This sub forum seemed the most appropriate for this question. For WoW purposes is the upgrade to Windows Vista worth it?

I ask this because I currently run WinXP Pro but have the option through a friend to pick up a copy of Vista basic for cheaper than retail. The system I use is quite cabable of running it (2 GB main memory, 3.0 CPU). I have heard of video card driver issues as well as many FPS games such as Far Cry and even Microsofts own Halo having problems with Vista, could not find anything WoW related.

For anyone who has worked with Vista directly: Is the upgrade worth it or will system perfomance take a hit?

You really need to make sure that your hardware has Vista drivers. There are a lot of older components that are not going to be supported in Vista, including the entire Sound Blaster Audigy 2 line and some of the earlier Nforce chipsets. Unless you consider yourself a PC building junkie or want to really research your hardware, I wouldn't buy Vista unless it was with a new PC at this point.

The real question is: does the upgrade actually give you any benefits?

If you can't identify a reason to upgrade, don't. "Because it's newer" isn't a good reason.

I read a nice artice on vista vs xp on tomshardware http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/.
Vista doesn't really seem to outdo xp on performance etc, so i don't think it's worth your time/money.
Check out the site yourself to make your mind up i guess

The windows are semi-transparent so that's why I upgraded.

Also WoW loads up really fast.

I actually have no information to quote or back this up, so this is more of a question. I heard that Vista also comes with two levels of management above Administrator, that you cannot access as a Vista User or Admin. Any truth to this? Apparently, form what I heard, this would be implemented to save and archive information that you would rather try to delete, in the case of National Security and what not. Any truth to this?

No, there's nothing like that.

You will suffer a preformance drop based simply on the available Vista video drivers.
There is a significant architecture change driver wise and the manufacturers are not able to keep up. Thus, compared to available XP video drivers, the Vista ones are heavily lacking. (I can go into some details if requested)

I know on the 3 systems I've tested Vista on, it was pretty much a 15-20 FPS drop regardless of system configuration.

I upgraded to Vista and I have the exact same performance as XP. 60 fps everywhere, dropping to 40-50 during raiding. Loads faster, nicer looking desktop, better security. No issues finding drivers.

What video card do you have? Finding the drivers was never the issue, it was simply that the developement for the DX10/9/8/etc being split into two paths (SLI/NonSLI) made changes much slower.

This is an untrue blanket statement. Just because there are no drivers for your hardware doesn't mean this will be the case for everyone.

It is amazing, that link shows up everywhere and tons of blog posts are based on it. Even if a lot of claims he is making has been debunked and/or answered by MS or others people does not care. MS is evil!

I didn't misunderstand. There are a large number of video cards that work just fine under Vista and give no performance loss, like the one in my second computer that runs WoW exactly as it did under XP.

I am sorry then. Since you also seem to be vague, can you perhaps share the information specific to your personal experience?

I've tested it on a Raedon 9500, Nvidia 6800 , and an Nvidia FX5200. (2GB of ram, 3.4Ghz processor, clean install each time..Vista Ultimate)

All systems had similar performance drops and based on the information from Nvidia, I am inclined to believe what I've experienced and what I've read coming from the horse's mouth versus a very vague statement in the order of "But it works on mine!"

I simply wanted the thread starter to be aware that if he has an Nvidia card (which according to market data, 66% of computer users do!), then there is a good chance that he could experience performance loss.

If you read the latest Nvidia beta patch notes they admit to having problems with wow and FPS loss.

Because of this and personal experience, if you have a Nvidia graphics card and want to play WoW on Vista, I wouldn't bother yet.

I was asking about upgrading to Vista just a week ago since I am in the process of building a new rig which has a 8800GTX card. Vista seems to be a mixed bag of results right now which is nothing new for a few month old OS. Yes you will suffer some performance hits. Some will be noticable and others will be so minimal that you won't be able to tell. Vista is a system hog compared to any of the previous verisons of windows. 2gb of memory is actually recommended if you plan on gaming and lots of the reviews/user comments I've read say 4gb is needed to run everything (games, apps, etc) perfectly smooth.

Where you will really notice the performance drop is in OpenGL based games. Currently video card drivers for vista don't feature very good support for opengl thus you could see your framerate drop a good 40+ fps in games like UT2004 and Quake3. Basically older games which you probably aren't going to be playing anymore anyways.

You mentioned that you could get Vista Basic. By that do you mean Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium? You may really want to check out this page to know exactly what you would be getting: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...ns/choose.mspx

Personally I would not recommend Home Basic for a gamer. You would be much better off with Premium or Ultimate. I just installed Ultimate on my system and so far I like it although I have yet to install WoW on it.

The other thing I've found after scanning over several different forums is that everyone experience with Vista is different due to their hardware and their drivers. A lot of what I was reading was how compatible Vista is with WoW as obviously that was a big concern of mine. What I found is that for some people it runs just as good as it did on XP, others experience small bugs like tiny graphical errors and then there are some that can't even get it to install and patch correctly. I will say that in the majority of the cases I was looking at WoW seemed to work just fine.

Installed it yesterday, WoW works fine on 8800 GTX and AMD 4200+ Dual Core, no fps loss whith last nVidia drivers.

Tearing is bad.

I have a 7800. Works great for me. YMMV.

My roommate used to run wow (vanilla version though) on his 64-bit OEM business Vista with no performance problems. 2GB memory, Intel chip on Asus mobo, Core 2 Duo processor and brand new ~200$ Radeon seemed to work well. His FPS was @ or near 60 all the time (v-sync is a must, use it).

I don't know if it would have been slower than xp, but atleast it was fast enough for one not to care about performance.

Well, I have the problem that I get a new computer and I get Vista with it so there is no question about me needing it over XP, I just don't have an XP copy. Is normal Home Edition different in terms of performance or just more features down the line if I go into Ultimate?

Thanks for your help

If it's 'Windows Vista Home Basic' (don't know about the names/version in other countries, but that the description in Germany, where you're from. Or near ), I suspect its performance even to be *higher* due to Vista's Aero interface is disabled there by default.

So you're just lacking some features.

That sounds perfect. I don't need flashy add-ons. A friend of mine bought a new system with Vista and had an FPS drop of about 20 frames. So I was a little worried because my new system itself is high-end and I don't want to buy XP when Vista is coming with it