I've been playing wow in vista since Vista Beta RC1, back then it had problems, the bigest thing to consider is if your video card has good vista drivers. Otherwise preformace seems to be about the same except alt-tabbing out of wow in vista seems faster to me.
(running Vista Ultimate on a Dual 3.6ghz P4 with 6gb of ram and an Nvidia 9800GT)

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I have had Vista for a month or so now (Action Pack Sub through the company I work for) and it does affect performance of WOW.

Not so much because of the requirements as Aero disables itself upon launching a game but due to poor drivers from Nvidia at the moment.

Vista is great, driver support right now not so much, my gaming box is back to XP and getting about 20fps more.

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I have noticed a slight performance drop but not too noticible..

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I fully support your love for the mac. No need to explain.

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fear not, us mac WoW-ers need to stick together. If only they'd get around to fixing Ventrilio! Grr!

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When I had Vista installed playing WoW, it seemed that the security features blocked most of my addons and game settings from being remembered. it was beta from a while ago, RC2, but still enough to turn me off until I know it's fixed.

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I installed Vista last night, and am running WoW under that as well. Seems to work just fine, with only a minor performance hit.

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Of course you will get a performance drop the operating system is brand new it demands more if you want it to run better get more ram or upgrade

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Actually, though Vista will run 3d applications slower, Macintoshes will still run them slower. It's sad but true and confirmed by benchmarks across the board that have a PC and Mac's using the same hardware. Granted they were done using WinXP vs Mac, I've seen WinXP v. Vista and Mac was an average of about 30% slower on the same hardware than WinXP, and Vista's an average of about 15-20% slower than WinXP.

I dunno about you but I'd be QQing if I shelled out the outrageous pricetag a Mac commands and still got that kinda performance!

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As my IT guy at work tells me it should make WOW alittle better depending on the system you are running. But overall not much, Vista is mostly for added Security and "useability" not gaming performance

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Ran Vista RC1 with WoW, and it played just fine for me. I have a "fairly" fast PC, albeit not PCIe/DX10, etc., but it ran wonderfully...just like on XP.

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Vista had MAJOR issues with WoW back in the betas and release candidates, but the final version actually seems to run pretty sweetly. No admin mode required. (And yes, though I can't explain it, ALT-TAB does seem to work better.) I don't know if MS or Blizz was behind the change, but the only problems I've been having since trying WoW 2.0 on a Vista machine are minor things (I have to keep re-accepting the EULA every time I start?) and having to run patches in Administrator mode still.

But the others in this thread are right - Vista likes WoW just fine, which means what will REALLY matter is how good the drivers for your hardware are on Vista. And based on my experience, your chances of getting decent drivers right now is next to nil. :( -50 DKP to nVidia and Creative for leaving us out in the cold!

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I beta tested vista for almost 4 months. rc1 and 2 and saw a major preformance drop but like previous posters have said it's due to poor driver support. I'm back to XPx64 and getting around 80-100fps in outland and over 60fps in instances

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"the only problems I've been having since trying WoW 2.0 on a Vista machine are minor things (I have to keep re-accepting the EULA every time I start?) and having to run patches in Administrator mode still."
I have not had the experiance of having to reaccept the EULA's, that works fine, but yes, when you want to install Wow Patches on vista you must run the installer in adminsitrator mode (Right click on the WoW Icon and chose run as Administrator) This is because a program must be running as administrator in order to change files in the /program files/ folder (this is a good thing, will make it slightly harder for some viruses to lock onto your program files)

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Pretty simple conclusion for this one. WoW is not what is taking a performance hit when you install Vista. It is your system. Vista is a resource hungry OS. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you have spare resources, because Vista offers a lot in return. If you bought Vista, and the only thing you do is run WoW, you should have just saved your money and kept XP. So, on a system that just meets requirements for Vista (or even those with a little more horsepower), you will notice a performance hit on just about every application you run. For those of us with 64-bit processors, you should be able to notice the OS actually utilizing the other 32 bits now, and taking advantage of the full power of your system. Poster #1 seems to be running a hearty system, so probably noticed a little better performance overall in his system speeds.

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I stayed up all night when i got my free vista business in the mail last week (trying to get sound to work, then trying to get wow installed).

Upgraded from XP on my macbook pro. installed wow. "hrm, this certainly is faster than on osx."

Rebooted back into macos and haven't been back.

Vista is gorgeous but...it's still windows. Woefully underpowered. I don't want to have to install cygwin just to make my computer usable.

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Who cares about Vista, Linux for the win! No vent support though.

Although I could be bought with a shiny new black macbook >.>

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I have no plans for upgrading to Vista, as the only thing I do with my Windows machine is play WoW... I use one of my Macs, or my Linux box when I have to do "work." So, this begs the question: When will Blizzard and nVidia stop supporting XP? I think it will be awhile for Blizzard, as they still seem to support Win 2k, but I dont know about nVidia...

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The first guy had performance problems in Vista for a very good reason.

He's running a mid-range graphics card from two years ago, running WoW in a window in a dual-monitor setup. So he's rendering probably at least 2048x1024 (if not more) worth of 3D desktop and then trying to run WoW on top of that. He's probably hitting the limit of both the fill rate and memory buffer of his 256MB card.

With the latest ATI Vista drivers (7.1 from their site) Vista runs WoW quite well. It's hard to tell if there is a slight performance decrease or not, but in full-screen mode it's roughly on par with WinXP. Some of the disc access and zone loading seems faster and more responsive, mostly a result of Vista's much improved I/O code.

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I have WoW and Vista Ultimate (Release) on my Dell Inspiron 9300; runs just fine. 1GB RAM....

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