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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."
With the exception of the driver issues, it looks like Microsoft is really making Vista gaming their primary focus and letting the Xbox stuff fade away. With Vista they don't have to worry about trying to compete in the hardware design and manufacturing area where they have had huge problems with vastly more expensive manufacturing costs compared to others, having to pull the plug early on the first Xbox hardware, and the well known and very costly Xbox 360 defect problems that are still going on.
It looks like Microsoft is really trying to get the current Xbox developers who are already for the most part PC developers to make their games Vista exclusive. What token support the Mac had from game companies is now pretty much gone with pretty much just Blizzard and their mercy Mac versions of their games and a scattering of PC ports. Linux continues to flounder around and failing to offer a stable and viable platform for game developers to target.
Killing of the Xbox mess would go a long way to healing the rift the console created with PC gamers when Microsoft started to get PC developers to focus on the Xbox first or exclusively. Most PC game developers sound like they don't really want to be writing for a console and would prefer sticking with the x86 desktop platform. Just look at what companies like Id, Valve, and Bethesda say about console development.
The billions Microsoft is wasting on trying to compete in the console world could be put to much,much,much better use revitalizing the shrinking PC game market. It's been six years or so and with billions down the drain the new Xbox is selling about as badly as the first Xbox. Microsoft needs to put that money to better use. PC game developers are where it should be going. Make Vista gaming as simple as healthy as the console market currently is.
...I was wondering where it gets the box art from, and how.
All I did was run some old game (UT99 iirc) without installing anything, and lo and behold it got added to the games explorer. Now, it's not such a bad thing in itself, but who did Windows send the information on what I've just played? How is it even detecting that a game has been run? Is it screening all DX apps and sending a checksum of the executable somewhere?
If the Wine project ever gets their DX10 implementation completed, it'd show everyone pretty clearly how slow Vista is compared to every other platform: XP, 2000, Mac, Linux, etc. Supposedly, they're planning on a complete implementation by the end of the year thanks to their switch to WGL, but I don't really know the details.
After unexpectedly having to go out and buy a new computer on Sunday (long story), I ended up bringing one home with Vista "Home Premium". Having to complete a project before Super Bowl kickoff, I booted up and my heart dropped when I saw how rough Vista is with common hardware, drivers, etc. After I installed the latest Daemon Tools and the computer refused to boot OR restore Vista, I wiped the disk and went back to XP Pro. Even Vista's "Out of Box Experience Assistant" caused a fatal error (I'm serious).
Let me put it this way: the out of box experience left a lot to be desired.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, it's pretty neat. Once they can port their D3D to their WGL basically they can port DX10 to anything they can port the WGL to... in other words you can run DX10 on Windows XP. I think it's a great stick in the eye for an overly controlling company in the industry. Thanks to the move to shaders it gets easier and easier to shift/translate D3D to OGL. I'm getting 30-50 FPS in Oblivion running Wine on Ubuntu x86_64 already.
Great, WoW runs on Vista.
I'm still not going to buy it...
Well, try running WoW (or any other game for that matter I suppose; I only tried WoW) with 1 GB DDR2 under Vista. On my machine, WoW runs on almost full details with ~25 addons at around 40 fps in supression room in BWL (hardware intense environment - lots of particles, many objects on the scene, etc.) under XP. WIth Vista, I get ~20 fps in an easy to process environment. Faulty drivers? Nah, don't think so.
That alone convinced me, even though my uni is MSDN e-academy subscriber and I can get Vista Bussiness for free. And Aero isn't really impressive if you saw beryl/xgl.
No.
2 gig RAM and onboard video. It's a E4300 Core 2 duo on a very decent motherboard. Intel 945 graphics.
I'm planning to put a good video card in the box tonight. Sunday, I just needed to finish a bit of work.
I'll try Vista again, when I hear a lot of people saying good things about it. For now, I'll stay with XP Pro, which I like very much for media production.
And Daemon Tools does indeed run in Vista. It's Vista that was at fault with my original story. I have no reason not to think Daemon Tools will run fine and run fine under Vista, but the installation process through Vista for a loop and caused it to crap the bed. It also wouldn't recognize my brand new Linksys G w/Speedbooster wifi PCI card, and Linksys doesn't have a special driver for that adapter for Vista yet. Their website says "coming..." So is the problem Linksys or that Vista doesn't support such a common piece of hardware?
After 5 years hearing about Vista, I thought I'd be knocked out. My "out of the box experience" (I love that expression after last weekend) was much better when Windows XP was brand new than with Vista Home Premium and a computer that's supposedly made to run Vista. I have never knocked Microsoft, but if someone asked me, I would not recommend Vista if they needed to get work done right away.
You are welcome on my lawn.