Will Vista Run Your Games?

mikemuch writes "With Vista reaching the more stable beta 2 designation, Jason Cross at ExtremeTech decided to run a slew of popular PC games -- Oblivion, F.E.A.R, GTA, Civ IV, WoW, and more -- on the OS to see what will and won't run, and how well. His findings are encouraging, but unsurprisingly the OS is not quite ready for prime time. Some work is needed on the part of driver writers, Microsoft, and game developers to get the gaming experience ready for launch day. The biggest problem he found was StarForce copy protection and a performance drop-off in many of the games when using anti-aliasing. From the article: 'With Microsoft proclaiming a "PC gaming renaissance" around the launch of Vista, they need to really deliver a fantastic experience, and it's not quite there yet.'"

Comments

Not exactly a StarForce problem

[IamTheRealMike]

Nearly every copy protection system uses kernel drivers, and if Vista isn't happy about loading older drivers I'd expect variant of these problems to affect many games and some apps too (Picasa and iTunes both use kernel level code for some features).

Blaming this on StarForce specifically hardly seems fair unless there's a specific reason Microsoft are blocking it from loading ....

I'm not sure that's the question

[Dark Paladin]

The question isn't "Can it run my games", but "Is there a value to installing Vista that will make my games run better"?

The only reason why I have a WIndows box is for the games (and if they ever get the virtualization stuff fast enough in OS X, then that goes too). It runs XP, and seems to work OK (except that Oblivion keeps shutting down. Shrug.)

With Vista, the two extra goodies are:

ESRB rating lockdown - as a Dad of three, that's all right. Personally, I find it easier not to buy my children games I don't feel they should be playing, or let them play it - but OK, it's a nice feature.

DirectX 10, which evidently will *only* be Vista (though I've yet to see a technological reason why it can't go into XP other than "We need a reason for you to upgrade to Vista).

DirectX 10 won't really be interesting to me until I upgrade the video card, and in a year with the Wii, and maybe a reduced-price PS3 purchase next year, I don't see myself upgrading to Vista then for DX10 until at least 2008 - which would be in time for the first service pack to come out to fix the things they missed in Vista.

So, for these two things, I'm not ready to shell out the $130 or whatever it will cost - but I guess it's good to know that the games that run under the gaming OS I use now will continue to run.

DX10 question

[DarthChris]

MS officially announced (some time ago) that there would be a SP3 for XP, and that it would contain some of Vista's new API's etc. My wonder is that maybe they will stick DX10 in that, given sufficient community pressure?