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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."
Provided that MS is able to get developers to switch to DX10, nobody will notice how much slower Vista is for modern gaming once they are rendered incapable of running current titles under anything BUT Vista. Vista's sluggishness is only an issue whenever XP can compete in the same arena. Sadly, DX10 won't fix any current driver issues.
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.
Yes, but at this point, EVERYTHING, is old software. I'm not going to pick up Vista until games work BETTER in Vista than XP.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
Asus A8R32-MVP with *** Socket AM2 ***? using DDR memory. And an FX 60? He obviously has a 939-system. How far can we trust this guy to have opinions on drivers and stuff?
...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?
"We use Mac OS X for our workstations (lower support cost, higher productivity)"
Shall we pull your other finger now?
whatever it is.
"Asus A8R32-MVP with *** Socket AM2 ***? using DDR memory. And an FX 60? He obviously has a 939-system. How far can we trust this guy to have opinions on drivers and stuff?"
I don't understand what the issue is. Please explain. I am not up on this terminology or equipment models...
I am assuming that the system as described is not possible. This would, of course, invalidate the results.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I've got no problems having to install apps/games using an admin account. I think that's a good thing, stopping kids from installing crap for one thing, and a lot of setups will actually prompt you for admin-level credentials if you're not already running with them. But you shouldn't have to run them as admin to use them - Palm f'n Desktop, for example. :(
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.
More likely the install attempts to write to HKLM and/or HKCU. The relevent dx dlls should already be present in the base Vista install.
Weird, daemon tools has been running fine in Vista since at least RC2 (I think). I've got it sat here in my system tray as we speak.
There will be plenty of similar reviews, but I recommend the article at Firingsquad.com,o _glass_performance/
http://firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aer
which shows that Vista, with the most CPU/GPU?Mem intensive Aero GUI enabled, is not negatively impacted as far as gaming performance is concerned.
Everyone just assumes that Vista is going to be a bloatware, but according to the numbers, it is going to be a great OS for gaming as far as the performance goes.
If you add nice GUI, taking advantage of the powerful GPU, that you, as a gamer, already have, security enhancement etc, it looks like a pretty decent OS for gamers.
I tried to run games in Vista from my old XP partition and games complained about missing dx dlls.
Here's the sad thing... I've griped about M$ forever, but I still run their OS because I play computer games. A lot. I know you can do wonders with various Linux tools, but there's something nice about not fussing with that sort of stuff to just play some games after work. Vista, with all its "features," is about to push me to something else in a hurry. Especially if the performance enhancements that are supposed to come down from on high with DX10 don't really meet expectations. Never leaned so far toward a Mac before in my life (the only game I play these days will run on that natively).
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Since you're the first one in this article I've seen refer to the drivers that these games install, I gotta ask:
WTF?
I get why a video card needs to install drivers, and I can see where a game would only run on maybe DX9+, so that if you have DX8.??- then it should check that and report to you, and ask you to install DX9+ before you continue.
BUT WHY WOULD A VIDEO GAME INSTALL ANY DRIVERS? A game should process the bits from the disk and the bits from the controller and display some other bits on the screen in an entertaining manner. End Of Story.
Now that I have cleared my mental vocal box, my mental ears (and the real ones too) are waiting to receive enlightenment so that I may understand and encompass this new thought process.
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I guess he just didn't notice details like the fact that surround sound won't work in World of Warcraft (and plenty of others) with his Audigy 2 soundcard on Vista, thanks to Microsoft's removal of the Hardware Abstraction Layer.
When I tried Vista Beta 2 RC1 I put a few games through the paces. I was quite impressed to see WoW work flawlessly with NVidia's beta drivers, though the framerate was definitely about 10% slower than on XP. I couldn't run Guild Wars at all, though this incompatibility is known by the developers and they're working on it. I also tried Half Life 2 which displayed really freaky polygonal artifacts - clustered red polygons on the torsos of NPCs that looked like throbbing tumors.
Finally, I tried DOSBox with many old games which all worked great, except that I couldn't figure out how to save a customized version of the text config file so I had to mount virtual hard drives manually from the command line every time.
I'd be using Vista right now if the game compatibility was up to snuff. I use my PC for gaming more than anything else and I find dual boot a real hassle. Considering the class action lawsuit swelling against NVidia for their inability to release drivers on time I see no compelling reason to become an early Vista adopter. I'll probably wait for SP1 like I did with XP.
Let me guess; Onboard video and 512MB of RAM. Right?
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
At least for the Media Center. Currently, Vista's only Media Center Extender that works IS the Xbox 360. Older extenders won't work at all, since they can't handle HI-DEF.
I seriously doubt Microsoft is ditching the XBox 360. I think they're -counting- on it as the "spokes" in the Vista Media Centers's "Hub" in an effort to dominate consumer electronics. Not sure how well they'll do.. Hardly anyone knows everything that the Media Center can do. MS is too focused on odd marketing campaigns, rather than something straight to the point, like Apple.
Well the chap at http://www.nvidiaclassaction.org/ is so upset with the Nvidia 8800 drivers that he has set up this site for all aggrieved to register for a class action suit. I find it very hard to reconcile the "25 games all working fine" articles with the existence of the class action lawsuit website- which arose as a result of literally thousands of complaints at the Nvidia website. Now given the fact that Nvidia is the only company offering a DX10 compliant graphics card - I would hold this article under some suspicion... Someone here is lying / or at least bending the truth in some way.
Great, WoW runs on Vista.
I'm still not going to buy it...
I don't think it's always cheaper - it depends on what you're buying and what you already have. Initially I think it's more expensive. However, over time I think it ends up saving you money if you decide to stick to bleeding edge and leaving some components in the box, such as the CD/DVD drives, hard drives, audio card, etc. I had two or three cycles where I basically just upgraded the motherboard, cpu, ram, and video card for about $1000 (P3 to P4 upgrade) and the only reason I had to upgrade the memory was because I went from RAMBUS to DDR. So I had bleeding edge for $1000 versus $3000 for a comparable Alienware or Voodoo machine.
Of course, now that everything has moved to SATA and PCI Express with $1000 high end processors, it's very debatable. You basically have to upgrade everything all over again, save maybe the network and audio card.
I'm really leaning toward buying a Mac as my next desktop, or just eliminating my desktop all together as I use my laptop more than anything.
Everything, drivers-wise, is pretty much a userspace driver unless it's supplied by MS directly in Vista.
It's slower than XP.
It's more resource intensive than XP.
You're going to find that you're going to have to throw more muscle at it to get performance out of it.
After having seen it in use and "used" it for the last four months, I can say that I've little use
for it- much less than XP, and I've little use for XP to begin with. You can wait for it to be
a better performer than XP, but you're likely to wait until there's no more support for XP in the
hardware. Then you'll be forced to make a choice, do without, use Linux, or use Vista.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Starforce copy protection uses a driver for some damn thing.
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.
Ah, but that is not the game, surely. I thought that was the game vendor trying to lock you into a method or pattern, not the game requiring that lib to translate bitA and bitB to produce bitC
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Workaround: set Compatibility Mode - XP. I found that gave me a significant increase (maybe 10% or so) in frame rates, and decreased startup times..
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).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
As far as most Windows-using folks I know are concerned, the one big reason they use the Microsoft OS instead of a Mac is because the games they want to play aren't available for Mac OS X. Not like it would cause a mass exodus or anything, but it would be more ammo for your average Mac evangelist.
I haven't read the article yet, but wouldn't it be normal behavior to require administrative rights to install software on a computer? In my opinion, what isn't acceptable is to require these rights to play the game.
Anyhow, I would have to say that if their socket 939 system is running *only* 10% slower than the Core2Duo machine, Vista would actually have to be increasing performance.
That's my take on it anyway.
Anyone else have any thoughts on this?
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
The previous post is not a troll... It's definitely Blatant mod abuse.
I know you can run Wine on x86_64, but I don't think Wine actually supports Win64 yet. Wake me up when it does, though -- that's one of a very small number of things that keeps me booting Windows for games.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Most of the wrong things you said have already been addressed by other comments, but where'd this piece of FUD come from:
Erm... what?
If this means "stable" as in, stable API, so that developers aren't always scrambling to keep up with the distro of the month, then I really don't get it. I can pop in my ut2004 cds and run the Linux installer on the disk on a brand new Ubuntu -- or Gentoo, or Debian Etch -- and it will work -- even a 64-bit Ubuntu. In fact, with the latest patch -- actually, I'm not sure how long they've had this, but my ut2004 is native 64-bit, which is more than I can say for XP.
I mean, you could say that the kernel isn't making it easy for binary blobs, like the nvidia drivers, and you'd probably be right -- and yet, even this is a no-brainer. It's been at least a year since I had any issues whatsoever -- I wish nVidia could open up their driver source, but short of that, they seem to be absolutely on top of their Linux drivers, even 64-bit -- which is more than you can say for their Vista effort.
If by "stable", you mean "not crashing", my Linux used to crash -- when my box was overclocked. It hasn't crashed since I turned off that overclocking -- months ago. And I'm running all kinds of experimental stuff -- Gentoo, Reiser4, my own custom kernel hacks -- and Linux has been at least as stable as XP when it comes to gaming, which is to say that I haven't seen either crash in longer than I can remember.
I'm really not sure what you mean by "viable" -- if you can make a Mac port, you can make a Linux port. If you mean that there aren't enough gamers on Linux, developers can easily rectify that -- do cross-platform development (which isn't hard at all, it can be as simple as recompiling) and market your Linux port. It really isn't that hard -- see ut2004. And after all, id software may be more generous than other shops (with their GPLing of old stuff), but they aren't stupid -- from what I can tell, they basically have one guy who's in charge of the Linux port, and that's really all it takes -- and now we have Doom 3 and Quake 4 for Linux.
The only way that statement makes sense is if you've drunk the DirectX 10 kool-aid, but at the moment, I bet my Linux performs better than Vista for the games I can play on it, so no one in their right mind (who doesn't already work for Microsoft) will make a dx10-only game.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
"The performance on vista(sic) for games is abysmal to say the least"
That's a false statement. I play Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Never Winter Nights 2, Paradise, and Civilization 4 on my Vista machine. Every single one of those games runs the same or better as when the machine was running XP.
Perhaps you'd like to qualify your statement more. "The performance of X game with Y hardware on Vista is abysmal", might be a true statement. Making a blanket statement like that, where there are counter examples is just plain irresponsible.
I was unceremoniously kicked from the server before even getting into the game, with a note that Punkbuster had inadequate OS privileges.
You know what? GOOD. PunkBuster is crap. My BF2 CD key was banned less than one week after I bought the game for supposedly running some sort of hack. I tried protesting, but PB said "we have clear evidence that you were using a hack," although they wouldn't elaborate AT ALL as to what sort of evidence it was, or what sort of hack it might have been, and they said the only solution would be for me to buy a new copy of the game, which is utter bullshit. The only thing I can think of is using DaemonTools to mount an image, but that doesn't affect gameplay.
At any rate, EA wouldn't give me a new CD Key either, because they claimed "Punkbuster is a third party application and we have no control over their decisions. Additionally, you can still play on servers without Punkbuster." Ok, so you hand over total control of your game to a third party? WTF sense does that make? Second, you expect me to want to play on a bunch of hack-infested servers? It was hard enough finding a playable server with a ping under 200 that didn't ban me for having a "high" ping, let alone one without PB.
So I hope Vista sinks the whole PB franchise. It's a shitty "solution" and a cop out for game publishers who don't want to take responsibility for their design flaws. That would be the only benefit to Vista that I can think of thus far.
Pardon my french, but I really hate those bastards.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
That might be funny if linux native games didnt run faster over 90% of the time, and even emulated windows games run faster in some cases (WoW and BF1942 spring to mind). I know many a WoW player who has switched to Linux *JUST* to get a 20% framerate boost in the only game they play.