then don't get a laptop. [smile] Desktop replacement laptops are: heavy and hot. The latter generally leads to a really short lifetime compared to an equivalent desktop. I also found that a heavy laptop meant that I hated bringing it with me which kind of defeats the purpose of having a laptop in the first place.

Vista is a hog (you'll want at least 2GB of RAM, probably an 80G HD and a Core2 chip). You can go lighter on the HD but no matter what turn off it's assy backup scheme: it updates frequently and it took about a week for my HD to get full. funtimes.

There's also a 1337 bug somewhere between Vista and my hardware where if my machine hibernates i have to flush the local DNS cache in order to sucessfully resolve host names after it wakes up.

The only advantage I see in Vista is DX10.

As for hardware, it performs the same because it's hardware. Whether the computer uses it efficiently or not is a driver issue (which is mainly outside of the OS's control).

I have Vista on my laptop and it works fine for development. I have a smaller HD but otherwise good specs. I got the Thinkpad T61 14.1" lappy. It's got an NVidia NVS card which isn't stellar but does the job. It's perfect for development when i want to go to a friend's house or a local cafe. My desktop is the beast that I use for more advanced graphics features and gaming.

Having a laptop you can't really play current games on does wonders for productivity.

-me

Quote: Original post by Palidine
Having a laptop you can't really play current games on does wonders for productivity.

LOL, good point.

Anyways, i am getting a laptop for "school", so its not a question if i should get a laptop vs a pc. I am asking that since XP takes less RAM to run, it will leave more RAM for me to use for my own things. Are there any good tests that someone has done that shows how much RAM vista takes vs XP. Im not really asking if vista is more efficient driver wise, just the background work that the OS does to suck up my precious RAM.

The reason that Vista takes so much more RAM than XP is because Vista is much more aggressive in prefetching memory - it will prestore the programs that you use the most in RAM, allowing for faster startup - after all, Free RAM is wasted RAM.

I've been using Vista for a while now, and I think that my productivity has gone up significantly over XP, though your milage may vary.

Get a laptop with 2GB of RAM (no system should have any less these days) and Vista will run silky smooth. On my desktop I find it boots considerably faster than XP so that may be nice for a laptop (I turn mine off and on a lot moving from place to place).

so I take it that all the things that I am hearing about vista are blown out of porportion?

Any other comments on this?

One opinion: my brother had WinXP 32Bit on the machine, now he has Vista 32Bit. The very same hardware underneath. All own games, all commercial games, all benchmarks, any apps run less than half the speed the used to run before. We profiled our games a bit, DirectX calls seem to need about three times more time to execute than before. But it doesn't explain why a release build now takes about ten minutes when the very same project (ours) on the very same hardware (Athlon 3200+, 2GB, GF7800GT) and the very same compiler (VC2005 Prof) used to take less than three minutes before.

The Aero GUI is another point that costs some performance but it's not that much and you regain it when running the application in fullscreen.

This opinion is by no means representative. Yet it's frustrating. We had some hopes when Microsoft announced they solved a mysterious bug that costed so much gaming performance, but applying the hotfix didn't change a thing. Thus I suggest avoiding Vista. Give it some more time to mature.

If I remember correctly the low performance bug isn't fixed until you've installed sp1 (final version isn't released yet), however several computer magazines have reported that the performance have increased greatly after the installation of the sp1-beta.

One could only hope that it will be released soon.

If you want something to compare with, the official requirements for Crysis was released a few days ago. The ones for vista is actually significantly higher than the ones for xp.
Check it out for yourself at the official homepage, section News: rig ready.

Ive also read that the opengl driver for vista is really bad. Is this fixed in the sp1 update also?

Im thinking now i should wait a while, and see how this turns out.