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.'"

Damn DirectX...

[DarkMorph]

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??

It's the HD DRM

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Didn't we have an article...

[SanityInAnarchy]

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:All Aboard the FUD Train

[carl0ski]

you live in a dream world?
Windows 98 was a disaster compared to 95 in stability.

Windows 98 introduced brand new cutting edge levels of instability
Windows 95 was very simple bland and stable
Windows 95C added new features but was kept simple and a true stability upgrade.
Wheres 2k in your list?
1. Windows 95
2. Windows 95C
3. Windows 98
4. Windows 98SE
5. Windows ME


Tell me with a straight face the latest revision is always the best

Re:People Were Right!

[EastCoastSurfer]

Don't forget Blizzard. The largest MMO right now runs great on OSX.

Re:That and

[ryan420]

Sycraft-fu has a very valid and insightful point. Complaints about this stuff on Internet forums can be incredibly misleading. People that don't have problems don't usually go out of their way to post about it. It's the small percentage of people with some esoteric issue that often seek out an audience on public forums. I'm not saying problems don't exist, but it's mostly a problem of perception.

Just as a point of reference, I have an nVidia 8800 GTS running in Vista without any problems. I haven't had a single lockup since installing Vista.

I'm not a huge gamer, but the games I have tried so far (WoW, Company of Heroes, Flight Sim X) are performing exceptionally well under Vista. I'm getting over 100 FPS in IronForge right now. ;-)

Re:Damn DirectX...

[rsmith-mac]

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)

Re:People Were Right!

[Bocconcini]

And cleartype. I haven't been able to find workign alternative for W2k.

Re:Parent is spot-on.

[catalystmaker]

Hi Terry Makedon here and I am the Manager of Software Product Management at AMD (former ATI). I will assume you don't work for AMD since your viewpoints are absolutely contradictory to our position on the topic of Vista. Here at AMD we don't believe driver development for Vista is a nightmare. In fact I have polled many Software Engineers and Architects within AMD and they thought developing Vista drivers was quite a satisfying experience. Sure it's a new driver model and a great amount of code had to be written but it's not inherently more difficult to write or validate than the XP driver was. Granted, if you start late and don't have adequate amount of time to plan, execute, and validate then everything will seem relatively difficult and the resulting quality will suffer. This is true for any software development project. At AMD we feel that we started the project early enough and planned for it thoroughly and in fact our software engineers delivered a solid driver that made the marketing promises very easy to fulfill. On top of that it is incorrect to assume that quality can be built into any software product in a hurry after the first release. In many cases, the initial design, if rushed, would result in an inherently unstable pieces of software that cannot be fixed by solely debugging after the fact. At least not in a hurry. In such cases, it would take a major redesign to raise the quality up to an acceptable level. My advice: I strongly encourage everyone to upgrade to Vista, and with Catalyst you can expect a great experience and easy upgrade. Worldwide press have praised us on the AERO experience we help deliver, the top notch stability and gaming performance that is very close and often surpasses XP performance. In fact Rahul Sood (president and CEO of VoodooPC) wrote this in his blog today "One could probably assume that ATI's tight support for Vista may have a significant market ripple somewhere down the line - but that's just a guess." Source: http://www.rahulsood.com/2007/02/ati-kung-fu-bette r-than-nvidia.html [rahulsood.com]