Gamers React to Vista Launch

As cranky as IT folks are about having to roll out new Vista installs, support them, update them, etc, gamers are matching them in irritation. Ars Technica recommends you dual-boot XP and Vista if you want to keep gaming on your PC. Voodoo Extreme explores Vista's crappy audio setup, while Computer and VideoGames reports that some small developers think Vista will ruin PC gaming (a comment we've heard before). C&VG does have a slightly more hopeful article up too, talking about the future of Vista gaming and what the new OS could mean for games ... once all the kinks are worked out.

Comments

Gaming Performance on Vista

[Vigile]

Just thought I drop a link to this article that actually looks at current gaming performance on Vista for both NVIDIA and ATI:

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=3 54&pid=2

Lack of hardware sound

[Frenchy_2001]

Voodoo extreme has nothing to do with this article. They are only pointing to it.
The real article is at IGN:
http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.html

Please, skip the redirections and ad views...

And I must say that this decision (no hardwrae acceleration) will badly hurt Creative Labs. Maybe, just maybe, this screw up will restart some competition in the sound card market?

Re:sound information

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

One of the articles says that hardware acceleration is no longer available in Vista, but doesn't say why (aside from the fact that MS didn't include it in their sound layer rewrite). Is this mainly a DRM thing?

Actually, MS pulled the API in vista and replaced it with one that did not run in kernel space, which is a good thing in general. The problem is they did not provide properly for backwards compatibility so games that used that API sound like crap. Other games that used OpenAL, still sound fine and at least one card manufacturer is providing a translation layer from the old API to OpenAL (sort of like WINE and DirectX). Some of the games that use the old, MS specific API are surprising. World of Warcraft, for example. I mean they had to write it for OpenAL to get the Mac and Linux versions working and they released the Mac version at the same time as the Windows version. Is support for OpenAL that poor on Windows? guess they implemented DirectX as well as OpenGL too. Is their toolset just built to do both anyway or what?

Re:Xbox?

[StikyPad]

now that Microsoft has a console, we are supposed to stop gaming on PCs?

Nope. Apparently you haven't heard about Microsoft's efforts to revitalize PC gaming. Well, now you have.

Re:Followed the link to voodoo extreme...

[Assmasher]

I am totally 100% incorrect about this and I apologize. Back when the first DX10 betas shipped, we tested on Vista and found that we got all the HAL layers we expected. I have tested it intermittently over the past year with no problems; however, I just ran our tool again against the latest SDK and found that I get 'Emulation.' (We used to get WDM.)

Apologies again for jumping about 10 meters past the gun.

Re:sound information

[Chris Burke]

World of Warcraft, for example. I mean they had to write it for OpenAL to get the Mac and Linux versions working and they released the Mac version at the same time as the Windows version.

Blizzard hasn't done jack for Linux, at least as far as development goes. They have worked with Transgaming to help Transgaming fix some issues with Cedega, and to restore accounts of Linux users that were erroneously flagged as bot-users. There is no "linux version" of the game, though. Cedega runs the Windows version of wow, and uses whatever audio driver the windows version uses.

They did implement both directX and OpenGL, and both can be used under Windows, so maybe it similarly has an OpenAL path on Windows.