I decided just for the heck of it id install Vista on a small partition on my hdd in my gaming rig. here are some specs.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.0>2.5Ghz
1Gb Trancsend PC5400 DDR2 667Mhz
1x Maxtor 40Gb (WinXP)
1x Samsung 80Gb (Parttioned to 60Gb and 14.5Gb, vista on 14gb partition)
ATI Radeon X700 Pro (upgrading, buts its till a decent card, Runs aero perfectly)

Well for this test i ran rollercoaster tycoon 3, Americas army, and rome tw.
I also benchmarked with 3dMark01.

Heres the results:

RCT 3:
XP: Graphics Auto set at Very High
Vista: High (wtf? same hardware)

AA:
XP: Auto set to High
Vista: Auto set to Med.

Rome TW:
XP:Auto set to High
Vista: Same

3DMark01:
XP:12,000 3DMarks
Vista: 14,000 3DMarks

So im confused i get better 3DMarks under Vista, but Better graphics performance under XP. I even mixed it up a bit and mached graphics setting to the way they are in xp and the games performed horribly under Vista. So this kinda confuses me, but also proved performance suffers under Vista.

All of those games were Designed for XP and just happen to also run under Vista. I'm not sure why you got better 3dmarks in Vista but I think I may have seen an explanation for that a few months back, just don't remember it now.

I remember back when XP came out lots of people wouldn't game on it because of the performance hit compared to 98se. The games just aren't optimized for Vista, new games will be.

I'm thinking some of the settings auto set themselves lower in Vista because you've only got 1 GB of RAM in this machine. Everyone knows that there is much more overhead from the OS in Vista.

thts what i thought LNC but i wasnt sure, the 3dMark thing is whats getting me. but to clear it up i guess Vista isnt good for my gaming :P i.e. BF2142 AA Half-life 2 etc.

Try running 3DMark06 instead of 01.

I installed vista which was a big mistake as i have an FX5200 256mb card.

Which i found out: after i could only get 20fps on counter strike source, is no longer supported by Nvidia on Vista....

Boo hoo

You already did this once. Threads merged.

I have a new PC with Vista Business Edition installed and after reading some reviews I decided to buy Flight Simulator X Deluxe Edition. The game would not even install on Vista (got error 1628) after checking a lot of forums and contacting Microsoft directly the problem remained unsolved. When back to XP last week and surprise, surprise everthing works with graphics and sound set to maximum. In my opinion Vista is full of bugs and needs a lot of tweaking.

I ran vista for a while and got 7 Fps on Fsx with my specs.

It was quite ridiculous.