In a second part to a story on Anandtech, more light is shone upon the problems many are having with gaming in Vista, and direct comparisons to the same conditions in Windows XP.

This time the problems of crashes due to the memory limits imposed by both 32 bit Windows version are highlighted with multiple comparisons, of several games, with exact hardware, save for video card changes.

Over several trials, the testers show that XP is much more frugal with memory than Vista - nothing new. What is shown, however, is that the amount of video memory present in the system has a marked effect on the amount of system memory consumed. In worst case during the testing the amount of difference was approximately 500 MB, which is a major portion of the user’s available memory, and can lead to the crashes observed. Also highlighted was that, while consistent crashes were observed in Vista, the testers were not able to induce crashes with XP, no matter which video card or drivers were used.

The important thing to note here is while the nVidia drivers consume more memory than their ATI counterparts, they are not directly responsible for the bad behavior of the operating system. In fact, on a couple of tests the drivers and cards made very little difference, yet large amounts of memory are being consumed by the game,

Three major points are made

Vista is using more address space than XP in all situations

The amount of address space used with Vista seems to be related to the amount of video memory on our video card

XP on the other hand does not fluctuate at all, the address space usage is the same no matter what card we use.

Further, the questions of why this may be so were not answered by the folks at nVidia, yet they do say that Microsoft is aware of the problem. The author makes reference to the difference in the video driver model, and while he does not make an analogy, I would liken it to the double-buffering that takes place in earlier versions of Windows with SCSI implementations.

It’s nice to know Microsoft is aware of the problem, and are working on the problem. What is very disconcerting is that this is a major problem for gamers, and since Microsoft is pushing gamers into Vista by refusing to support DirectX 10 on XP, it amounts to some very irresponsible behavior.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this specific problem to be fixed, in comparison to the number of new DX10 games released.

[tags] Vista, Windows XP, DirectX 10, WDDM, double buffering, nVidia, ATI, Microsoft, Service Pack 1, Service Pack 2 [/tags]