QUOTE
What it says is that basically many games don't run on the currently available Vista versions, and the others are noticeably slower. It also says that you usually need twice as much RAM as you needed on XP, and you shouldn't even try the better games without a multicore chip.
Thats quite a biased source then.
Heres the problem with current Vista. The Drivers are still in a really early format. Vista drivers have to be redone from basically scratch. This makes it much easier for developers..because now they know that hey this code will either work on all Dx9/Dx10 graphic cards or it wont work on any. Your comparing the first few major drivers for Vista vs idk how many major drivers there have been for Xp from Nvidia and ATI.
ATI has yet to supply it's Open GL drivers causing them to be radically slow. ATI has slightly less Dx9 performance on Vista compared to Xp however I believe when you move towards higher resolutions Vista actually takes the crown.
Nvidia's Dx9 drivers are somewhat lacking although they have "decent" Open GL drivers. They have yet to provide a Dx10 Driver.
I do not have a multi-core chip. On Beta 2 I ran need for speed most wanted like nothing with a few slow downs. Guess what? Rc1 saw a massive increase in speed. Rc2 another huge speed improvement! The final release is even suppose to be even a little faster than Rc2. However Vista takes advantage of multi-cores even moreso than Xp could ever do.
Ram? You will only need double on the 64bit versions. Vista dumps most of it's GUI when you launch a game. This frees up a bunch of ram. You will need 128 - 256 more megs of ram tops for Vista games if any more. This is coming from people who have actually ran games like BF2 on a good system. BF2 = 2gigs max settings on Xp and Vista.
After translating that article via Google language so I could at least get the gist of it, I have to point out something:
The compatibility problems it mentioned were drivers not games or your average application. Microsoft has gone back and redone a lot of its driver code to make it all work faster and more secure. This means a lot of the old drivers wont work and may cause horrible corruption. For instance Creative Labs have yet to get a decent Vista driver out and there current one can cause blue screens.
Hell with RC1 on Anandtech a website that basically gives you the straight out facts with comparison charts and the exact machine specs they used.
Comparing Xp vs Vista on the same machine specs with an 1900XTX I believe with RC1 Vista scored 2fps lower on HL2:EP1 at 1600x1200 with 4xAA. Damn that performance indeed! That was RC1......and I hear Rc2 did much better.