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Vista Not Playing Nice With FPS Games 437

Posted by kdawson from the shoot-em-up dept.
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.'"
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Vista Not Playing Nice With FPS Games More

Vista Not Playing Nice With FPS Games

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  • People Were Right! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12, 2007 @06:55PM (#17989568)
    Everyone who accused Vista of copying OS X were dead on!
    • Yeah, they both suck running on Dells and Gateways.

      • Re:People Were Right! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) * on Monday February 12, 2007 @08:42PM (#17990860) Journal
        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: (Score:3, Informative)

          by newt0311 ( 973957 )

          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).

          Thats because XP was nothing more than a repackaged version of windows 2000 with a different GUI. The kernel was essentially the same so a few very minor changes in the code (or sometimes none at all) were enough to port the drivers. Vista on the other hand, is a completely rewritten kernel. I don't know specifics, but there are probably massive changes in the driver structure in the kernel especially since the drivers must now support DRM, driver signing, etc... Not like I care, I am quite happy running G

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Except that Vista already has more games and more users than OSX...

      Funny how the world works.

      • Re:People Were Right! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by laffer1 ( 701823 ) <luke@@@foolishgames...com> on Monday February 12, 2007 @08:35PM (#17990784) Homepage Journal
        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: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ravenshrike ( 808508 )
          Y'know, if everyone's having problems writing advanced graphics drivers for Vista, perhaps the real problem is the structure MS implements. After all, it's technically MS's responsibility that the emulation software for DX9 and OGL works. More so the former than the latter perhaps, but they have yet to do even that.
    • What did they copy, exactly? Was your post supposed to be funny or something?

      • Re:People Were Right! (Score:5, Funny)

        by Brian Gordon ( 987471 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @08:13PM (#17990540)
        They copied OS X's inability to play mainstream games.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cytg.net ( 912690 )
      indeed .. Vista is like a bad linux distro out of 98' ..
  • 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.

  • Damn DirectX... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DarkMorph ( 874731 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @06:59PM (#17989602)
    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... (Score:5, Informative)

      by HFXPro ( 581079 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:05PM (#17989680)
      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? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:23PM (#17989916) Journal
        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... (Score:5, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:27PM (#17989972) Journal
        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... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @11:39PM (#17992650)
          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? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HappySqurriel ( 1010623 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:00PM (#17989626)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Drey ( 1420 )
      Many new systems being sold through retail stores only come with Vista.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Danse ( 1026 )

        Many new systems being sold through retail stores only come with Vista.

        Right, and they use Vista as a selling point, encouraging people to upgrade to it, instead of warning them off as they should if they actually cared about the experience their customers were going to have. They should be waiting at least until the first service pack is out.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by mrbcs ( 737902 )
          Warn them? Shit, the service calls are where they make all their money.

          This is like Christmas for the Computer shops.

          1. Sell clueless user unnecessary upgrade.

          2. Let them play with it for a couple days and break it.

          3. ??????

          4. They bring it back to get "fixed"

          5. Profit!!!

    • To me at least this is as old as windows and perhaps it has always been true. A new OS reduces the performance of your computer when it comes to games.

      Remember Windows 3.1 and before? The fast majority of games in those days were DOS games. Simple reason, the whole GUI was not needed and back then the OS and the GUI were still clearly seperated between DOS and Windows.

      Same is true for linux, you can get far better performance for a single purpose graphical app doing things directly then going through X. O

    • I completely agree that beta testing of Vista is best left to others. For those folks who love buggy software which will break their devices and who love the mystery of trying to find out why things don't work anymore. Kind of like the car mechanic with the car that works when it wants too and whose hood is always up. I don't see myself rushing out to buy a buggy, DRM filled Operating System that doesn't offer anything new other than that the need for a whole new computer to use it and at that, the thing is

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)

      by gad_zuki! ( 70830 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:51PM (#17990276)
      >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!
    • In theory, one upgrades because the value added by the features to the new version outweigh the uncertainty about the new version's stability, security, etc. The problem with Vista is that the equation doesn't balance properly. The new features of Vista are Aero, better searching, more logical file structure, and numerous minor tweaks to security and performance, but the unknowns are of a similar or greater weight as the benefits. Especially when one factors in that the users most concerned about the featur

  • It's the HD DRM (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:27PM (#17989982)

      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.

      • Stick with XP or buy a Mac.


        Your post was actually sounding *a bit plausible* until this part. A Mac for games? :D Oh my god...

      • Re:Parent is spot-on. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Spikeles ( 972972 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @10:19PM (#17991914)
        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

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ozphx ( 1061292 )
      Disclaimer: The above post is a complete load of bollocks.

      Protected Video Path is not some complex trickery embedded deep in the bowels* of the OS snooping on your every move. Think of it as a wrapper codec, like an encrypted stream. Highly simplified it works like so:

      Your HDDVD has an encrypted movie on it, which you want to play. Windows has a quick check to see if all your components support PVP.

      If they do support PVP, then it sets up a stream which passes the encrypted movie all the way happily thru the
    • The DRM you speak of (HDCP) does not affect video games, but rather HD protected content such as Blu-Ray, HD-DVD or protected content from a cablebox. Since video games are not protected video, they are NOT affected by HDCP, which is what downscales the resolution on non-hdcp compliant hardware.

      Even if DRM is at the root of most of the problems you are working on, it has nothing to do with 3D graphics stability, and does not explain the issues people are encountering in the article. Besides, the articl

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by GFree ( 853379 )
        Stop using facts damnit! :)

        People are so desperate to bash Vista that they'll take any ol' piece of information and twirl it around to create something entirely different. It's ridiculous. Why can't they just let people whatever OS they want in peace?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )

      Don't blame ATI or NVIDIA, blame Microsoft for this one.

      While I blame Micros~1 for foisting this on the computing populace, a very large measure of blame rests upon you guys (ATI/AMD, NVidia) for going along with it.

      When Microsoft presented their protected video path/DRM/copy protection suite and asked you to sign on to it, your correct response should have been, "Fuck off." (An ideal subsequent response would have been to get cracking on Linux and/or Mac support, since it was clear Microsoft was going

  • 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.

    • The solution should be simple enough - don't accept OEM. It's a ridiculously restrictive license that Microsoft makes bucketloads from. If you continually replace your computer and pay for an OEM license every time, you're losing money big time compared with what you would spend on a copy of Windows that you can reuse on a new computer. And if the vendor gives you crap when you ask for a computer without Windows preinstalled, since you already have a copy, take your business elsewhere.

      OEM is stupid and nee

      • I'm not understanding how one loses money buying OEM products?

        I've been purchasing many things marked as OEM and have been saving money since the product is still covered by warranty.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Winckle ( 870180 )
          You misunderstand, he is not talking about cheap computer components, he is talking about OEM Windows licences. OEM licences are more restrictive, they can only be installed on a single motherboard for example.

          Heck everyone loves cheap OEM parts!
    • I don't know that ms are falling all over themselves, but for "cutting edge" stuff, it seems, in addition to the cutting, leading, and bleeding edges, we need a few more "edges" on the "vista" ahead...:

      -- gasping
      -- panting
      -- fainting
      -- shitting
      -- thrombic
      -- cataleptic

      Maybe when enough people die to upgrade, things might change?
    • The new XPS systems don't ship with Vista if they have NVIDIA cards in them, from what I hear. They still ship with XP.
    • Tell him the truth. Tell him that Vista has all sorts of problems, that his games will crash, and that due to OEM licensing deals, it is very hard to get a computer that has XP on it. His ire will be right where it belongs. On Dell and MS. Protecting the less technically inclined from the truth is not protecting them at all.

  • Nothing surprising (Score:5, Funny)

    by Red Moose ( 31712 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:06PM (#17989716)
    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.

  • 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.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • What??? (Score:4, Funny)

    by oojah ( 113006 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:17PM (#17989850) Homepage

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

    Since when has gentoo had DirectX 10?

    Cheers,

    Roger

  • 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 adv

  • They even copied THAT from the Mac (Score:5, Funny)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) * on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:21PM (#17989900) Journal
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by antifoidulus ( 807088 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:24PM (#17989932) Homepage Journal
    When Duke Nukem Forever comes out, PC gamers will forget about all those old, now dull looking toys.
    • I hear they are optimizing Duke for service pack 4 but I'm not holding my breath, they didn't say service pack 4 of which OS.

  • Tips for Vista Gaming: (Score:5, Informative)

    by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <(megazzt) (at) (gmail.com)> on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:34PM (#17990062) Homepage
    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.

  • NVidia certainly dropped the ball (Score:5, Informative)

    by hklingon ( 109185 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:39PM (#17990116) Homepage
    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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by StikyPad ( 445176 )
      just using windows can cause the machine to spazz out randomly

      That's not a bug, it's a feature designed to engage the user emotionally.
  • 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

  • Virtual memory randomizer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DimGeo ( 694000 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:44PM (#17990166) Homepage
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

    by ThinkFr33ly ( 902481 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:45PM (#17990184)
    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! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by PhxBlue ( 562201 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @07:45PM (#17990196) Homepage Journal

    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."

  • 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... (Score:2, Informative)

    by joevai ( 952546 )

    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 inste

  • 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?

  • Slowed by Security (Score:5, Funny)

    by QuantumFlux ( 228693 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @08:03PM (#17990408)
    An enemy has fired upon you... Cancel or Allow?

  • 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.)

  • Not vista's fault (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zebra_X ( 13249 ) on Monday February 12, 2007 @09:15PM (#17991216)
    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.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @03:00AM (#17994156)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I guess that settles it (Score:3, Funny)

    by gosand ( 234100 ) on Tuesday February 13, 2007 @05:47AM (#17994982)
    Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.

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