Pinhedd :
There was nothing wrong with Vista for gaming. There was something horribly wrong with application developers and OEMs who put Vista on hardware that would have a hard time running XP SP3.
Windows 8 won't really bring anything new to the table. Microsoft set the bar very high with Windows 7 and there's not really any core improvements in Windows 8 that say "you need to upgrade" like there were from XP to Vista and to a lesser extent Vista to 7.
There most certainly was issues with Vista, mostly in how bad it's memory management was. Also the WDM model is different for Vista then it is for 7.
It had absolutely nothing to do with "old computers" as I have had several customer boxes running Windows 7 x86 with zero issues yet they choke up with Vista x86. Not about memory as they all have 4GB of installed memory and again Windows 7 runs much smoother then Vista did. Sure as hell wasn't about CPU speed, even when it was choking Vista never used more then half a core's worth of power.
The biggest culprit behind Vista's performance "issues" was how it's memory management subsystem treated SuperFetch memory allocation. Superfetch was treated as memory assigned to a regular server and thus would be paged to disk if more memory was needed by the system. As Superfetch's algorithm was designed to keep requesting memory until free memory was at 0, you were left in a situation where you
always needed to page out to disk if any other program needed even 1MB of memory. As many programs are constantly doing memalloc / dealloc it had an accordion effect on your memory subsystem, a few MB's would become available, superfetch would grab them, a program needed them back and windows memory subsystem would then page the superfetch cache to disk to free up some memory. Having "more memory" only delayed how long it would take for superfetch to eventually grab everything, at 8GB you could go days without it filling up unless you accessed a ton of stuff. I've had 8GB box's hit 0MB free before with a 6GB+ superfetch cache. Vista's memory model is more secure then previous versions of the NT Kernel. It will zeroize memory before it reallocates it, same with page file data. Thus paging to and from disk is particularly expensive performance wise on a Vista machine.
With Windows 7 MS changed up a few things. Namely superfetch's memory cache is now treated exactly as that, a cache. Win 7 will not bother paging SF's cache to disk and just zeroize the memory prior to returning it to the free memory pool. Also they implemented a buffer space of free memory, from 50 to 200MB will remain free at all times, SF will never try to go to zero. This provides some space for the normal minor expansion / contraction of program / services memory footprints. This is why Windows 7 seems faster then Vista when many programs are being used, their natural expansion / contraction are not being hindered by page swaps and having to reallocate memory.
The WDM / GDM model also had a huge inefficiency, display data was stored twice. Once in the programs WDM session and again in the kernels WDM master session. This way every single window and program you had opened (even minimized ones) consumed 2x as much memory as they should. This made Vista extremely memory hungry and combined with the issues with SuperFetch is what made it seem sluggish. In Windows 7 only a programs WDM session stores the display data, the kernels WDM session only holds pointers and references to the display objects, like an index instead of a full book.
Vista wasn't "bad", MS was trying many new things at once. A more efficient caching system combined with a more secure memory model and a faster graphics subsystem. Some of these things stepped on each others toes and didn't work so well when combined. After redoing some parts of these subsystems they worked just fine and were released in what we call Windows 7. Windows 7 should really be refereed to as "Vista SP2".
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