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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.
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
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...