Xejin

Vista is alright. You hear a lot of FUD about Vista that is 99% untrue. XP runs better on older hardware because it was designed for older hardware and older hardware was designed for XP. Vista really shines when you have a lot of RAM because of its prefetching software. Basically, it'll create a RAM disk for you so that textures and what not load faster.

You'll notice that Vista looks like its gobbling RAM like crazy, that's just the prefetching software. One of the above posters is very right about driver issues. There is a lot of older hardware (1+ years old) sitting out there that will never get a Vista driver and because of that Vista will never be as stable or a fast as XP will be using the same hardware.

On newer machines, Vista will out perform XP. It's that simple. However, do not upgrade to Vista thinking that DX10 will help you get better performance in WoW - it won't, WoW uses OpenGL.

 

• Maestroquark

As long as all your drivers are installed correctly, there's no "good performance" issue. It simply caps out at 60 FPS. So I'm basically at 60 FPS the majority of my playtime, unless heavy spell effects start basically, and it's quite good performance.

 

Caldar

You only cap at 60fps if you have VSync enabled, but for the most part the human eye can't tell the difference from higher fps anyway.

 

• Maestroquark

No, I cap no matter what my settings are. Blizzard introduced a fix once on a PTR (about a year ago?) that worked for me, but they reverted the change because it broke too many other things.

 

Ichal

Disabling Vsync makes the game crank out images as fast as it can, but it doesn't make the monitor refresh faster than you've set it to.

If your computer can run WoW at the refresh frequency you've set, disabling Vsync only gives you tearing. It has little use outside of benchmarking really.

If 60fps isn't enough for you, crank up the refresh frequency instead.

 

◊ Kalman

It's an AMD x64 x2 specific issue; frame rate caps at either 60 or 64 FPS.

However, it's been fixed? I used to get this issue, and no longer do - Maestro, might try upgrading video drivers?

http://mmorchive.net

The WoW forums, explained:

 

Aphyrax

This is incorrect. On Windows, WoW supports both DirectX and OpenGL, and defaults to DirectX.

DX10 will still not help you though, because WoW is not a DX10 game. Older games get no automatic benfit out of DX10, the developer must explicitly use DX10 functionality.

I would really like to see proof of that statement. Anecdotal evidence from beta 1 (where UAC was indeed horrible) does not count.

I strongly recommend against turning off UAC. If you get too frequent prompts then that is a good indicator that you are doing something that you shouldn't. Would you tweak the brakes on your car every day? Modifying system state is the equivalent of that. The one prompt when installing a new app or new patch really isn't bad, and if you for example surf the more shady corners of the web (or follow links from the official WoW board) then knowing that UAC will prevent that keylogger from installing is well worth the hassle.

 

◊ Shalas

If I treated my car like I do my computer, yes. I recompiled my shell three times today, which requires changing your active shell twice per build (as windows really doesn't like it when you modify the active shell), and UAC goes crazy if you try to change your shell. It's a great idea for protecting normal users, but UAC being annoying is in no way a sign you're doing something you shouldn't.

 

◊ Kalman

If you don't know when you should and should not turn off UAC, then you aren't going to be doing that kind of thing to your system.

http://mmorchive.net

The WoW forums, explained:

 

◊ Shalas

There's a lot of people who say that there's never a good reason to turn off UAC. The specific statement "if UAC is annoying you, you're doing something wrong" is utterly untrue, There is nothing wrong with fiddling with your system settings on a daily basis -- if you're going to break anything in ways that UAC would protect you from, you'll probably break things well before you make it to the "daily" part.

 

◊ Kalman

There's a lot of things wrong with fiddling with your system settings on a daily basis *for most users*. If you're doing that, then you either know enough to be capable of maintaining a system safely with UAC, or you deserve what you get for screwing around with things you don't understand.

http://mmorchive.net

The WoW forums, explained:

 

Feorthas

I still prefer keeping systems like UAC enabled, just so I know when an app wants access to something or other. I'm the kinda guy who kept his hands on a software firewall, even though he was behind a NAT router, so he could catch apps as they requested permission to phone home and/or get access to the internet just incase something malicious got on his box. The legit apps I typically OKed once and let the firewall remember the setting; the iffy ones I'd manually grant/deny access on every request.

Unfortunately, UAC doesn't sound like it can remember what stuff is 'good' and what stuff is unknown, so that could be annoying when an app needs regular access to protected files/memory :-/.

Oh well, I can put up with Linux's security prompts just fine so I'm sure Vista's won't be all that bad, whenever I start using it.

 

Celandro

My point on the amd x2 is that with 2 cores enabled for WoW I get 30fps. With 1core enabled i get 45fps. There is some sort of known issue with some configurations.

 

Feorthas

If you're running an AMD CPU, you need to get the dual core fix--probably a CPU driver update (yes, CPU drivers exist)--from AMD.

 

• Apate

If it's the one I got - set a system restore point.

I was having some problems and tried this and it killed my computer. I did fix the problem and it was unrelated, but I still don't have a clue what happened when I tried the update from AMD.

See you, auntie.
"You don't need a machine to make a rainbow. For rainbows are made of happy thoughts, and dreams, and chocolate unicorns, and gumdrops, and licorice sunsets, and fuzzy gumdrop bears, and sugar-coated chocolate gumdrop land."

Originally Posted by DeeNogger I am coming for you Apate.

 

Andersen

The general sentiment here is right, though I've not had a problem with Diablo 2. If you get x86 Vista on a new machine with plenty of RAM, it will run fine. If you try upgrading or running x64 you're just gambling, it may or may not work, testing of both of those was rather pathetic. Upgrading wasn't even an officially supported scenario internally until post Beta 2 and then it rarely worked properly. Many apps will still fail to upgrade, at a minimum you should reformat and do a clean install.

If you're running an older system you'll definitely notice that Vista is a resource hog as well. Prefetch is amazing if you have the RAM to make it work, but really even at 2 gigs you don't have enough.

Perhaps I'm jaded from running so many unpolished versions and seeing all the wasted resources and worthless monitoring going on that an average user wouldn't see. But almost everyone who worked on it will tell you that it was rushed out the door before it had even been fully tested, let alone fixing any problems found in the last two months.

 

Aphyrax

As a side note, never upgrade an OS to a different major version. Ever. Wipe everything and do a clean install. Installing a service pack or so is fine, but the amount of black magic going on when trying to convert everything from XP to Vista is astonishing. You will end up with an inferior system even if you get lucky and everything works.

This is not specific to Windows. Upgrading an OS is generally a bad idea.

 

Feorthas

Ouch, that sucks.

And by 'that' I mean both system restore and the driver nuking your box--unless MS has drastically improved their restore functionality.

 

• Apate

Well, it worked. I won't say I'm a fan of it, but this time it turned out ok. With the drivers installed, it went into a constant loop of resetting.

See you, auntie.
"You don't need a machine to make a rainbow. For rainbows are made of happy thoughts, and dreams, and chocolate unicorns, and gumdrops, and licorice sunsets, and fuzzy gumdrop bears, and sugar-coated chocolate gumdrop land."

Originally Posted by DeeNogger I am coming for you Apate.

 

Andersen

System restore has been completely rewritten from scratch in Vista. It's now based on the volume shadowcopy service that existed in older versions of Windows but was defaulted off. Any time a modification is written to the hard drive, the diff between the new block and old block is saved. Hidden virtual drives on your system will actually allow you to look at the exact state of your hard drive at any day over the past few weeks, depending on how much space is allocated for this (defaults to 15% of disk space).

Unfortunately, system restore itself isn't any more intelligent in deciding which files are system related and which are personal documents. It just uses a list of file extensions which are to be restored, and excludes any others. I wish they had added the feature to let you do a complete restore of everything, instead you would need a 3rd party app to do that.

 

Hongten

So i switched to Intel, and i must say - Vista is fine. 60 fps everywhere, havent ever seen less then 40fps in raids.
Core 2 Duo 6600
2 gig of Ram
8800 GTX.
Amd just fail in WoW+Vista.

 

Feorthas

Wow, that sounds like a vastly superior implementation to the utterly horrible restore system in XP (which ~could~ restore a box to a functional state but you'd be damn lucky to have it that way for long); why doesn't Microsoft attempt to advertise improvements like this that people could, you know, appreciate in a meaningful way? (a new, shiny, GUI isn't really 'meaningful')