Getharn wrote:
You said your machine had 4GB RAM? Well, looks like they've potentially only increased the bloat, then, rather than killed performance too badly. I found I noticed the difference on machines we moved from XP to Vista at work, but most of them had 1GB.
My reasons for 4GB of ram are that some games are finally starting to take advantage of having the extra memory (for texture caching and such), and considering my Video Card (AMD/ATI 256MB DDR4 HD2600XT) and Processor (AMD A64 4000 X2), it was the cheapest/easiest upgrade to swing. And I needed every bit of performance I could squeeze out of this system if I was going to play some of the new games being released. Besides, with DDR2 prices at
under $10 a gig, it seems almost silly not to upgrade... ^_^
Getharn wrote:
The main problem with Vista I'd heard was the lack of gaming performance - direct comparisons between XP and Vista machines on the same games seemed to put Vista at
10-20% lower frame rates. Admittedly I haven't hunted around for every comparison I could find, so it's possible there's some biased reporting going on.
Check the date on that benchmarking article... it's two years old....
Most of the gaming performance articles out there that I read showed a performance difference of less than 10%. That's not to say that some games don't perform worse, but anyone can pick and choose benchmarks.... ^_^
Here's something a from Feb 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1390&page=2
Take a good, long look at those Oblivion scores all you Action/RPG fans... and keep in mind that Fallout 3 is the same engine...
Here's something even more recent..
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 ... 500,00.asp
You'll notice that the two are pretty much neck and neck. Besides the SP1 improvements, a lot of that performance can be attributed to drivers finally being mature. For W7 it looks like manufacturers figured out that driver support might actually be important...
Also keep in mind that most of the benchmarks out there don't even look at the 64-bit versions of Windows...
Getharn wrote:
As an aside, don't forget to enable PCI remapping in your BIOS with your 64-bit install, or you'll lose a big hole of you memory (can be as much as half a gig). This is assuming your motherboard supports it - not all do, unfortunately.
Yeah, my mobo already has that turned on by default.
I did have my first crash on Windows 7, but it wasn't the fault of Windows... it was my memory. I have 2 sticks of DDR2800, and 2 of DDR2667. Both pairs are OCZ, which is pretty overclockable, and I was running it all at 700MHz, so 2 were underclocked and 2 were overclocked. Combine that with the fact that 4 sticks aren't going to be as stable, and I was hosting a Gears of War co-op session... Let's just say I had to shut my computer down, take out the slower sticks, boot up, then shut down and put them back in before the system would start up right again... >.<
Also, I've run both 1.04 and the 1.05 beta demo of Eschalon and neither version can run OpenGl. It doesn't display the intro graphics properly, and crashes out at the menu.
