Windows for Gaming - Many Questions!

This is for a MacBook Pro - see sig.

I am not a gamer so forgive if this is a dumb question but - are you guys all benching / playing on Windows?

If so Windows XP or Vista and with BootCamp or with Parallels?

I assume Bootcamp + XP would get the best scores. I am thinking about installing Windows / Bootcamp just for gaming, but not sure if I should do Vista or XP. Vista will probably make better use of my 4GB RAM.

I am not going to use Windows for anything except gaming - how much HD space should I give the Windows partition? NTFS better than FAT?

I have Parallels already and will buy it + have a Win XP install on a virtual HD for that. But I assume that gaming performance with that will probably most likely suck. A friend told me that Parallels performance when running off a Bootcamp partition is very bad - is that true?

I have both Vista Ultimate and XP Pro install versions through our company's MSDN network so price is not an issue.
I am tending towards Vista because even though it annoys the heck out of me, it's undoubtedly the way forward and the OS that MS is going to put all development efforts into. So Vista will get better whereas XP will stagnate. XP IMHO is much better than Vista now, but that may not be so going into the future. Also XP can't even make proper use of 2GB RAM so it won't be able to do much with 4.

Any advice would be much appreciated! Especially from gamers... I am going to use that Windows Bootcamp mostly for gaming, and perhaps maybe sometimes for debugging our applications but I expect the latter to be minimal.

 

Okay well, it's kinda odd you say you're not a gamer but you wanna install Windows just for gaming and you are concerned which OS gives the best scores for gaming? Okay, you sound like a gamer but a bit contradicting.

At any rate, it all depends but at this time XP would be the best solution for gaming because of it's compatibility. Vista will disappoint if you expect to bring home your favorite game and it has driver issues. On the other hand Vista is designed for gaming with DirectX 10 which is the future of Windows gaming. XP is not going away any time soon when it comes to gaming so it's best to go the XP way.
For the best gaming experience install Windows via bootcamp. Parallels and VM ware Fusion are best used for running most other Windows software outside of gaming. You can use them for gaming but you will run into performance hits.
Ignore the people that say it's a pain to dual boot because 2 years ago it was something most people wished their computer could do and now that Apple has designed the Macs this way some people act like it's such a chore when it's a great convenience to do it all on one machine.

 

Yes, Boot Camp will produce much better results as this is native, not emulated like Parallels. I'd recommend XP rather than Vista for the same reasons described above by hldan. Vista is not mature enough yet.

NTFS if you want more than 32GB of space allotted for the Boot Camp partition or if you want to be able to handle files that are larger than 4GB. FAT32 if you want to be able to write to the partition from Mac OS X for whatever reason. I went with NTFS personally, I don't have a need for writing from OS X as I only use Windows for gaming anyway.