flaws with vista help

[hercules71185]

I have a amd 3600 x2 64 oc to 2.85ghz on air now, 3gb ram, 8600gt pencil modded 750/1900 from 540/1400.
if I upgrade to vista what problems are there for me?
I liked the interface. My friend is offering me his copy and key for 50 bucks since his computer has 512 ram and he says he can't even open up a picture without going over.
How much slower will my games run? I guess the most demanding game out right now is bioshock? Using that for my benchmark. completely maxed out in dx9 1280x1024 with 2xaa(supersampling enabled) 16x af.. I get 40+fps avg and never went below 25fps unless I had someone writing me on IM while the game was open. Will I be able to play the game maxed out still on vista or does the performance lack that bad.
On his pc I put my vid card in there. giving his specs at
amd sempron 3200
512mb ram
8600gt at stock 540/1400
3dmark05 ran on his 06 won't
I got 4,512 on xp
4,470 on vista. Why do synthetic benchmarks not slow down much but, supposedly games do?
ps those aren't what I get lol

[Apoptosis]

say a 10% performance hit is what you should expect on gaming... I'd guess less, but always plan for the worst. DX10 drivers have gotten a ton better since Vista first came out.

[hercules71185]

awesome thanks
10% so if I'm getting 50fps I have to worry about getting 45... I didn't know how the drivers were coming along since at first it was a 10% performance, I've heard as low as 5% and then 1 benchmark (I know you can't go by random people) the benchmark was less than 1% overall altho some were as high as 10% slower overall he claimed heavy shader games make no difference.. One more thing can you stop aero from running? like in somekinda menu, isn't that the reason its slower since it has to run the 3d desktop 24/7 resulting in the 10% loss?
Or can you just turn it off if you REALLY for some reason need that gain.....

[Apoptosis]

all sorts of rumors are flying around, but I'd say a 1-10% drop should be expected, but it ALL depends on the game title. I remember before Vista was gold it was a 20-30% difference, so the drivers are night and day better. I'm playing world-in-conflict right now on Vista x64 with nvidia 163.75 beta drivers and all is well... I was running 163.44 drivers and i swear performance is down with the 163.75 drivers on this particular game... was getting 34fps with 163.44 everything set to high and now on the 163.75 drivers I'm getting 29fps... That's a ~12% performance difference from just two driver versions, but then again with 2GB of memory I was getting 31FPS and when I moved to 4GB i was getting 34FPS... A 9% performance increase from going from 2GB to 4GB... Vista loves memory.

[ViPeR.Ja]

i rather just stick with xp for now. since sp3 is coming out and vista too me seems kinda noobish

[hercules71185]

I'll try it out see what happens. I'll do some benching since I'm bored.. back up my data since that needs to be done on my 1.5 year old harddrive(I don't need to lose stuff) and I just got a bunch of dvds mismarked for clearance with the cds from the same company haha love new people. 4.99 for 100 pack of dvd 4.7's and the 25 pack of dvd DL's were only 1.99 ( I now have 300 dvds and 200dvddls :-D I'm actually debating ebaying them its all they had so I couldn't buy a crap load of them lol