Got a new 64-bit Vista system (post SP1) and it’s run everything flawlessly so far.
I have not installed an extensive back catalog, though. Everything (except WoW and Stalker) that I’ve played on this system to date are fairly recent releases. I’m talking Bioshock, COD4, Oblivion, Witcher and Warhammer.
Fallout 3 and FarCry 2 run like butter. Great stuff.
And as a side note, I’m very happy with Vista generally. Crashes don’t take down the system, and I find using XP on my kid’s computer annoying now.
Well, vista had its far share of problems at release. But I guess XP did too looking back. You are right. After service pack 1, vista performs very nicely. Now its just a public perception problem MS has.
I disagree. Vista had few problems; hardware vendors not supporting it with quality drivers was a problem, though. Since the problems happened on the new OS, people naturally linked the two.
Vista x64 plays everything I want, without issue. I haven’t put very many older games on my rig, though
Vista got a bum rap due to circumstances beyond’s Microsoft’s control for the most part. Of course OSX is more stable but if MS exercised an iron grip on the hardware platform, Windows/Vista would be more stable as well.
I think a big part of the reason that Vista got a bad rap is because it requires a fairly significant upgrade to run smoothly over Windows XP. People had these machines that they’d been running XP on for a few years, and shockingly Vista didn’t run perfectly on them. So of course it was blamed on Vista, and not their outdated hardware.
Vista x64 is as stable as you could possibly expect from an operating system. I couldn’t compare to OS X on approved hardware, my only real experience is
with hackintosh installs. Obviously I’ve seen more then a few kernel panics that way. But as for Vista, I’ve been using it on my primary machine since about two months after launch and I literally can not remember it crashing. XP was much dicier, even after SP3. And XP drove me nuts as Explorer could not handle browsing large hard drives with thousands of files. Managing the same files in Vista, in contrast, is effortless.
Ditto on the x64 support – it’s been rock-solid for me. It’s at least as stable as OS X on Apple hardware, provided you take driver support into your own hands and don’t run into resource issues.
When I was using my Mac Pro for gaming (Vista X64/ OS X 10.5, 10GB RAM, dual xeon), I would pretty much never reboot unless I needed to switch OSs. Whichever one I was in would run forever or until I intentionally restarted it, whichever came first.
Now that I have a dedicated gaming rig again, it’s just as stable under Vista X64 as the Mac Pro was.
