OK heres my testing machine spec.

Shuttle SN45 - Nvidia 2 Chipset running a AMD Athlon XP2800 - Unclocked.
2GB of Kingmax PC3200
80GB MAtroIDE133 HD
ATI Radieon 9600 Pro 128 - Unclocked.
Logitec MomoForce wheel (the old one - best one IMO )
LFS S2 Patch V

Anyway I am a MSDN developer and do have a test copy of Windows Vista.

I did a fresh install of XP service pack 2 and only installed the official ATI drivers for the card - and used the default card settings.

Running at 1024x768 The game runs lovely! Using the XG Turbo around blackwood and just me on the track I get a peak of 110FPS and on the pit straight around 70FPS. Solid.

Curiosity got the better of me so I flattened the said machine and installed Vista - Only installing the ATI Vista (Beta) Drivers...

Now I dont know if its a ATI driver problem or a Vista Issue, but using default graphic settings I'm only getting around 30 - 40FPS at most around the whole track!

With a full race at blackwood I get a pisspoor rate of 20FPS or thre abouts throught the whole race!

Not the most technical of experiments but theres one hell of a noticable difference! Maybe its vista.. maybe its the ATI beta drivers... who knows.

Either way I'm putting XP back on the machine tonight!

There was a problem with ATI drivers a while back, not sure if thats whats causing the problem.

I am pretty sure its an issue w/the Catalyst drivers. I think most people that run LFS on nvidia cards have not noticed any major differences between vista and XP. While (from what I've read) most people on ATI cards constantly experience performance drops.

I have the same problem.

Sad.