I took a chance with my time this weekend to try out Vista Ultimate x64, after acquiring a pair of 2GB sticks of DDR2-800 for my gaming desktop. I have to say, I haven’t had the chance to throw much at it and I wound up on a retro kick anyways, but Vista x64 seems just dandy on this machine.
I’m a tad concerned, however, with the fact that Vista idled at ~35-39% memory usage. Sure, that doesn’t sound bad, till you work that that is more than 1400MB. Qualms? Yeah, I’ve got some. Mind you, this is excluding the so-called cache memory, I believe, not including. Compare that to, say, a viable 64-bit Ubuntu copy using like 130MB, and even WinXP sitting around a few hundred. After all, it’ll run on 256MB of RAM total, with some heavy swapping.
On the other hand, using 64-bit Vista with SP1, I noticed no appreciable slowdowns with my games, but I have no hard numbers so it’s all subjective. Plus, I was playing a DX10 game I hadn’t played in a long while, or ever on Vista. Hellgate London, if you’re curious. However, it’s quite pretty on DX10, and I was running with maxed settings except AA was on “Medium”.
Also loaded up the Orange Pack along with some other non-graphically-impressive games I had a hankering for, including Space Empires IV & V, and Outpost 2, of all things. A Windows 95 game, FFS!
I think some of the noticeable slowdown here and there on HGL and the Steam games was a harddrive bottleneck. Vista is loaded on my old SATA1.5 120GB. If and when I move it to the new-ish 320GB SATA3 from WestDig, I think games will show themselves to be pretty snappy with 4GB to play with.
Definitely a leap from 32-bit. Only 2.5GB available after XP accounts for my SLI 512MB vidcards. Alt-tabbing on Vista was very quick, much faster than 32-bit XP.
Still playing with the WMP11/Media Center integration with my 360.
I’d like to note that this a legit copy of Vista Ultimate, I have my own (32-bit) copy purchased at a local shop for a reasonable sum. I still need to order my own 64-bit DVD from Microsoft, which they offer as a courtesy for a shipping fee. But I’m using my own CD key.