Age of Conan

Is it worth upgrading to Vista for DX10? I'm very skeptical about Vista to be honest. Currently I'm running XP 32 bit...but I have 4 gigs of ram that seems like a waste and I would like to utilize that. Will I see any major improvements with Vista 64 regarding DX10 vs DX9 and full use of the 4 gigs I have installed?

Sounds like you got the hardware already to fun Vista, just need to buy the OS right? I upgraded to Vista x64 and I prefer it over XP anyday.

Turn off UAC, indexing and it runs pretty good. Also get a cheap 1gig flash drive and use it for Readyboost and apps open a lot faster. Can't say it helps in gaming, but opening a web browser or other apps it starts them pretty quick.

I plan to use second tax rebate check to buy a DX10 card so I can't comment on the dx9 v dx10 arguments yet.

If you're a college student you might try looking around to buying Vista with a student ID/email to get it cheaper.

For the love of god DO NOT GET VISTA, it is a terrible piece of junk, it hogs all the resources and even with SP1 it is horribly slow and unstable.

I have taken it off my wife's laptop as had appalling performance and went back to XP and now her PC runs fast as lightning.

It must say something when Dell went back to offereing XP as an option on New PC's and MS is selling OEM copies of XP until the end of this year and is having to support it until 2012.

I went to a friends house to see his new gaming rig, he had 4 gigs of hyper fast ram, quad core processor, DX10 graphics card and Vista only performed OK even though the PC cost almost £3000 and he even said he was thinking about going back to XP.

I have a GeForce 8800 GTS, and I run it on XP. Why? Because directX 10 is totally broken still. It crashes constantly. Believe me, I'm pissed about it, but my computer does scream with everything I throw at it on XP. Vista is just a "neat headache", and I sprung for the ultimate edition. Just like XP, expect it to be decent when SP2 comes out. To make matters worse, I orrginally had an 8600, but because of the way DirectX10 pushes a graphics card, it actually destroyed it. Luckily, EVGA has a lifetime warrenty on all products, and my work computer needed a graphics update.

If you have enough RAM memory, it would be a good thing to upgrade to Vista in my opinion. Also note that Vista crashes to Nvidia GPU users due to bad drivers, so if you have one maybe you should stay XP.

DX10 does not give any major graphic changes at the moment.

DX10 is worth it when a game actually has a client utilizing graphical improvements for it. Age of Conan is one such game.

Some games like the recently released Assassin's Creed include a DX10 client, but without developers adding any actual improvements; so whatever passive effects DX10 has are marginal. 

Can't say I've seen AoC's DX10 client outside of trailers, but ya know, the fact that Funcom put effort into it means there will be graphical improvement. 

I'm hoping the benefitial differences between the DX9 and DX10 clients are as clear in AoC as they are in LOTRO.

Seems to me the people above may of had a bad time with Vista, firstly I do have 2x 250gig Hd's in my rig as I dual boot from Vista to Xp..Why? because Yes still some games dont run properly or dont run at all (but this list has got Considerably smaller over the last year)

But to say Vista sucks is just silly, I will agree that Vista uses allot of resources and some games do run faster in XP but to say Vista and DX10 is broken and crashes all the time and is rubbish is just HOGWASH.

Vista over the last 6 months has vastly improved and you can see a difference betwwen DX9 and 10 (not huge bit still nice) and I do not have any problems with Vista crashing WHAT SO EVER (Ultimate version).  I feel sorry for the people that pay out alot of money and have problems but this does not mean everyone else does and is no reason to drag an entire product down unless you have done a survey yourself.

Stay with XP unless you have a good rig I would say ...  13000 pcmark 06 Vista

2x hd  xp-vista,   e6600 2.4 oc'd to 3.4,   8800 gtx oc2,   2 gig ocz

DX10 is pretty good.  i got a decent computer with an 8800gt, quad core and vista 64 bit and everything runs smoothly.  if you need to upgrade then you have to go with vista and DX10 as microsoft and the games industry is not gonna give you a choice 6 months down the track.  if you dont like it then your going to have to deal with the system or face the consequences (it will get worse the longer you put it off).

Since Age of Conan is one of those MMORPGs that actually has the DX10 in terms of one of the few MMORPGs that offers it, then yes. Go with Vista if and only if you have a really good Gaming rig to run this game. Otherwise, I'd still recommend to sticking with Windows XP if your system can't quite handle those type of games if your specs aren't good enough. Besides, Windows Vista still has a lot of things that needs to be improved especially the fact that it eats a lot of system resources. So stay with Windows XP, there's no dramatic difference between DX 9 and DX 10 just that yet.! xD

I got bot 32bit and 64bit original vista(thanks to firm) and 32bit xp in my computer(in my another hdd). Yes, vista consumes much more ram than xp but its worth it. For example, in xp when you quit from a game, ram usage is going over top and probably you need to restart your pc to refresh your rams(there are some probrams to do this work ram cleaner but I don't recommend, some of them crash your pc)  but there is no problem in vista like this. I think, Vista works more stable than xp but you may have some driver problems and some old programs doesn't work. However, 64x games(f.e crysis) or programs runs  better than 86x versions.

I have amd 3800 x2, 3gb rams and 8800gts-oc.... 32 bit vista consumes around 800mb ram (in my enterpreise edition) but 64 vista consumes around 1400mb ram (in my ultimate edition). Anyway, Microsoft recommend usage for 32bit is 3gb ram and for 64bit 4gb ram and a dual-core prosessor. My best pleasure dx10 experience was bioshock and it got good optimization and it has almost same fps values with dx9. Smokes, ,fire effects, textures and reality was better than dx9. Age of conan is created by Microsoft support and you know dx10 = microsoft. I think there will be good job in Aoc as dx10.

Finally, Vista works faster than my xp but you need good pc for it. My friend uses 32bit version and he got single core pc. He says after sp1 and when you close Auro(desktop visuals), vista work faster and more stable than xp. I used 64x bit for a long time and I didn't encounter any serious problem. Nowadays using 32x.

Note: Even after sp1, 32 bit vista can see 4gb but it cannot use 4gb (it still uses 3gb).

I recommend you to install vista, at least try it from your friend pc who uses vista if you are not sure.