I have not seen anything good come from Vista to date. I do not appreciate Microsoft trying to strong arm people into using that Vista crap... I dislike, with some vehement Passion on the side, the so-called OS that is Vista. I have had to deal with it in an IT setting and I would never recommend it.

If enough gamers clamor for DirectX 10 on XP then maybe Micro$oft will do it... maybe. I say stay with Windows XP until at least Vista SP1 comes out, if you MUST "upgrade" to Vista... But like I said, clamor for DX10 on Windows XP, maybe we can make that happen.

Wait for Open Beta-er, first year or two of Vista before you buy it.

RAM doesn't do floating point operations, I think you mean teraBYTEs.

 I have vista and from a general operational standpoint I like it (with UAC disabled.)

HOWEVER!

I have a GeForce Go 7800 and Nvidia is terrible with vista driver support and have been having some suffering game experiences because of it.  Check around other forums about the card you are getting and see what people are saying about any driver issues first.

Don't do it Yoda!

Wow, Entroper is the only one that seems to be ok with Vista :/

But that's a good idea, 'trying' it before buying it. I thought about that, but didn't know if it was a good idea to say it here :P

About the vcard, I referred to the NEW 65nm 8800GTS. That's like the GT, but with bigger memory bandwidth. The new Radeons are tempting because they are so cheap. The 3870 goes for around $219 and the 3850 for around $179. Also, Newegg is not an option for me anymore, because they don't accept PayPal :(. Any hardware/software would be from TigerDirect, mWave or eBay.

100% do NOT go with Vista 64-bit. It has huge driver issues. You will regret it.

I would further advise against Vista 32-bit but it is not a completely horrible option (like Vista 64-bit would be). In general I prefer XP for almost everything...the almost being that I enjoy the chess game that comes with Vista by default.

Well, just to throw something out here, I ran a benchmark program with an overclocked 8600GT at 630 MHz in Vista 32-bit and the final result like 650 FPS. An 6600GT using the same benchmark program in XP got 800 FPS. This really sucks for me.

 I read somewhere that Microsoft has a way for people to downgrade to XP available due to dissatisfaction with Vista.  I'll see if I can find the link.

Except that I have NO driver issues, and I don't regret it at all; in fact, I'm much happier than I was with XP.

I can't tell if totalwar23's post was in jest or not, but it illustrates exactly what I'm talking about.  Who cares if you get 650 frames per second or 800 -- if you're averaging 100 or more, any difference is completely meaningless.  Older games are going to run just fine on newer hardware in Vista 64 even if they don't run as fast as they do in XP, and newer games will be slightly slower, equal, or slightly faster in Vista.  I've seen benchmarks to this effect.

I don't think DX10 is a good reason to switch to Vista, at least not until games start looking better or running faster in DX10, which they haven't yet.

Last I checked, 8800 GT cards were in stock at Amazon.com at the MSRP of $249.  I haven't heard anything about a 65 nm 8800 GTS, have you got a link that talks about that?  Would it be based on the G92 chip?  The reason the 8800 GT outperforms the earlier 8800 GTS in most cases is because of all the internal tweaks in G92.  If a G92-based 8800 GTS does exist, you'd get the best of both worlds.

Actually fazz, "try before you buy" is probably the best way to go.  Don't listen to me or anyone telling you how much Vista sucks, see if you like it.  If it doesn't work for you, drop it like a hot potato.