Gaming. Pastime for some, necessity for others. Yes, gaming is an integral part of everyday life on the PC and Vista promises to be a great OS for the job. It is quite obvious that Direcx10 will provide a dramatic boost for next gen games .But what about today and yesterday? Just because newer games arrive ,it isn’t quite expected that games only few years old will be left to eat dust in the garbage .Is vista fully baked for gaming or only a half cooked food that will leave you disappointed ?Lets find out !

The number of “Directx10 only games” is still quite rare. Games like Crysis ,Bioshock ,company of heroes are optimized for Directx10 ,but they do not drop support for Directx9.DX10 enabled Games obviously look finer in vista, but do they also run faster ?Read on ...




Let’s take a deep look. Windows vista is the first ever windows that is supplemented with a unique game explorer that keeps track of your already installed games ,shows their rating and also helps you update them periodically. It is also the first windows to use a separate branding for games called “Games for windows”. So far, sounds good .Both nvidia and Ati have already shipped DX10 enabled GPUs and completely rewritten their drivers for Microsoft s newest baby. The atmosphere is ready and so are the gamers. And be noted,DirectX10 is a vista exclusive.



(Vista game explorer automatically organizes your installed games)


We first evaluated how DX10 enabled games performed under vista compared to XP.Then also took a look at the performance of DX9 games in vista compared to xp.We tried to find out ,how much performance varied under these two platforms .To be honest, the results were not quite groundbreaking for vista lovers…

Now first find out what DX10 can do for us and what DX9 can’t:
Directx 9 vs. Directx 10:
As mentioned before,DirectX 10 is exclusive to Windows Vista and is not slated to be supported by any other platform. This will ensure that the next-gen games will be available on Windows Vista before any other platform.
So how much better DirectX 10 is in comparison to DirectX 9? check these screenshots for blowing your mind.




(Age of conan DX9)

(Age of conan DX10)

(Microsoft Flight simulator DX9)

(Microsoft flight simulator DX10)

(Crysis)



Test for DX9 games:
Test machine:
Processor: Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (Conroe 65 nm, 2.93 GHz, 4 MB L2 Cache)
Motherboard :Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6
Chipset: Intel P965, 82801HR (ICH8), BIOS: F8
Common Hardware
RAM: 2x 1024 MB DDR2-800 (CL 3.0-4-3-9)
Corsair CM2X1024-6400C3 XMS6403v1.1
Graphics Card: HIS Radeon X1900XTX IceQ3
GPU: ATI X1900XTX (650 MHz)
RAM: 512 MB GDDR3 (1550 MHz)
System Hard Drive: 1x 150 GB 10,000 RPM, 8 MB Cache, SATA/150
Western Digital WD1500ADFD
Data Hard Drive: 1x 150 GB 10.000 RPM, 8 MB Cache, SATA/150
Western Digital WD1500ADFD
DVD-ROM: Teac DV-W50D

Benchmark:
Higher numbers indicate better performance.Calculations are based on Frame per second(FPS)









Benchmark image source:www.tomshardware.com
Test for DX10 games:
Test machine:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) LGA775

- X2 1024MB Corsair XMS PC3-10600 CAS7 Module(s)

- ASUS P5E3 Deluxe (Intel X38)

- OCZ GameXStream (700 watt)

- Seagate 500GB 7200RPM (Serial ATA II)

- Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX (768MB)
- ATI Radeon HD 2900XT (512MB

Benchmark:
Higher numbers indicate better performance.Calculations are based on Frame per second(FPS)

Crysis makes the most of DX10 visual effects so we chose it for our benchmark:



Benhmark image source:www.techspot.com

We were told Crysis would perform better in Vista but this apparently excluded DX10 performance as both the 8800 GTX and Radeon HD 2900XT were slower in Vista/DX10 when compared to XP/DX9. While the GeForce 8800 GTX only suffers from a small performance loss the Radeon HD 2900XT is completely killed off in Vista. Therefore we recommend anyone running a Radeon HD 2900XT to stick to XP


Final Thoughts:

It may seem like our testing with gaming performance in Vista all resulted in a feeling of doom and gloom, but don't let that scare you off just yet. I think we all expected there to be some initial growing pains with the Vista operating system and PC gaming simply because of the dramatic shift in driver technology that had to take place; I just don't think we expected it to be this bad. This may change as driver revisions are updated through the comings months, so we'll definitely be keeping an eye on both companies progress.

For now, gamers that were interested in running off to get a copy of Windows Vista, I'd caution you to take a minute and contemplate. Gaming under Vista is definitely possible and if you're comfortable with some slight performance drops for now while taking advantage of Vista's other new features, then a move to Vista sooner rather than later should be considered. If gaming and gaming performance is your only metric for your PC, then I'd definitely hold out on upgrading until AMD and NVIDIA have their software perfected.