Vista Not Playing Nice With FPS Games

PetManimal writes "Computerworld is reporting that gamers who have installed Vista are reporting problems with first person-shooter titles such as CounterStrike, Half-Life 2, Doom 3. and F.E.A.R. (Users have compiled lists of games with Vista issues.) The complaints, which have turned up on gamers' forums, cite crashes and low frame rates. Not surprisingly, the problems relate to graphics hardware and software: 'Experts blame still-flaky software drivers, Vista's complexity, and a dearth of new video cards optimized for Vista's new rendering technology, DirectX 10. That's despite promises from Microsoft that Vista is backwards-compatible with XP's graphic engine, DirectX 9, and that it will support existing games. Meanwhile, games written to take advantage of DirectX 10 have been slow to emerge. And one Nvidia executive predicts that gamers may not routinely see games optimized for DirectX 10 until mid-2008.'"

People Were Right!

Everyone who accused Vista of copying OS X were dead on!

Re:People Were Right!

See, this is good news for me. I don't really want to change to Vista. I've tried it, I even own a legit copy of it, but decided to put it aside for the time being and put XP Pro SP2 back on my PC.

By "mid-2008", I'm hoping SP1 or SP2 includes the abandonment of DRM, and I assume that by then there will be plenty of web sites that will tell me how to run a "trimmed" version of Vista the same way I do right now with XP Pro.

I don't have time at the moment to fuss with all the production software I use to get it running on XP. Sonar, Premiere, Steinberg Wave-lab, Pro-Tools, etc. I've got oddball little directx plugins for all those programs that I rely upon. I can't afford the time or energy right now to play with all this just to keep MS' quarterly earnings healthy.

I don't remember XP's rollout being this much trouble. I remember being elated at how it just seemed to have drivers for everything I was running and and there was a significant improvement over Win98 and NT (which most of the music software didn't like).

Maybe Microsoft will decide to focus on the Xbox and Zune and Dynamics (whatever that is) and leave the operating system to people who care. Sort of like Apple, who seems to be edging its way out of the computer business and into the much more lucrative "entertainment industry" (are THEY in for a shock). And I just don't buy the idea that computers are all going to be embedded and consoles and set-tops, etc etc. As long as there are people who want to be creative (and scientists) there will be a need for some type of general purpose cipherin' box onto which you can impose your will (to some extent) and make do what you want to do.

Re:People Were Right!

What planet are you on? Vista has less games and less users than the ENTIRE OS X population. Maybe if you limit to 10.4 it would be close. There are games I can get for Mac OS X and Windows XP that do not work on Windows Vista. As the article stated, it is nvidia and ati's fault for their shitty drivers. OpenGL based games have terrible frame rates. With the nvidia 8800 driver I can get my 7300 to run Enemy Territory without crashing but not the official driver for my card. WoW, Halflife: Source, ET, Darwinia, uplink and age of empires II work on my system. I have not gone through a full install of all the games I like yet. Star Wars: Knights of the old republic will not run at all. It seems to be a detection issue with the video card. I hate companies that do that. The configure/splash screens work but then it just crashes.

When I first installed vista, ET, Quake 3, RTCW and several other quake 3 based games would not run. They do work on my iBook G4. I only get 13fps in ET on that iBook and yet it was faster than Vista on a Pentium D. Funny how that works.

By far the worst issue with vista is nvidia and ati. They can't seem to ship stable drivers for it. My audigy card sometimes drops audio after several hours of use but its still working better than my video card. If you haven't gone to vista, wait until there are drivers. I don't know how OEMs are shipping computers with vista yet. The drivers can't be working right on those systems.

Re:People Were Right!

They copied OS X's inability to play mainstream games.

Re:People Were Right!

Game developers are too stupid to write portable code but that's unrelated.

You're right. It's because they're stupid. Game developers don't do Mac versions of games because they're too stupid. It's not because the PC games market is pretty small compared to consoles, so the much smaller Mac market is objectively tiny. And you don't ever see games that run on more than one platform. And game developers are never beholden to deadlines or budgets that make producing a Mac version not only uneconomical but also a pain in the neck.

No, it's because game developers are stupid. And probably lazy, too.

Thanks for your piercing insight.

Re:People Were Right!

He's got a good point there. If everyone wasn't riding the DirectX cock, they could code in OpenGL instead (like iD and the Unreal team) and therefore make their games a hell of a lot more portable.

In the end I guess it's a numbers game. If you're targeting a specific platform, you code whatever is native for it. This is changing due to the vast landscape of consoles with PPC chips and ATI/NVidia chips in them. I'm betting that in the future alot more devs will turn to OpenGL to make their games extra-portable for PC as well as next-get consoles.

What did you expect?

We all knew this was the way it was going to be. This isnt a newsflash for anyone. I have a dx10 compat gfx card, but I'll stick to XP for gaming way after SP1 for Vista comes out. Drivers for Vista just plain and simply not up to snuff yet.

Re:What did you expect?

The audio stack is completely new. It bypasses your video card

Damned. How will I watch my MP3s now?

Re:What did you expect?

Gee and here folks were complaining that Apple didn't have iTunes ready for Vista. So where were all the game softeware companies. Too. twiddling their iPods perhaps?

Damn DirectX...

I can only hope this sort of thing promotes the appeal of using OpenGL, so more games are more likely to become cross-compatible. Projects like WineHQ can mimic the behavior of Win32 API, and things would run more smoothly if instead of translating DX, to just have OpenGL games to begin with. Does DX really provide or perform more/better than OpenGL that commercial games continue to use DX??

Re:Damn DirectX...

Direct X provides an all in one interface. OpenGL is just a graphics specification and is pretty much strait procedural. A lot of places would rather not have to do DirectX for sound and input and then also use opengl which feels somewhat out of place. That said, I wish more games were OpenGL. I love OpenGL.

SDL, then?

Or, OpenGL+OpenAL?

I think the main problem is that most games don't do their own engines. This is a good thing, but then, most games end up using engines written for DirectX...

As for the games which do create their own engines, I'm guessing many of them don't see portability as an issue, or if they do, would rather be easily portable to the Xbox 360 than to anything else.

Here's hoping QuakeWars continues to ensure OpenGL is well supported -- the Doom 3 engine is alive and well, I hope...

Re:Damn DirectX...

Expect to see OpenAL take over from DirectSound; Vista's driver model doesn't support hardware acceleration for DirectSound, but it does allow vendors to impalement other APIs with direct paths to the driver. The Creative drivers, for example, support accelerated OpenAL and EAX, but can't support accelerated DirectSound.

Re:Damn DirectX...

As odd as it is to face it, it doesn't seem like the gaming audio market has much of a leg to stand on any more. On-board audio is widely popular, and even among gamers the proportion owning modern SoundBlaster cards is fairly low. Hardware acceleration for such a small & shrinking market is just one more headache for a developer, when they could just use an off-the-shelf audio system like FMOD/Miles which can do everything in software and drive as many audio channels through DirectSound as is required. The cost of course is the CPU penalty and the quality penalty (the later to keep the former in check) which means to a certain extent everyone who is above the median is getting dragged down.

But for better or worse*, this is the way things will go. Creative is living on borrowed time unless they can convince developers to use OpenAL themselves, or they convince FMOD/Miles to put in two paths to support both groups. I don't think they'll be successful without a great deal of bullying.

* Worse, IMHO. I use cans for gaming and good head related transfer functions(required for 3D audio over headphones) are not done in software due to the heavy performance hit. There's still a distinct advantage to using hardware here(the X-Fi in particular)

Why?

Why would anyone rush out and buy a new operating system?

You exchange a series of well known bugs and security problems (that have work arounds and policies to protect yourself) to being put into the unknown. Personally, I'm going to let everyone else rush to be the lab rat and only upgrade when I'm forced to.

I'm putting mine in a safe deposit box!

I don't care if Microsuck won't release a DST fix for W2k, I'll be running that sucker until the Civilization series requires an OS upgrade.

Therefore, I've got a few backup copies of my w2k pro install disk, and I will be putting the original in a safe deposit box at the bank next week.

I didn't see a damn thing in XP that warranted the time spent, much less the money spent, on upgrading. Vista is no different.

Re:Why?

>Why would anyone rush out and buy a new operating system?

To bitch about microsoft apparantly. Hello, I am running software on a platform it wasnt designed to run on using new and unstable drivers and I am surprised things are not working as well as on my xp sp2 system! Now I shall submit this grievance to slashdot!

Re:Why?

If everyone waits for a confirmation that Vista works before using Vista, no one will ever use it. Think about it.

I'm thinking about it now... it's... it's so beautiful...

DX10 is the new thing.

With the push towards DX10, is it really that surprising? I wouldn't accuse MS of maliciously hindering DX9's performance, but it's not hard to imagine them not putting much effort into it. Or at least not into DX9 APIs/functions not being used by Aero.

It's the HD DRM

disclosure: I'm a developer at ATI and am writing this anonymously.

Vista's DRM is the fault in nearly 100% of the problems we're seeing. A game tries to output at 1280x1024 or greater and the DRM kicks in trying to downgrade the resolution. Don't blame ATI or NVIDIA, blame Microsoft for this one.

Parent is spot-on.

I am not going to say who I work for, but I will say I work on drivers for one of the big two graphics card vendors.

Driver development for Vista is a nightmare. We are forced to work within rigid and sensitive specifications, wherein violations cause Windows to shut us down or restart the video subsystem entirely. In the past, delivering content to the screen was relatively straight-forward and we were free to operate as we needed to get our job done. Today, it is entirely up to Microsoft and if you dare wander outside their edicts and trigger their damned “tiltbits”, you are fucked. Debugging this system is almost entirely blind so we are forced to play wack-a-mole all day. On the bright side, our driver code is receiving a thorough audit. In the mean time, you guys are getting the product of a rapid hackfast, intended to get something out the door to meet our marketing promises.

When Vista becomes dominant in the mainstream, all of you can expect loads of problems unless Microsoft learn to lighten up. Sure, they want to enforce standards on their platform. We all know Windows sucks largely because of how badly drivers are written, but they are doing it by screwing with us, the hardware vendors. My group knows what the hell we're doing. We would not be one of the top two if we didn't, but Microsoft are making our lives nearly impossible because they do not consider in the least what we need to make good products.

My advice: do not think you can buy either ATI or NVIDIA and expect Vista to work entirely as advertised. Wait a year. Stick with XP or buy a Mac.

Re:Parent is spot-on.

How about reading this.. http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=357 [pcper.com]

Which contains a much more authoritative response from Dwight Diercks - Vice President, Software Engineering at NVIDIA

New Computers get Vista

The problem is trying to buy a new computer without getting Vista. My dad needs a new computer and plays strategy/role playing games and how do I explain to him that his high-end Dell computer with Vista is going to crash playing some games. Talk about bleeding edge.

Nothing surprising

Did anyone not see this coming? I am no hardcore gamer, but from what I can gather having not read the article as usual is that DX9 runs in Vista by means of what is like a wrapper like for the 3Dfx days. Of course this shit will run slower, it's MS trying to actually do something new for a change. Like NT - took them until 2000 and basically XP to get it right. DX12 will rock.

Now, off topic, I must confess that I no longer even read the Slashdot paragraph, but I just read the headline and then go straight to the comments to see what the controversial parts were.

Re:Nothing surprising

...I just read the headline and then go straight to the comments to see what the controversial parts were.

You must not be new here.

Minimal OS always best for max stability and speed

When playing games, writing music or capturing video you're always best with a very minimalist OS. I managed to get Windows XP do work fairly well doing audio work with 256MB by removing pretty much everything except that required for the applications.

Microsoft doesn't seem to understand that an OS is just for running applications, managing files and providing base services. They have to provide more and more features to make the upgrade justifiable. Games are better to stick to a dedicated XP install with all the bloat removed for now.

The drivers just aren't ready yet

There are serious problems with many games because . . . well, good code takes time, and Microsoft has (quite reasonably) changed the architecture of the drivers significantly, and so we are seeing that some things are now very slow and others just plain don't work right. It is not DirectX's fault, just that code is new and yet is expected to work just as well as it used to in every possible situation - which isn't going to happen. The blame, if any, goes to Microsoft for not releasing the spec earlier, and to the driver writers for not doing a perfect job. Perfection is pretty hard to achieve the first time around, though, so I don't honestly blame anyone that much. It's just the way things are when you make big transitions. Frankly, I'm surprised things work as well as they do now.

Opportunity

A good opportunity for a new OS to emerge.
Nothing works on Vista and everyone is getting sick of MS.

If only someone could make a stable, reliable, secure OS, without all the flashy crap that nobody wanted, but still user-friendly, and capable of read/write of MS Office documents, they would have a chance to replace Windows.

Not that its going to happen...

What???

games written to take advantage of DirectX 10 have been slow to emerge

Since when has gentoo had DirectX 10?

Cheers,

Roger

3D CAD too

i was reading an article from the Upfront newsletter about this with engineering CAD software as well.

Nvidia executive...

Nvidia lost all credibility with their predictions when they brushed off the 3D Mark benchmarks of their FX line of cards, stating that developers would use the Nvidia specific optimisations, and thus that the performance with the generic stuff was irrelevent. We all know how that ended ::stares at his FX 5900 Ultra that can't even run Oblivion well enough to be entertaining without third party hackish solutions, and even then::

Its just a sad attempt at justifying their garbage Vista drivers, I feel like. On the other hand, how bad Vista's backward compatibility is, is simply inexcusable in this case.

Better them than me

Not every bug for every game will be discovered during internal testing (and MS's buggy reputation doesn't help). Frankly, I'm glad that these gamers are having these problems so that by the time I upgrade in a year, there will be fixes or work-arounds.

On a related note: Vista's promise to reinvent gaming seems to be faltering out of the gate. Beside the problems listed in the article, MS isn't doing a good job of telling casual gamers what sort of videocards or hardware they'll need to effectively take advantage of DX10. Then you have contradictory reports from gaming studios that DX10 doesn't mean anything - yet. None of this is helping to make PC gaming "easier" for the masses. In fact it's complicating things.

They even copied THAT from the Mac

Vista - so like a Mac that you can't even play games on it :-)

[And yes, this is a dig at *both* sides, so let's see how that goes down :-]

Simon

Thats all right

When Duke Nukem Forever comes out, PC gamers will forget about all those old, now dull looking toys.

Cool

Maybe this will slow down game development for Vista and therefore allow me to wait even longer before being forced to buy it in order to play the newest games...

Until game developers start releasing more games that are unix based I will be forced to eventually buy vista and that really pisses me off but what is a gamer to do?

Vista Commercial Beta

As I recall, Microsoft had already begun development on a major service pack before Vista hit retail shelves. Are we really all that suprised to discover that there are some issues with the new O/S? This is just another example of a commercial beta release, if you ask me. I seem to recall that "Testers urge Microsoft to extend Vista Beta" news stories were a dime a dozen on several IT news sites after Microsoft confirmed the release date.

In regards to gaming performance and WHQL drivers, I tend to think that a significant number of PC gamers are smart enough to try updating video drivers if their video performance is buggy or slow. Maybe I am giving PC gamers too much credit? I just figure if you are unable to learn how to properly configure your O/S for optimal gaming performance, there is a large and far less technically inclined console market waiting for your business.

Tips for Vista Gaming:

1. Use Task Manager to set the game priority as "Above Normal". This should help the game get priority above all other programs, however if you need to task switch out for something your OS will be sluggish. This will work on any Windows.
2. Go to the shortcut Compatibility tab in properties and disable "desktop composition", which will disable Aero Glass while you're running the program, saving you 5-15% CPU while it's running in some cases. Of course Aero Glass is automatically turned off in fullscreen mode so this is only useful if you like running games windowed, and it's running slow.
3. You can go and disable all themes using the Compatibility tab, as well, which is also doable on XP. This won't grab you as much of a performance gain.
4. Lastly, you can kill as many programs and services as possible before gaming. Services you won't need to care about too much, however non-Microsoft services usually aren't vital and are most likely to chew up CPU (MS services take their role as "background" services seriously). If you want to take it to the extreme, try this [technet.com], keeping in mind it was written for Windows XP, not Vista.

Re:Tips for Vista Gaming:

If I have to do all that just to get a game running smoothly, it's painfully obvious why Windows will never be ready for the desktop.

NVidia certainly dropped the ball

I have an 8800GTX since Nov 15. Being a corporate customer, we've also had the various flavors of vista since Nov 30th. The new shiny 100.xx drivers are complete and utter crap across the board. The nVidia card touted as the ultimate in vista preparedness, the 8800, barely works on vista at all. See nVidia forums [nvidia.com] The class action stie [nvidiaclassaction.org] and my own video [youtube.com]. There are thousands of folks out there with issues. The nvidia drivers thread (70+ pages) has been deleted at least 3 times that I know of (from before the Jan 30th launch).

In my youtube video.. just using windows can cause the machine to spazz out randomly. For example.. I can't hit control-a to select all my icons.. it crashes the driver? WTF nVidia?

To make matters worse, nvidia appear to have thunked the 32 bit drivers into 64 bit address space... so there doesn't seem to be a true 64 bit driver out there for vista at all. Can anyone comment on this??

The 97.xx drivers.. what Microsoft shipped with vista.. are probably the best and most stable drivers at this point. On some of the other forums the reviewers have gone back to "stock" drivers for Intel and nVidia hardware.. and this eliminates some of the apparent vista stability issues. Some people have had ok luck out of the 100.xx drivers..

The truth is, I think, no one expects the vista drivers for hardware we already have to be this amazing break through. What is a bit scary is that the driver support is apparently so poor at this point in time... and it is poorest on hardware supposedly designed with vista in mind. The RTM drivers for vista/older cards aren't that bad.. they're playable in a lot of cases.. A lot of people, myself included, are having problems with source engine games IF the settings are cranked up way high. 800x600? No problem. 1920x1200 4xAA 4xAF.. Heloooo Pink Checkerboard Textures!

I'm not too terribly miffed I can't game quite as well on XP SP2... I am more than a little disappointed the drivers are buggy for basic things like.. screensaver... overlay video playback... being up for more than 4 hours? Given the state of Vista and that the graphics subsystem hasn't really changed much since RC1 I would have expected much better drivers-- especially since there are all these vista techdemos floating around.. at least in the case of the 8800+vista.

New versions of Windows always slow down games!

If playing computationally demanding games is important to you then it is simple really, upgrading Windows is pretty much always a big mistake.

Every new version of Windows inherently runs at least slightly slower than the previous (and often much slower). I am still using Windows 2000 as games tend to run much faster with it than with Windows XP. I upgraded to XP but then went back to 2000 for that bit extra performance bonus ...my computer has decent specs but downgrading is still better than wasting a few bucks on a RAM upgrade!

Virtual memory randomizer

I wonder how many of those "mysterious" crashes have to do with Vista's built-in virtual memory randomizer. Such a thing exists also in OpenBSD and if I remember right, *A LOT* of old bugs were exposed in various packages... And since we all know the coding standards of a computer game...

Turn Down the FUD

There are two primary reasons for games not working perfectly on Vista:

1.) Crappy video drivers. (Especially nVidia drivers.)

2.) The game needs admin privs.

If you're a victim of crappy drivers, well, that's the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge, I guess. ATI's drivers are fairly good. They had WHQL certified drivers released before Vista's consumer launch. nVidia, on the other hand, is dragging their ass. They've had a long time to get these drivers done. If you want to blame somebody, blame them.

If the game doesn't run without admin privs, then blame the game manufacturer. How do you know ahead of time? Well, if it has the "Designed for Windows XP [microsoft.com]" logo on the box, you should be good to go. These games were certified by Microsoft, and as part of that certification, they couldn't do stupid crap like write to c:\Program Files. If your game doesn't have that logo, then who knows.

Luckily, games that require admin privs can still be run on Vista without too much trouble. Just right click the game icon and select "Run as Administrator". Even better, right click it, go to properties, select Compatibility, and check the "Run as Administrator" option so that it always runs as admin. This will solve 99% of most people's gaming issues.

But games that don't run on Vista have nothing to do with Vista's "complexity" (it's a freaking modern OS, of course it's complex...), and it has nothing to do with some DirectX 9 incompatibility (the Dx9 bits ship with Vista).

Not to mention the fact that other sites mention [extremetech.com] pretty good luck with running games on Vista.

As usual, compatibility issues have more to do with 3rd party incompetence than with the quality of Microsoft's OS.

Good timing!

And one Nvidia executive predicts that gamers may not routinely see games optimized for DirectX 10 until mid-2008.'

That's about the earliest I'll consider an "upgrade."

Could someone please copy DirectX...

Can't some kind of DirectX analogue be implemented on OSX?

It can't be much harder than the Mono project re-implementing .NET... :)

Games are the only thing keeping me on Windows.

Vista hate...

Ok, I'm getting a bit sick of this same old boring Vista bashing (yes I know I'm on /. where MS bashing is a almost national sport). I have just been playing F.E.A.R. using a shock-horror NVidia card and it plays fine - I simply had to download the Vista driver from Nvidia's site (maybe some of the newer DX10 cards have problems, my DX9 is fine). In fact, it actually seems to play faster than in XP!

Though a great advocate of Open Source and Linux, I'd like to think we can appreciate the good in Vista instead of taking cheap shots every 10 seconds. These people probably had very specific problems and threw their toys out of the pram. I'm not even reading TFA, this is just annoying now. Rationality people! Us intelligent Linux-loving Lisp-defending geeks need to show the masses rationality!!!

Land of the Dead/Other Unreal Engine games?

Dedicated server for Land of the Dead will not run in Vista, it just freezes, without actually doing anything.

Anyone know about other Unreal Engine games?

Vista - because gaming is not important to us

That's the message they're sending all of us who are now jumping ship to console gaming instead. My next laptop will be either a Mac or Linux - I've had it (and I've owned a Microsoft OS machine since they first shipped them).

Besides, Spore is going to run on the Wii - why wait?

Slowed by Security

An enemy has fired upon you... Cancel or Allow?

Fiji

So let's see here. DX10 games are coming mid-2008, and Fiji is due in 2009. Vista sucks on almost every computer it's possible to install it on.

I think we have another ME here, my friends.

Try consoles

Not to troll, but this is a good point in favor of playing games on consoles. They lack a mouse and keyboard setup, and they are less powerful than PCs for most of their lifespans, but if you like the games avaiable for them, they at least provide an almost completely stable, hassle-free platform for about five years before you have to replace them.

(Hmm, actually, I guess XP was a five-year platform, too.)

Vista is not fully backwards compatible

And frankly, that's fine by me. It's got some bullshit problems due to excessive DRM, but it also has some nice new features. We're testing Vista in the office and I have to say that compared to XP, it's a *big* improvement. I'm going to hold back on deployment for a good year, but I'm also going to recommend that once a major service pack is released (say SP1), we'll migrate our Windows desktops (and junk older machines that can't handle Vista).

Most of our lab desktops run Linux, but there has also been a big migration to MacOS X. I don't expect Vista to affect that migration. Grad students, postdocs, and most professors seem to still prefer Unix. But most of the administrators are used to Windows and badly want an upgrade.

I think that even in the academic world there is real pent up demand for a new Windows. And from what I've seen, Vista is a pretty damn good. (though I still prefer nix on my home box)

Vista

ehh, I had my doubts about XP when it came out.. I started using Vista RTM in November and have had a few problems with it. I want to strip it down, kill off a bunch of services and disable the new lame UAC shit.. it has potential but yeah, I think most of the comments here are right, wait for SP1 and it will be a production OS-- that's highly unprofessional, but it's what we've come to expect from the lumbering beast.

strange

I installed Vista Ultimae on my old pc with 512mb of ram a p4 2.8 cpu and a nvidia 6200 128mb gfx card. I cannot for the life of me find any problems i got counter strike source installed and day of defeat installed i have nothing to complain about they both run as perfect as they ever did. i would love to report something bad about vista but after using it from launch day i cannot report one crash or any driver issues everything in my pc is supported including my old tv tuner card which was made in 1999. im reading all these bad reports about vista on the web using my pc with vista which runs much better than xp ever did and all i can do is scratch my head and wonder what the fuck is going on do i believe the article or my lying eyes?

Not vista's fault

maybe someone has pointed this out - but the reason the FPS suck is not because vista sucks - but becuase the hardware manufacturers have failed to provide stable drivers for much of their hardware.

the 8800 gtx has terrible support at the momement with a number of users threating nvidia through www.nvidiaclassaction.org [nvidiaclassaction.org]. in general NVidia has been doing a poor job of supporting their hardware, for example under XP 64 the drivers are equally bad - barely implementing what is needed to perform well. at the vista launch a large portion of their motherboards (680a, 680i, NForce4)did not have WHQL drivers relased.

many software publishers have clearly not tested their software with vista as well making things less smooth.

vista has been under development for an extrodinarily long time - give then ease of aquiring the OS (CTP releases, RC releases), and wide availability of development tools that contain support for vista, the blame falls squarely on the hardware and software vendors who have not updated their software for this release.

Ironically, the upgrade to Vista on my AMD 4x4 [blogspot.com] has gone without incident. All of my games continute to work at roughly the same level as before. There are still some performance issues and a few interesting features of vista relating to multicore machines.

Holy hyperbole, batman!

Wow, I'm fucking shocked, I am. Doom 3 doesn't run on a platform it wasn't designed for. Neither does Half-Life 2. Sure, we could blame the hardware that wasn't designed for it, or the drivers that aren't ready, but instead, lets slag Micro$haft. Damn them!!! *shakes fist*. They should have kept their Crappy Vista in the goddamn box until everyones drivers and hardware was ready for it! And also, they should have included a magic genie that would notice I was installing it on my MMX200 and automatically configure it for best performance! God damnit, this box has run games perfectly since Windows 95 without me having to upgrade it ONCE, why do I have to now just because I installed Vista?!? WTF?!? Stupid Micro$uck and their money-grubbing ways!

There, did I cover the majority? Good, now STFU. New programs have trouble. New drivers take time to get to maturity. Old games need tweaks to work on new systems. It's the way life goes.

I think I should post a Slashdot story the next time I try to play my beautiful original copy of Descent on my XP3400+. I mean, goddamnit, things run so fast that one tap of the keyboard and I've flown across the room and slammed into a wall, and then that damn little yellow guy who's usually so weak I play bumpercars with him kills me before I can blink. Obviously, this is a Microsoft problem. StUpId MiCrO$hIt!

(But damnit, that's still the best 3/8 of a second in gaming....)

What about the performance improvements?

Reviews such as here [firingsquad.com] and here [anandtech.com] show that Vista gaming performance is actually better than XP's in Direct3D applications, at least with AMD's more mature drivers. OpenGL performance, on the other hand, is horrible, along with Nvidia's drivers altogether. But Vista gaming isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be.

DirectX compatibility in versions past

This reminded me of a question I'd had years ago: Suppose DX10 games start shipping and I've got a DX9 graphics card, say a 7800GTX.
Can I play these new games at all without buying a new card?
I'm sure the old one could manage a decent framerate on the new game just without the new shaders and whatnot. The last time this happened I managed to buy a DX9 card before any DX9 games appealed to me so I've never had to deal with it firsthand.
Did I answer my own question?

Gaming is the only reason to use windows.

The moment another, cheaper, OS can run games as fast, I'll stop stealing it. Until then I'll continue to run Linux on VMWare (paid for) to get all my real work done, but VMWare is a bit heavy to run in the background while gaming.

MS, please fix the Vista drivers so I may reinstall my pirate copy and continue to say that MS isn't totally evil.

Only themselves to blame

So in other words, there are a lot of gamers out there who are gullible enough to install a new MS operating system with the belief that it is going to provide a better gaming platform than what they had on Windows XP from the moment it is released.

I would suggest that those same people need to take some example from the majority of us using open source software who are *fully aware* that if you make a major update to your system, you may end up screwing up a piece of software that you were able to run fine previously.

I'm sorry, but whether you use Linux or Windows, you're a complete and utter fool if you always run the "latest and greatest" version of everything AND expect everything to run smoothly out of the box.

I guess that settles it

Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.

Absolute FUD

I've been running Vista Ultimate on my laptop since December. Being a developer, I run a local instance of SQL Server, various development IDEs, and I am an avid gamer. Just two weeks ago I attended a coworker's LAN party and decided to bring my laptop (it's a pretty beefy alienware). I had absolutely no problems playing the following games:

Counter-Strike
Far Cry
Battlefield 1942
Warcraft 3

If you are running Vista and have a problem running a game, try going into the executables properties and first try to run it as administrator, if that doesn't work run in it compatibility mode. Battlefield was the only game on that list that required me to do this.

Also, FYI, I achieved framerates in these games of around 60fps, which while isn't a number a graphics afficiando would brag on, it's more than sufficient to have a smooth gaming experience.

Fool me once...

It was 19 hundred and ninety and eight, when I, a mere computing novice, rushed to the store and purchased the latest and greatest update to windows to my perfectly operable 5 month old PC. After the "upgrade", my system was trashed. The cd rom worked half the time, my favorite game became extremly buggy, and the sound showed up whenever it took a notion. And all of this was accompanied by oh so many pretty blue screens, with their helpful messages and hexadecimal character strings. So Microhard can keep their Vista eye candy and I will keep my reasonably operable XP SP2. And this will be my last windows system, thank you very much.

Cynical Response

"Chris Donahue, manager of Microsoft's Games for Windows group, says the company has tested 1,000 popular games from the past five years. Most work well with Vista, he said, declining to elaborate how many had problems and why."

"I'd be very surprised to see any games that hit the market from this point forward straight out not support Windows Vista," - Chris Donahue.

They thought the games we had to be compatible and expect the games to come to be compatible. If the games they already thought were compatible have proven to be incompatible... what does that mean for the upcoming titles? Maybe they need an Oxford Dictionary, because this is not the first time these folks have dropped the ball on compatibility. Maybe they just don't understand the meaning of the word?

Is this a conspiracy to force all die hard PC gamers to buy Xboxs? FPS or RTS with a controller? I have used the perfect setup (PC keyboard and mouse) why would I want that? Oh because I can't play anything on my PC now because MS can't sort their shit out? Or just Microsoft not really able to figure out what they're doing? Or Both? They don't sell PC, but they do sell Xboxs.

Why only FPSs?

So if we switch to a third person view we'll be ok then?

Why upgrade?

I don't get it. I'm having no problem playing Leisure Suit Larry on my Windows 95 machine...

My FPS is fine

Whatever, I run vista with only a gig of ram, my 64 bit chip, and a nvidia 7600 GT card and counter-strike source plays as well as it did in XP. It does crash occasionally, but thats because I only have a gig of ram.

why bother?

I have to wonder, then, why bother to support Vista at all until next year?

OK, I'm bitter. Game execs seem to be willing to care more about the young and unproven DirectX 10 than all the people on (the mature platforms) Mac OS X and Linux who are probably more than willing to pay a little extra for a good game.

It' slike that episode of DS9 I watched last night: clothing Ferengi females simultaneously doubles both the consumer base and workforce. Like the FCA, execs of game publishers and developers are more concerned about exploiting their current market (and a too-immature and almost non-existent market) than about expanding it into a larger base.

Economically, it doesn't make sense.

It makes me want to throw chairs at people.

Re:All Aboard the FUD Train

Only problem with nVidia drivers I've had, since Vista Beta 2, is that console windows can't go fullscreen, since "The system does not support fullscreen." This means you can rule out playing DOS games, unless you use DOSbox (which is slow) or a virtual machine solution (which can be very difficult to set up right). Not too big a loss since even with tools like VDMSound DOS game emulation under NT has never been great.

Re:All Aboard the FUD Train

You!=everyone

Some gamers have experienced issues with their favorite games. And I'm sure some of them updated to the newest drivers as a first resort before posting problems on the internet. Really this was not unexpected. Every new release of software (especially a Windows OS) is not without problems. This only reinforces my opinion that if I were to get Vista it won't be until SP1 at least. The pattern for MS may still hold true:

Version 1.0: Buggy, unstable. Win95, ME, XP
Version 2.0: Some fixes, more stability. Win98, XP SP1
Version 3.0: More fixes, mostly stable. Win98SE, XP SP2
Version 4.0: There is no version 4. Start with another Version.

That and

I've never met a group of people who can cause so many problems as the Computer Ricers. The Computer Ricers are the people that continually screw around with their systems in a misguided attempt to get more performance. They run beta drivers, they squabble over 50 3DMark points (out of 10,000), they always have to run the latest, greatest software. These people break systems in ways I can't even dream of, they have problems that no normal person ever encounters.

Well when they do, they go and scream loudly about it on forums. It's never their fault, it's always the evil hardware manufacturer or OS maker or whatever. It's never the fact that they screw around with their software, overclock their hardware to the point of instability and so on, nope it's someone else and by god they are going to give them holy hell on a forum for it!

I encountered this with the 8800, nVidia's new card. I decided I wanted one, despite seeing people having tons of problems in forums. Well, I took the time to read the directions and make sure I had what I needed (such as a power supply that gave it sufficient power) and that I did what I should (such as using Drivercleaner to scrub the old drivers). Lo and behold, it works great. I don't have problems weird problems with it, my games don't crash, it's just a newer, faster card.

Basically I've found that you have to take any negative comments on the Internet with a grain of salt and check the source. If it's a tech professional who's done some proper testing, ok worth listening to (though a single point of data does not make a trend). However if it's a Computer Ricer, just ignore it. In all likelihood they caused the problems they are having.

Re:Didn't we have an article...

OpenGL games only suffer when run in windowed mode, the same would happen in Beryl on linux.

Why?

I mean, I can run a reasonably modern game with support for in-game cameras -- say, Doom 3 (native Linux port), which can show me just as much detail on an in-game screen as I see in the rest of the game -- or Half-Life 2, where the demo showed someone tossing a camera around, and the screens behaving realistically.

So what's so hard about, say, showing an OpenGL game in a window? Is it trying to run two GL apps at once, that don't necessarily cooperate (game and window manager)? Or is it a driver issue?

For the record, I don't know about the sort of stacking effect you'd have with the window manager trying to do GL stuff to a game window (which has its own GL stuff), but I do know that I'm able to get reasonably good performance out of running more than one GL game at a time in windowed mode on Linux (without Beryl).

Re:Slow to emerge

One way or another, early adopters almost always get screwed.

Re:Didn't we have an article...

a couple of months ago that predicted FPS games would suffer due to the DRM?

What does this have to do with DRM? It's driver issues, plain and simple. As is always the case, don't use the WHQL-certified drivers provided by Windows Update. You'll always find newer, better drivers by visiting nVidia or ATI's web sites directly.

And a subsequent astroturfing article attempting to convince us otherwise?

I assume you're referring to this [slashdot.org] article. How is that astroturfing? The response was done on the Vista team blog, which is a Microsoft property and is in no way trying to pass itself off as an unrelated third party. Whether or not you believe what they say has nothing to do with the response being astroturf.

Sucks to be a cursing Anonymous Coward

Best gaming play is still via the computer for many types of games. And I agree, don't buy Vista.

Re:It beats

Who needs anything other than WoW?

Re:Not one comment..

There are no comments about the Aero UI being a problem, because it's NOT. You may have noticed that when a fullscreen game is run, the desktop switches to the basic UI (2D) just before entering fullscreen. The reverse happens when quitting or alt-tabbing to the desktop. I don't know what happens when running windowed, but fullscreen definitely does not have issues with the 3D desktop running in the background because it's doesn't.

I think this will be my last comment about Vista for a while. People just don't seem to think MS might have actually done something smart for a change.

Just tried it.

I'm curious if the same thing would happen on OS X... Also, what about DirectX windows? (Does DirectX even have a windowed mode?) I seem to remember all the uproar was about layering OpenGL on top of DirectX -- I'm guessing, looking at this now, that DirectX games would have to go through the same thing (if they run windowed).

From what I can remember benchmarking at before, my UT2004 is running at fullscreen, at decent speed, on Beryl on Linux. It does this because I told Beryl to not do any sort of indirection on fullscreen windows. (This took me from ~25 fps to ~50 fps, so I know it did something.)

(As far as I'm concerned, it should kill the indirection as soon as there aren't any effects on that window anymore. Of course this means a drop shadow would lag you... Maybe the indirection will get fast enough, eventually, that no one will care?)

I also have one old 2D MMO which I run in a window, and apparently the latest Beryl SVN has a keystroke for toggling indirection on a given window. Therefore, I should be able to easily run that game at full speed. However, it's old enough and slow enough that it really shouldn't matter, so I haven't checked out the SVN version. Also, there is a keystroke for taking an app fullscreen, which would presumably disable the indirection.

I mean, other than the "running a whole separate game" thing, there shouldn't be much performance degredation for simple GL apps -- no more, at least, than if you were actually running two windowed GL games side by side.

Also tried: xv works, with no noticeable performance hit until I started dragging the window around (dragging any window which does animation causes the whole WM to lag -- not significantly (down to maybe 10 FPS, which seems to be what OS X's UI operates at), but noticeable.

Also: Surprisingly, xvmc works, again with no noticeable performance hit. It does cause problems when dragging a window around, though -- I believe this used to work pretty much as expected, whereas in Beryl it's possible to figure out what's going on, but it's far from graceful.