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For Gaming: Vista or XP?

T

trilamb

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Long time mac user, never booted up windows on my mac. When new MPB's come out, going to try it for the first time (with boot camp) for some PC gaming. Probably graphic intensive games like Orange Box, Call of Duty 4, etc.

Looking into purchasing a Windows license and wasn't sure if Vista or XP was better for gaming.

Also curious what I should expect to pay for a windows license -- non-upgrade (since I've never owned windows before).

Most of the non-upgrade versions on newegg seem to be over 200 bucks. There's gotta be a cheaper way.... i hope.
 
trilamb said:
Long time mac user, never booted up windows on my mac. When new MPB's come out, going to try it for the first time (with boot camp) for some PC gaming. Probably graphic intensive games like Orange Box, Call of Duty 4, etc.

Looking into purchasing a Windows license and wasn't sure if Vista or XP was better for gaming.

Also curious what I should expect to pay for a windows license -- non-upgrade (since I've never owned windows before).

Most of the non-upgrade versions on newegg seem to be over 200 bucks. There's gotta be a cheaper way.... i hope.
Click to expand...

I am not sure about pricing, I already have a copy of Vista and XP for my bootcamp/parallels setup. As for gaming, it seems that if you want to play most games XP will be fine. Though if you wanted to play, lets say Halo3 on a non-console, you will have to get Vista. I would imagine that most games will eventually move to Vista, or have Vista support. Most of the games I have looked into, are still playable on XP. Halo3 is the only one I was interested in playing without a console, and it required Vista.

Go get a list of all the games your playing, and find their developers. If their developers are stating they are moving in the direction of Vista, bite the bullet, and get Vista (something higher than home/basic though). If the games/developers of games that your into, seems to not be moving to Vista, then a purchase of XP would be best, as it will allow you to do what you want right now, and not cost too much money.

Also, remember some developers are coming out with games on OS X. Look into those also.

Personally, the games that I enjoy seem to be on the Xbox360 and Wii (I have kids and we enjoy playing the sport games together on the Wii) right now. Halo3 was the only one I even looked into when it came out for PC.
 
According to the benchmarks, XP is the way to go.

One thing to keep in mind, is that DX10 is Vista only. So the newer games are being written for both DX9/10, but may eventually only support DX10. If you want the best now, you can use XP, and upgrade to Vista when the time comes.
 
Vista should be fine. If you have performance issues, you can always turn off its fancy GUI and make it look like Windows 2000, but still have DX10, the longer support period, UAC (though some applications like Lotus Notes have to be run as root anyway), and so on...
 
When you're looking for pricing, eBay is the cheapest there is. Just make sure the seller has good feedback and the copy of Windows is new and legal. I've been considering buying windows for games, but I'm actually pretty happy with my OS X games right now.
 
I've found XP SP3 to be slightly faster than Vista overall, and noticeably in some heavier games/programs.
 
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