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

DX10 will eliminate this problem for MS

[DrMrLordX]

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.

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

[kailoran]

...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?

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