Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander is one of the hottest PC games out right now. Featuring maps that are over 6400 square kilometers in size with highly detailed landscapes and units, one has to wonder why our PCs don’t melt under the load.

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Supreme Commander is a truly next-generation game, and the results confirm this. Although the framerates were close for both systems, Vista came out as the winner with more than a 10% lead. We also found the Vista experience to be more trouble free – in Windows XP we encountered some audio issues, which seem to be quite widely spread. The frame rate was also a lot more consistent in Vista, which was particularly noticeable during battles which were significantly easier to control.

Windows XP (High res PNG)

Windows Vista (High res PNG)

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R contained some of the most demanding graphics available. The same is still true for Extraction Point, the expansion pack to the horror FPS. The graphics in the game are pretty much the same as before. For our testing soft shadows are off.

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With F.E.A.R. there is no question as to which system handles it better. Windows XP mopped the floor with Vista. Both the XTX and the Pro saw a similar drop in performance, which makes it pretty obvious that it is not the rest of the system holding the XTX back under Vista. Visually there was no difference whatsoever between the two versions. Our Vista system crashed two times when exiting the game though, with the error report clearly showing the video driver to be the culprit.

Windows XP (High res PNG)

Windows Vista (High res PNG)

Oblivion

Oblivion was released a while ago and features one of the best looking game worlds ever seen on the PC. The level of detail available mixed with the exceptional use of HDR lighting is really the type of experience that redefines what you expect from your games.

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Just as with Supreme Commander, Oblivion performs better in Vista. This is quite surprising, as Vista uses almost twice the amount of system memory when compared with XP, leaving less work space for Oblivion which is known to be a memory hungry game. Clearly Vista is the superior solution for memory management and some clever coding is going on behind the scenes. Because the vanilla version of Oblivion closely resembles the Xbox360 version which has very little RAM to work with we decided to tweak the game's .ini file and make it pre-load more terrain (uExterior Cell Buffer default 36 – changed to 102). The framerate was not affected at all, but where Windows XP managed to remain stutter-free, Vista saw some hitches when crossing terrain chunks. This is probably due to Vista's larger memory footprint.

Windows XP (High res PNG)

Windows Vista (High res PNG)