World in Conflict Demo: XP vs Vista Performance

Yeah, I know you all are probably tired of reading all this stuff about WiC and benchmarks, but I promise, this will be the last post on this issue! Ever since hearing about Ender and Tochi having benchmark numbers at about 2x of what I had reported, I began thinking what could be causing it. Given that the game was CPU bound based on the benchmark, I could understand how Ender's numbers could be faster since he was running a dual-core cpu, but Tochi's laptop cpu is much closer to mine, yet he reported that his numbers were roughly 50% faster. So what could the difference be attributed to? The OS...

I still had my XP install available since I was dual-booting, so I gave WiC a run in XP to see if that had any difference on the performance. And the numbers were pretty interesting to say the least.



This chart pretty much tells the story. At "Very Low" and "Low" details, XP is pushing about 50-60% more frames compared to Vista, but there's a crossover at "Medium", and strangely enough once we get to the "High" details, Vista begins to take over as XP becomes OTL slow averaging 0 frames per second. Although I would never play at that setting, it was still interesting to note. As for the reason why XP struggles at higher details, I have no idea :P