Vista SP1 vs XP SP3 - The Duel

Hey guys,

Here’s a short review, rather a duel between two leading OS – XP and Vista from Microsoft.
This has been a debate for a long time as to which of these is the better OS with regards to gaming. I have run a few benchies and some games, to give a direct comparision...

Could someone do a comprehensive tweaking tutorial on Vista??

gimme some time i ll post wat al tweaks i did for my vista...

@abhi- nice review.

Vista SP1 x64 will give much better results.

Very nice review abhi

Time for me to move to Vista.

+1 to this.

the 177.92 drivers are supposed to be better than the 177.83 you have used for the test

c'mon dude, am really waiting for a good tweaking guide...am new to Vista

177.92 are controversial drivers.

Some say the performance increases just marginally over the 177.83 by just 1 fps but losing on the image quality. If u have read the release notes, they are supposed to be better than 175.15/177.19 by a huge margin not over the 177.83.
Some say, Digital Vibrance does not work with these drivers on some systems and the driver is less stable due to its beta nature.

While some others say it's better than the 177.83.
Well. none of the above are proven.

Anyway, I tested because 177.83 was the most stable and recent WHQL driver available from Nvidia.

For those who are new to Vista, they can refer to this website which i followed when i upgraded to Vista. It does help a lot but still, there is nothing better than u urself fiddling around with the control panel to find and tweak stuff. Just don't mess up with the registry. Dat's it and u'll be safe.

TweakVista.com - Windows Vista Tweaks, Tips and Hacks

On the left pane, u can see options like

Customize Interface
Vista Tips
Performance
Software
Security
Downloads
Links

Each of the above links has lots of tweaking options to get u started.

If u simply wanna just get some more performance, look into these pages:

How to tweak your Vista performance Part -1
How to tweak your Vista performance Part -2

For those who need a comprehensive performance tweaking lookup, checkout this link:
Speed Up the Performance of Vista - Vista Forums

The above links might help a lot if properly followed, so do give it a look.

177.89 works the best here, both on XP SP3 and Vista SP1

i like vista better than xp it works like charm. if u update its even better

Great work mate. Repped.
btw , found a mistake.

Whereas the figure above it shows the opposite , vista leading in memory , and XP in CPU . or am i wrong in interpreting the scores ?

Thanx Phoenix. Dat's my mistake. Good find though...

Edited

good work .. repped you man

just to show i read through it . Hehe. Nice guide , will be useful for lots of people stuck on the decision.

Vista sure is a nice OS , but still lacks the simplicity many users need. The layout has changed a bit , which usually is no problem for even small time computer users , but can pose some difficulty for others , like my folks , who still ask me how to do basic stuff on it.
Also , Gaming surely has improved after SP1 , with much much more optimized memory allocations and usage. Can still use a bit more but.
And as u said , people with 2GB or more only should look at Vista if they plan on gaming on it in its present condition.

future service packs will definitely make it better .. just take the kind of improvement XP had going from vanilla to SP1 to SP2 , SP3 was for like a cumulative update ...