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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?
The mobo is a socket AM2, an AMD socket with 940 pins. The processor is a 939 setup (939 pins.) This may not seem as though it wouldn't work, but the AM2 setup rearranges the way the pins are aligned such that only an AM2 processor fits in it. So yes, the described system is not possible. Even if it were possible, surely there are better mobo choices, it's memory is DDR 400 for goodness sakes.
Demented But Determined.
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.
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
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.
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...
The motherboard (ASUS A8R32) is a Socket 939 motherboard. You can tell from the "A8" in the model name... that refers to the socket type. All of ASUS' K8- and A8- series motherboards are Socket 939. Likewise, all of ASUS' Socket AM2 motherboards have "M2" in the model name. My own motherboard is an M2N-E, for example. You can decode that as "AM2 socket, NVidia chipset, configuration type E". In this case, it's a passive chipset heatsink, 6 SATA, no IDE, no onboard Firewire, etc. etc. They also have M2V motherboards, which can decode as "AM2 socket, Via chipset".
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
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.