Gaming Post-Vista — Myths and Realities

Ant writes "An article at Ten Ton Hammer answers personal computer/PC gamers' question on what's coming their way with Microsoft's newest operating system/OS, Windows Vista. With the PC primed to be the primary distribution platform for certain gaming categories (MMOGs in particular) for many years to come, it's important to know exactly what we're getting into when Vista rolls out worldwide on January 30, 2007. Jeff 'Ethec' Woleslagle offers a quick, non-technical rebuttal to several of the more ambitious PC gaming rumors cropping up around the internet." From the article: "Games which seek to take advantage of DirectX 10 high-end features like Shader Model 4.0 (which the graphically revamped version of EVE Online will aspire to use) will require a computer fully compatible with DirectX 10. This in turn requires a GPU fully optimized to work with DX 10 (such as the first-to-market NVidia 8800). The Microsoft requirements for a DX10 'optimized' GNU and system are fairly strict, so jaded gamers take note: this phrase is more than a marketing maneuver. For those among you that can't afford a major hardware upgrade anytime soon, don't fret (yet). Microsoft's XNA framework enables developers to easily develop parallel versions of a game for DX 9 and DX 10. Here's hoping that developers and publishers will be equally accommodating in releasing XP / Vista compatible games in the same box."

Comments

Forget Graphics, Think Audio

[rsmith-mac]

It's not the graphical changes that gamers should be worried about with Vista, it's the changes to the audio subsystem. MS completely rebuilt that subsystem for Vista, it's now a black-box for all intents and purposes that takes program inputs and dumps fully processed audio streams that just need to be hit with a DAC to be presented. The problem with this is that it means that audio cards can no longer bind to the audio subsystem at anywhere other than this endpoint, which breaks a lot of 3D audio features such as EAX and some HRTF's(for simulating 3D audio from directions where there are no speakers) since these cards need the raw data from the games and not the fully processed streams.

OpenAL bypasses this limitation, but anything that uses DirectSound3D(which is most older games and some modern games) now gets neutered on systems with high-end audio cards. Of course this mainly screws over Creative since EAX3+ is a closed spec anyhow(and you won't find much love for that), but since no one is or will be working on a competing standard anyhow, it's just going to make things harder for everyone since it breaks the only modern standard.

The graphical changes due to DX10 won't cause much trouble, MS has thought this through both forwards and back, but there are going to be a lot of angry EAX users once Vista comes out.