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Vista Gaming Test System Info Page 2 of 4
Test System:
The test system used was not a top-end system, but it's comprised of some decent hardware that should make it a viable candidate for our tests.
The first thing to note here about the system is that it has 4GB of PC2-8000. This memory is rated to run at 5-5-5-15 at 1000MHz, but we ran it at a more conservative 4-4-4-12 at 800MHz. In order to run it at 1000MHz in this system we would have to overclock the CPU and our interest in this article lies in the performance between 2GB and 4GB when gaming.
Notable Notes:
While many of today's motherboards claim support for 8GB of memory, getting 4GB or better to work is not always easy. We had to flash the BIOS to the latest build in order to get 4GB identified correctly. Also, Windows-based BIOS flash utilities are virtually non-existent and we had to dig several floppy drives out of our junk drawer in order to find one that could read the only 3.5" disk we had around. Once we flashed up, we could see more all 4GB of memory instead of the 3.25GB that were initially identified.
Click for full sized image.
You have to admit that the desktop looks pretty slick, but it comes at a cost. The Aero interface won't be available on all versions of Windows Vista. If you want Aero, you'll have to shell out for Windows Vista Ultimate, Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Business.
Give A Man A Fish . . .
There is a saying that if you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Software follows a different, somewhat distorted policy. If you provide a system with less RAM, it will page less RAM. If you provide it with more RAM, it will use more RAM to do the exact same thing. You cannot teach Windows to take care of itself when it comes to memory. To prove my point, take a look at the screenshot below. It was taken before a bunch of programs were installed on a Windows Vista RC2 machine running with 4GB of Memory.
Click for a larger image.
That's right dear friends! A fresh install of Windows Vista Ultimate will hog over 1GB of system memory - just to run. This screenshot was taken at first boot and from there, the memory usage only climbed until it stabilized at a mere 1.11GB - almost 28% of our system's memory. Granted there is still 2.89GB free, but out of the box Vista is a RAM pig.
We booted up with 2GB of memory installed, fearing that we would see results very similar to what we captured above. With less memory available, Vista stripped itself down to a mere 680MB of memory at first boot and leveled off somewhere around 784MB. It's using less overall memory, but with less RAM installed it is now using over 38% of our memory just to operate. We are now down to 1.2GB to run all of our applications.
Compare these numbers to my current install of Windows XP Professional 64-bit on my main machine. I have a ton of applications open and am running 63 processes at the moment. I have two instances of Folding @ Home running, two instances of Firefox, a single instance of Internet Explorer running, with Outlook open, Skype, MSN, a backup program, Trillian, Palm Desktop, NOD32 and Ultramon to control three displays. On this heavily bogged system, I'm using 563MB of RAM and I have a lot going on. Under Vista, this would hog much more memory.
We see that Vista likes RAM - and lots of it. It is unfortunate that today's games also require large amounts of RAM. On the next page we are going to jump right in and see how 2GB compares to 4GB when it comes to gaming under Vista.
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