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Several sites now have articles up going into Vista's game performance:

Gamespot

PC Perspective

Firing Squad AMD Only

Firing Squad Aero in Background

Doesn't look at all like the doom and gloom I've seen tossed around, and in some tests, Vista is faster than XP. Once the drivers are in a more complete state, there shouldn't be much performance difference Vista and XP.

The tomshardware benchmarks do show a performance hit though (and a rather severe hit running OpenGL apps). Might be just specific to their test setup though (since they only tested one set of hardware).

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/

And isn't the hardcore gamer type also the type to go through huge effort overclocking to get a slight performance increase? This kind of negates the standard slight overclock.

Tom's game benchmarks appear to be in line with other sites (CoD2, Fear, etc.). OpenGL is purely dependent on the GPU vendors now (almost like it was on XP), so AMD and Nvidia need to come up big here; for the moment, I'm going to blame the drivers for the poor performance.

The CPU benchmarks are interesting. Some run well, others look like shit. It looks more like a program issue or compatibility settings issue than anything, since some programs run well.

Considering how immature drivers are for Vista, I dont find this suprising at all. Drivers make or break modern gaming preformance.

Xon wrote:Considering how immature drivers are for Vista, I dont find this suprising at all. Drivers make or break modern gaming preformance.

WDDM is certainly different from the old WDM architecture! I'd bet that most companies are trying for correctness first, performance later.

So, as I understand this, there won't be any significant jump in what you see unless you have a DX10 card, Vista and a game made for DX10? I'll probably wait a good year to upgrade (unless I'm actually able to pick up a copy from the bookstore. Student discounts are a life saver).