I spent a lot of time at GCDC this year quizzing design leads about why Vista likes to chew on game performance like a nervous puppy. The general consensus: Vista video card drivers...let's not say "suck," to be fair to Nvidia and ATI (whoops, I mean AMD) whose engineers have been struggling to put things right for over a year. But they definitely suck (more juice out of your rig) compared to XP.
With Windows 95, we took a performance hit because the GUI and stability shift were considerable enough (and we could always reboot games in 95's "pure" DOS mode). But for most gamers, Vista might as well be XP running WindowBlinds, a pretty looking skin-job in search of a raison d'etre. Eight months on, you pop in most games for a visually same-same experience, but two-thirds as smooth frame numbers. No big deal when the drop's 150 to 100, but I plugged in Gothic 3 the other day, and 30 down to 20 or lower kind of grates on your "$600 for DX10-compatibility" nerves.
You heard Valve's spiel about making DX10 Vista-only hurting PC games? (A "terrible mistake," says Valve mucky-muck Gabe Newell.) Everyone who's not in public relations agrees: Microsoft was simply foolish to artificially tether DirectX 10 to an OS upgrade where the visual benefits are, year-to-date, essentially nonexistent.
So I just scanned the improvement list for Vista SP1, and all I can say is, what about games guys?
Vista SP1 will add support for Direct3D 10.1 with APIs that should help PC game developers better utilize the latest Direct3D graphics hardware.
That's it, fellow gamers. A lousy dot-one update that I'm sure should make all those twinkles in designers' eyes yield lovely fruit. In, you know, two or three years. Maybe.
I took Vista off and re-installed XP. I may put it back on in a few years when they get the gaming bugs out. To me it's just not worth the slowdown in my games to have Vista on my PC.