Quote: Original post by Schrompf
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.

Update your disk controller/chipset drivers. I had a comparable system (Nforce 4 motherboard), and disk performance quadrupled(*) as soon as I installed the latest drivers from Nvidia (released this month, I think).

(*) slight overstatement, but the difference was *huge* - compile times went down, and everything became *much* more responsive. Worth a try.

Quote: Original post by bovinedragon
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.

The opengl vista driver..? Well, the opengl XP driver sucked more (software rendering vs D3D emulation on Vista). As long as you install drivers for your graphics card, you will have native OpenGL support which is as fast as on XP. Never had a problem with graphics drivers, and I've been using Vista since beta 2.

If you're going to lug the laptop around (between classes, say), I suggest getting a lighter laptop, rather than a heavy desktop replacement. I'd also go with Vista now; SP1 is around the corner and will iron out a few kinks that haven't been solved through Windows Update. I got a Vista laptop for my wife this summer, and it works fine.

If you can find a lightweight laptop with a GeForce 8500 or 8600 in it, that'd be ideal I think, unless you want the absolutely best frame rates playing games like Crysis. Go for 4 GB of RAM if you can, and an extended life battery (or two).

Make sure you get the T7 series of CPUs; a T7500 is a good CPU to aim at.

A Dell Inspiron 1420 can be had with GeForce 8400, 4 GB of RAM, T7500 CPU for about $1700. The 8400 is a little on the under-powered side for "true gaming," though it's fine for development.

The Inspiron 1520 is a little bigger, but can be had with an 8600 and the CPU/memory trimmings for $1800. (Add another $400 for a writable blu-ray drive) If you can deal with the heft of that machine, it's probably a very good bet for your needs.