Gamers React to Vista Launch

As cranky as IT folks are about having to roll out new Vista installs, support them, update them, etc, gamers are matching them in irritation. Ars Technica recommends you dual-boot XP and Vista if you want to keep gaming on your PC. Voodoo Extreme explores Vista's crappy audio setup, while Computer and VideoGames reports that some small developers think Vista will ruin PC gaming (a comment we've heard before). C&VG does have a slightly more hopeful article up too, talking about the future of Vista gaming and what the new OS could mean for games ... once all the kinks are worked out.

Gaming Performance on Vista

[Vigile]

Just thought I drop a link to this article that actually looks at current gaming performance on Vista for both NVIDIA and ATI:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=3 54&pid=2 [pcper.com]

Lack of hardware sound

[Frenchy_2001]

Voodoo extreme has nothing to do with this article. They are only pointing to it.
The real article is at IGN:
http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.html [ign.com]

Please, skip the redirections and ad views...

And I must say that this decision (no hardwrae acceleration) will badly hurt Creative Labs. Maybe, just maybe, this screw up will restart some competition in the sound card market?

Re:sound information

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

One of the articles says that hardware acceleration is no longer available in Vista, but doesn't say why (aside from the fact that MS didn't include it in their sound layer rewrite). Is this mainly a DRM thing?

Actually, MS pulled the API in vista and replaced it with one that did not run in kernel space, which is a good thing in general. The problem is they did not provide properly for backwards compatibility so games that used that API sound like crap. Other games that used OpenAL, still sound fine and at least one card manufacturer is providing a translation layer from the old API to OpenAL (sort of like WINE and DirectX). Some of the games that use the old, MS specific API are surprising. World of Warcraft, for example. I mean they had to write it for OpenAL to get the Mac and Linux versions working and they released the Mac version at the same time as the Windows version. Is support for OpenAL that poor on Windows? guess they implemented DirectX as well as OpenGL too. Is their toolset just built to do both anyway or what?

Re:Some positive side effects

[TheMidnight]

Unfortunately it doesn't break WildTangent. I had to uninstall the stuff off my new Vista HP machine.

Re:sound information

[Ksempac]

M$ completely changed the way sound is processed on Vista. On Vista, the default system is the shared mode. Every sound of the system will be processed by a single software layer. This allows developers to play sounds regardless of the underlying hardware. However, this also prevents DirectSound and DirectSound3D from accessing the hardware. It also remove EAX.

There is a solution to that : the exclusive mode. Sound cards makers can create a driver, which will get total control of the sound system. This would allows them to make EAX works again, but right now, Creative (which we can say is the biggest sound card maker for gamers) is lazy and released drivers without support for EAX,Dolby Digital,DTS,6.1 sound...(btw they also said most of their webcam wont get drivers for Vista)

So it is more of a "lazy sound card maker" problem than a Vista problem (NVidia and ATI did make drivers for their card didn t they ?)

Re:sound information

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

So it is more of a "lazy sound card maker" problem than a Vista problem (NVidia and ATI did make drivers for their card didn t they ?)

From what I understand the problem is not the cards don't support Vista's new sound APIs, it's that current games don't use them and the way MS has the software work-around function defaults to not detecting hardware. From the article Creative is the only one with a working solution, using a layer to translate to OpenAL. Audigy and Soundblaster cards simply play a lot of games with really crappy sound. Nvidia has always relied upon the OpenAL API and thus has no work to do. I don't know about ATI.

Future games will probably use Windows new APIs to do the audio work in software and work fine, or use hardware support for the cards via OpenAL, but the a large portion of the current games who used the MS proprietary sound APIs, instead of the open standard OpenAL, will have spotty sound support on many cards.

Re:Xbox?

[StikyPad]

now that Microsoft has a console, we are supposed to stop gaming on PCs?

Nope. Apparently you haven't heard about Microsoft's efforts [gamesforwindows.com] to revitalize PC gaming. Well, now you have.

Vista Works for Me

[TheMidnight]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I like Vista so far. I bought it last night at midnight on a new HP machine, and so far, it's really nice. Of course, I got a 22" LCD monitor to go with it, which makes reading Slashdot almost magical. :-)

I installed Doom 3 and Quake IV on the system (the newest games I have since I bought an Xbox 360 a few months ago) and they ran just fine. I got about 60 fps on both games at high (not maximum) detail settings and no noticable lag or excess hard drive activity. I had no sound problems or video problems. Granted, being a brand new Vista system the driver issues others were seeing are probably moot.

So far, I'm impressed. Vista is light-years beyond XP and is right up there with Mac OSX. I have a Mac laptop and I'll say they are a little similar, but not a rip-off. The main similarities to me are the login screen and the gadget sidebar, which looks an awful lot like the Dashboard mated with the Dock. For gaming, Vista is top-notch. I've also heard (not verified) that a game for Vista will be able to play someone on the Xbox360 on my home network in the same game. If that's true, that would give me good reason to buy lots of new games for both platforms and have people over.

Re:Followed the link to voodoo extreme...

[Assmasher]

I am totally 100% incorrect about this and I apologize. Back when the first DX10 betas shipped, we tested on Vista and found that we got all the HAL layers we expected. I have tested it intermittently over the past year with no problems; however, I just ran our tool again against the latest SDK and found that I get 'Emulation.' (We used to get WDM.)

Apologies again for jumping about 10 meters past the gun.

Re:sound information

[Chris Burke]

World of Warcraft, for example. I mean they had to write it for OpenAL to get the Mac and Linux versions working and they released the Mac version at the same time as the Windows version.

Blizzard hasn't done jack for Linux, at least as far as development goes. They have worked with Transgaming to help Transgaming fix some issues with Cedega, and to restore accounts of Linux users that were erroneously flagged as bot-users. There is no "linux version" of the game, though. Cedega runs the Windows version of wow, and uses whatever audio driver the windows version uses.

They did implement both directX and OpenGL, and both can be used under Windows, so maybe it similarly has an OpenAL path on Windows.

Re:My Reaction is... screen res not important

[WillAffleckUW]

Actually, Red Steel is one of the worst games on the Wii. Most are 4 or 5 star out of 5 games, like Rayman's Raving Rabbids, Zelda, Trauma Center, etc. Don't judge a console by it's worst title. Just as we shouldn't judge the PS3 by the only good non-cross-platform game for it, Resistance: Fall of Man (the only good one so far).

Now, I admit the 360 is coming out with a bunch of games, but for some reason most of the good games are Japan-region-encoded. Which means not gonna happen.

However, this proves the point that WinVista is not needed for modern gamers - we have many decent platforms to play them on, ranging from Wii to PS3 to 360 to Mac to Linux/BSD.