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

Article error

[Proud like a god]

"a DX10 "optimized" GNU (sic)."

Try GPU. Are there no editors anywhere?

I can do without games that.....

[saur2004]

require DX10, that is of course until Wine gets DX10 compatibility. ;P

IMHO by 2008 we get Vista only games

[gsn]

Pretty soon, several games will be Vista only - Halo 2 comes to mind. I'd say by 2008 most stuios will start being Vista only or XP but with reduced settings. This is ok - serious gamers tend to upgrade hardware much more frequently than the average Joe user - every 1.5 years I thinkis about right. New games are pretty high priced so pretty much only serious gamers are buying them anyways - the average Joes wait a while until the price goes down. My only concern is that Vista is supposed to divert all system resources towards games when in play - wether it will actually work before a few dozen patches is a concern - and Vista consumes a crap load of resources even to run in the background - how much of a dent will that be on performance?

Re:Minimum requirements

[Drogo007]

In my 8 years in the video game industry (1995 - 2003) minimum requirements were always a tricky issue all-around. The first company I worked for (R.I.P. Access Software Inc.) had a habit of pushing the limit of hardware - forcing customers to upgrade to play the newest version of the game. Since I started in Tech Support, I got to hear a surprisingly large number of calls from 80-year old farts who had heard we were coming out with a new version of Links (golf game) and wondering what they needed to buy to run it.

A couple of years later as a tester with a very large publisher, I got stuck with the job of verifying (and helping to set) minimum specs. The marketing guys had all kinds of statistics on average machine and how doubling the minimum RAM reduced our target market by X%, etc etc etc

Very rarely did any technology less than 3 years old even figure into the discussion on what the minimum hardware was that we absolutely HAD to support to have a chance of selling enough games to keep the studio afloat. And there was a lot of pushback from the developers to try and add any technology (rendering, sound, etc) that wasn't supported on the minimum machine just because that meant there was all kinds of complexity involved (essentially they wound up writing two complete, parallel games - Software Renderers vs. Hardware Renderers for 3d is one fine example)

MS has lined up a couple of high-profile "exclusives" to try and hype gaming on Vista. But I'd be willing to bet that most video game developers/publishers are going to continue to target WinXP/2k users for years to come, simply to maximize their market.

Vista? Direct X 10?

[Yvan256]

If anything, developpers should stop, take a good look, and switch to Open GL (which works on Windows, OS X and Linux/BSD AFAIK) instead of getting even more dependent on Microsoft proprietary "solutions".

Re:Vista? Direct X 10?

[lolocaust]

That would work, and games could be ported easily to everything except the Xboxes. Even in 10 years time it'll be simple to port a classic game to a mobile phone to maximize revenue. I'm interested to know why large developers tend to go for DirectX solutions when they have to port it to openGL anyway for the Playstations and the last two Nintendo consoles.

Re:Vista? Direct X 10?

[Svartalf]

And, how many times does it need to be said that there's alternatives to each piece. In fact, the big studios don't use much of ANY of DirectX' stuff directly- because they're anticipating a port to a console. So they use Miles, FMOD, or OpenAL for sound. They typically have rolled their own network stack code, but now, there's TNL, RakNet, and Grapple (It's not portable yet, but that's on my plate, so it's soon...). There's little reason to be even USING their DirectX APIs because they LIMIT you (And in some cases, MS has deprecated them- DirectPlay, the network layer, for example...)- and in many cases, things like Miles works MUCH better than the DirectFoo equivalent and plugs into the same low-level hooks in the OS.

Unless you're targeting X-Box, there's little need for using DirectX. If you plan on targeting X-Box, you're better off making a rendering
abstraction layer that insulates the game from the choice of either, picking other things for sound like Miles or OpenAL, and then grabbing
a license for TNL/RakNet or rolling your own or grabbing Grapple and finishing the minimal work to make it run under Windows.

OpenGL?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why doesn't the game industry use more OpenGL? There are success stories from it and using OpenGL allows easy porting to Linux and Mac. If also using SDL or similar, the game might require virtually no changes to be cross-platform.

Re:OpenGL?

[big4ared]

Very few people use opengl for a variety of reasons. The main reason is that in order to do anything useful, you have to use a ton of extensions. That, and opengl is still getting it's act together. Microsoft finished their API for next-gen graphics (DX10) as well as providing a reference rasterizer last December. Right now, Kronos group just has some proposals for things like geometry shaders and stream out, but nothing definite. So if you're developing a Vista-only game, the choice is pretty obvious. In terms of cross-platform compatibility, the number of units that a typical game would expect to sell for Linux or Mac is so small that it's not worth the cost. What most games are more concerned about is PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii, generally in that order.

Re:OpenGL?

[bishiraver]

"What most games are more concerned about is PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii, generally in that order."

Not according to a previous slashdot article linking to gamasutra - the order should be Wii, Xbox 360, PS3.

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.

Re:Forget Graphics, Think Audio

[lidocaineus]

what the HELL are you saying?

Re:At least in the short-term.

[big4ared]

Generally, the more units the game sells, the more platforms that will be supported. So even if only 1% of WoW's users use Win2k, it still makes sense to support it. So the huge cash-cow games like WoW will support everything. The question is what will the smaller games do?

Re:File this in the "Who-the-F-cares" department

[dangitman]

And yes, the GNU is an article mistake.

Don't believe that! GNU's Not Unintentional. GNUs are very deliberate, indeed.

Re:OpenGL - Where's OpenGL?

[Rycross]

WHEN DO WE GET REAL OPENGL SUPPORT

When you install the card manufacturer's drivers? Vista only uses the OpenGL->DirectX translation layer with the out-of-the-box drivers. Installing manufacturer drivers will give you proper OpenGL support.

Re:Minimum requirements

[Mac Degger]

I've always wondered, seeing as it's the only hardware survey I really have access to; how representative is the Valve hardware survey? Did the numbers you worked with compare or where there large differences?

I'll pass.

[Yfrwlf]

"it's important to know exactly what we're getting into when Vista rolls out"

Who says we're going to get into it, Zonk? What I find amusing is that Microsoft tries to say it will be better/faster/stronger/smarter. Faster? Definitely not. If you want to run games on it, you'll be running the game AND Aeros. I heard something about Vista possibly disabling Aeros while you're playing a game. Um, no. I'd like to play online games while windowed so I can do other things too, and that would require both to be fully running. Just because they want to cram DRM into the kernel so it can monitor me means I need to run out and buy a box with 2 gigs RAM and a 256 meg graphics card to support their bloated OS? Pass.

Programmers are going to have to start making games for Linux if they want my money, I'm done with Microshaft.