25 Games Tested in Vista

mikemuch writes "Jason Cross at ExtremeTech has installed more than 25 PC Games in Windows Vista and reports back with his experiences with each. For the most part, the OS handled games with aplomb, but on the whole ran them slightly slower than XP, and some required logging in as administrator to install them. These and other minor issues were the result of immature drivers. It was hit or miss whether games would appear in the Games Explorer correctly with box art, and GameTap doesn't work yet at all."

Comments

Think before you upgrade

[GFree]

Article's pretty good. It's definitely true that performance will be (slightly?) under what you'd experience in XP. It's up to you whether you wish to pay money for an operating system that, for now, actually provides less performance than XP.

BTW, clicking on the "Print" link in the Options under the first page will show all pages as one. Useful if you don't want to click next all the time.

Re:Um, yeah, about that Games Explorer thing...

[erroneous]

Yes and No.

It's done by reading a local Game Definition File which will - in Microsoft's vision of the future - be created by the developer and included in the game install.

However for games without such a file - presumably including all legacy games - Vista will dial the mothership and request the data using "Windows Metadata Services".

See http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb173447. aspx

New driver model

[cbhacking]

This is unconfirmed info, so take it with a grain of salt, but I've heard two things about Vista's Direct3D that could cast some light on the slight performance loss.

1. By default, Vista tries to use DirectX 10 when running a 3D program. DX10 is not backward compatible, so Vista also includes DX9. However, if a game needs DX9, Vista will waste some resources trying DX10
   Workaround: set Compatibility Mode - XP. I found that gave me a significant increase (maybe 10% or so) in frame rates, and decreased startup times..
    
2. As with, for example, the nVidia proprietary driver for Linux, Vista uses as little kernel-mode driver as possible and runs the real code - the stuff that puts a load on the CPU, not the GPU - in user-mode. (The reason in Linux has to do with keeping the kernel-mode code OSS while still having full proprietary capability, while in Vista the change was made for stability reasons.) This causes a small but noticable (I usually hear 5%-8%) performance loss, as the user-mode code goes through the kernel-mode driver before reaching the hardware.
   The only workaround for this with current hardware would be using XP (or other non-WDDM) drivers... probably not worth it. However, cards and drivers optimized for DX10 may negate this issue. The idea behind DX10 isn't to do anything DX9 revision C couldn't; the idea is to do it much faster, and to take advantage of WDDM (Windows [Vista] Display Driver Model).

In any rate, I game in Vista, and if my framerates are slightly worse, they are plenty good enough... and well ahead of, for example, Wine (though there's something awesome about playing even a DX8 game like WarCraft 3 in Linux/BSD).