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?

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.

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: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?