A couple weeks ago, we took an exhaustive look at Vista gaming by installing over 25 popular titles to see which ones work and which ones don't. Overall, we're pretty impressed with the results. Most games work on Vista just fine, at least as well as they work in Windows XP. There are a few oddities with regards to some games and services not showing up in the Games Explorer, and a gotcha here and there (most of which can be solved by choosing to run the application as administrator). On the whole, while Vista is going through the normal teething pains of a new OS, the games compatibility thing seems like a non-issue for most people.

The catch is, we didn't consider performance in that article. In the interest of casting as wide a net as possible over a whole slew of games and eliminating hardware variables to focus on the operating system, we tested on a single PC configuration. We know for a fact that some games, even many games, run slower under Vista than they do under Windows XP. It's a whole new graphics driver model, and it's going to take a little more time for Nvidia and ATI to get their drivers fully optimized. If experience has told us anything, it's that your game performance under Vista is going to vary from one title to the next, and from one graphics card vendor to the other.

So exactly how much performance can you expect to lose if you switch to Vista? Does it depend on whether you have an ATI or Nvidia graphics card? If so, which of the two graphics giants have the best Vista drivers right now? As a follow-up to our Vista games compatibility feature, let's examine the performance impact with both ATI and Nvidia's latest Vista drivers. Continued...