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I bet you're right. On my computer, 32-bit XP SP3 is a little bit faster than Server 2008 x64, even though the 64-bit version can take advantage of the 4GBs of RAM. Of course that's not a great match up for guessing the difference between XP 64 and 2008 64 unless there's a handy conversion between XP and XP64 performance . Also 2008 is running a fair amount of junk (debug versions of DX, terminal services to allow VS debugging, assorted other junk at startup) and the XP is pretty minimal and nLited, being used only for running games (without StarForce though).

So it might not be too surprising that my XP is faster. That said, it isn't *much* faster, less than 100 points in 3DMark 06 (and Vantage would only run on 2008, obviously, though I haven't tried it), and 2% or less average FPS in most games. If you consider 2008 to be Vista without the annoyances, I think the advantages of 2008 make up for the slight performance drop, and if you add in the handful of games where 2008 is faster and the even smaller handful where DX10 can or must be used, I think it's a better choice (if you have both available and aren't going just for raw numbers). Plus Vista 64-bit drivers seem to be pretty easy to find nowadays, which I gather isn't always the case with XP64 drivers. Really the only reason I keep XP around is because GameTap isn't 64-bit compatible and because GRAW 2 has problems with 2008 (on my computer -- I should really try reinstalling it and using a new profile to make sure it doesn't have some leftover settings that are messing it up).