Vista Performance
When Vista came out, people complained. Just like when XP came out... Just like when 2000 came out... Just like when 98 came out... Just like when 95 came out... (You get the picture.) One of the major things they complained about was the performance of videocards in games. With the radical redesign of the way drivers interface with the operating system, DirectX was also radically redesigned to accommodate the changes. See, DirectX was designed to offer a high-speed interface to the graphics system of Windows and was intendeed for developers to harness to full potential of the hardware without writing their own interfaces. It was a video acceleration breakthrough and anyone with an unbiased opinion of Microsoft knows this. It's what made PC popular for games.
Now, during the history of DirectX, Microsoft was experimenting with how to make it work. They tried to make DirectX not work directly in tangent with the kernel of the system, running in user-mode to promote stability, but that proved to be far too slow and they abandoned that approach. As a result, DirectX up to version 9 has been a kernel patch, more or less, but with Vista, drivers are no longer operated at the kernel level, so DirectX 10 couldn't either. This is what all the smart people bring up. I mean, you have the casual Vista haters who just hate for no reason, and then you have the true concerned performance mongers who dig up information and go: "Look, this is what Vista does and I don't think it's so great." Not for performance, maybe, but separating drivers from the kernel practically eliminates Stop errors. (Otherwise known as Blue Screens of Death.)
But fear no more! ExtremeTech has run benchmarks on Vista (SP1 and base) vs XP (SP3 and SP2) and I think the results will surprise you. Certainly there was a performance decrease with Vista base, but with the advent of SP1, you can see that the frame rates are on par with XP if not exceeding XP entirely. I tolerated the slower performance of Vista for the stability of the new driver model, but I think it's clear that Microsoft is figuring out how to make DirectX 10 (which runs safely in user-mode) work as fast as DirectX 9 (which runs dangerously in kernel-mode). Everyone needs to revise their opinions about Vista's performance and wake up and smell the roses... Vista is not the mammoth tangle of processor intensive garbage that everyone makes it out to be. Every operating system is released with issues, even immaculate Apple has bugs (that are just simply overlooked by fanboys). Vista just needed a bit of time to mature, and, slowly but surely, Microsoft is addressing the concerns of everyone who doesn't want to use Vista. Soon enough, the only reason they haven't upgraded would be because they don't want to. Which is fine, but don't go justifying your decision by making Vista out to be something it clearly isn't.
Fact is: Service Pack 1 DOES increase performance to every bit the speed you had with Windows XP, AND you're getting a far safer and stable approach to drivers than you did with Windows XP. You have the best of both worlds now... I think it's time for some people see how nice Vista is for themselves. If history is anything to go by (and it usually is), all you performance mongers will eventually see the light and upgrade. After all, you upgraded to Windows XP, did you not?