FSX Vista vs. XP performance

[flyinjoe]

I have a dual boot setup on my machine with XP and Vista and today I decided to load up FSX on my XP drive to see how well it performed vs. my Vista FSX installation.  Much to my surprise (because I've read so much about DX10 performance improvements), the XP installation averaged around 10 more fps on an identical flight with identical graphics settings (except for being able to use DX10 support) vs. how the game ran on Vista.

Is this probably due to poor Vista drivers for my Nvidia video card?  Would using DX9 in FSX on my Vista drive get me the same performance as using DX9 on XP or would the drivers still keep performance down?

Joe

[Katahu]

1. Post your computer's hardware specifications.
2. Post your settings [be specific about it].

Once the above have been satisfied, then we'll talk about what's going on. On a side note, it has been widely determined by much of the known FS community that [for now] the only graphics cards capable of handling DX10 features are GeForce 8800 series cards and its equivalents [$$$$]. Any lower, and you won't get what you expected with DX10. Even if you did, performance would suffer. Also, if you haven't already done so, invest in a Core 2 Quad processor with at least 2GB of ram. I have one and it makes FSX purr like a kitten.

[Dwhiskie]

Im running vista with a core 2 duo e6600 oc @ 3.1 ghz with a 8800gtx w/no oc and get minimum 25fps with everything on high except autogen. dx10 runs fine as well except for some flickering on taxiways.

[flyinjoe]

Don't get me wrong, the game runs okay on my Vista drive (averages somewhere around 20fps).  It's just that using identical graphics settings in XP yields an average around 30fps.  I was just curious as to why the big difference when the system specs are the same and was it due to more mature video drivers for XP than Vista.

[Dwhiskie]

[quote]Don't get me wrong, the game runs okay on my Vista drive (averages somewhere around 20fps).

[CaptainT30]

XP was actually my FSX life saver.  ;D

I ran FS9 on my laptop for around 4 months (I've had it for 5) which I got from my brother because he didn't use it anymore. But eventually, I saw FSX and I REALLY wanted it.

my specs are nothing special, AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-58, Ati Radeon  X1100 IGP 256 MB, 1GB DDRII and a 17" display. It ran FS9 very well, but I sure couldn't't say the same for FSX. I got around 7 FPS at KLAX.

By luck, Vista was beginning to mess up my laptop, as in it was using up 80 % of my memory for no reason, I barely had any processes running, and all spyware and virus scans turned up negative for anything. So eventually I decided to install XP and Ubuntu 7.10 linux. I installed FSX and Sp1, and finally I was getting the performance and quality I wanted, 19 FPS average at KLAX with medium-high to high settings. Also I'm hoping to get SP2 /Acceleration for some more performance gains.

Until now, I seemed to not be lucky with my laptop with FSX, all the autogen tweaks gave me virtually nothing and even SP1 only gave me an extra 3 FPS in cities. I finally found the tweak that gave me what I wanted  :)

Good luck to all who are still struggling with FSX  ;)