Scott has a problem running games on his machine under Vista, he writes:

I have upgraded and downgraded between Vista x86 and Windows XP (MCE and Pro both x86) numerous times. I have a single core Athlon 64 3500+, 1.25GB of DDR2 ram, and an Nvidia 8600GTS graphics card. My PC is my one and only gaming machine as I love pc gaming.

My first question is this: every time I run Vista, I get a pretty substantial drop in the framerate in nearly all my games - enough to justify going back to XP, which is the only reason I keep going back to XP. But, I like Vista: I have dual booted in the past but, I prefer the simplicity of a single OS system. In your opinion what is the reason or reasons for the drop in performance? Do you have any tips to increase gaming performance in Vista?

One of the most recent games I’ve played is Crysis. While I understand that there isn’t any hardware in place at this point to run the game with all the bells and whistles, I’m just fine running it on medium in the graphics settings. But whenever I run it in vista I have to drop to low to keep at an acceptable framerate (acceptable framerate to me is anything without lag, whether that be 30fps or 120fps, i do not want lag.) Since I’m using a 17″ LCD monitor, I’m kind of stuck at the resolution of 1280×1024. I’ve noticed that games run smoother at lower resolutions, but the poor ability of my monitor to redraw non native resolutions is sub-par to say the least. Any advice or better yet insight that you could give me would be greatly appreciated.

Whew, that’s a lot to chew on, Scott. You’re not the only person to experience serious framerate problems with Windows Vista - Microsoft, nVidia, and ATI have all seriously dropped the ball on PC gaming. conspiracy theorists suggest that Microsoft is doing this on purpose to push the remaining game developers and gamers to the Xbox 360, but logic dictates that this isn’t a really great idea and that it’s just utter incompetence across the entire industry.

Honestly, the only thing I can seriously recommend is to update your graphics card drivers. I know, I know, you’ve tried this. There really isn’t anything else I can recommend, as Windows Vista and nVidia just don’t get along very well. nVidia still has not fixed the damn flickering text error in Windows Texas Hold ‘Em Poker, and that problem has been there from day fucking one.

Of course, it would help if Microsoft didn’t totally drop the ball on DirectX 10 and actually give hardware manufacturers and game developers a reason to give a damn (like back-porting it to XP).

If you can’t tell, Scott, I’m not exactly happy with the Vista/Graphics/DirectX/Drivers situation.

OK, ranting aside, there’s really not a lot you can do at this point in time. To increase the general snapiness of Vista you could upgrade your machine to 2 or 4GB of RAM (however much your motherboard supports), but this isn’t going to fix your framerate problem.

Honestly, nothing short of Vista-optimized drivers is going to fix this problem. I want nVidia to do it. You want nVidia to do it. Everyone wants nVidia to do it. But, nVidia and Microsoft are too busy with their heads stuck up their own asses to build Vista optimized drivers.

In short Scott, you may want to stick with your dual-booting system for now, and wait until Vista Service Pack 1 arrives, which may alleviate some of these ass-backwards problems.