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Vista Not Playing Nice With FPS Games
PetManimal writes "Computerworld is reporting that gamers who have installed Vista are reporting problems with first person-shooter titles such as CounterStrike, Half-Life 2, Doom 3. and F.E.A.R. (Users have compiled lists of games with Vista issues.) The complaints, which have turned up on gamers' forums, cite crashes and low frame rates. Not surprisingly, the problems relate to graphics hardware and software: 'Experts blame still-flaky software drivers, Vista's complexity, and a dearth of new video cards optimized for Vista's new rendering technology, DirectX 10. That's despite promises from Microsoft that Vista is backwards-compatible with XP's graphic engine, DirectX 9, and that it will support existing games. Meanwhile, games written to take advantage of DirectX 10 have been slow to emerge. And one Nvidia executive predicts that gamers may not routinely see games optimized for DirectX 10 until mid-2008.'"
Everyone who accused Vista of copying OS X were dead on!
We all knew this was the way it was going to be. This isnt a newsflash for anyone. I have a dx10 compat gfx card, but I'll stick to XP for gaming way after SP1 for Vista comes out. Drivers for Vista just plain and simply not up to snuff yet.
I can only hope this sort of thing promotes the appeal of using OpenGL, so more games are more likely to become cross-compatible. Projects like WineHQ can mimic the behavior of Win32 API, and things would run more smoothly if instead of translating DX, to just have OpenGL games to begin with. Does DX really provide or perform more/better than OpenGL that commercial games continue to use DX??
Gentoo Linux - Wouldn't have it any other way. And fuck beta.
Why would anyone rush out and buy a new operating system?
You exchange a series of well known bugs and security problems (that have work arounds and policies to protect yourself) to being put into the unknown. Personally, I'm going to let everyone else rush to be the lab rat and only upgrade when I'm forced to.
Is anybody really surprised by this? Until the masses switch to Vista, the game developers will still concentrate on XP.
With the push towards DX10, is it really that surprising? I wouldn't accuse MS of maliciously hindering DX9's performance, but it's not hard to imagine them not putting much effort into it. Or at least not into DX9 APIs/functions not being used by Aero.
disclosure: I'm a developer at ATI and am writing this anonymously.
Vista's DRM is the fault in nearly 100% of the problems we're seeing. A game tries to output at 1280x1024 or greater and the DRM kicks in trying to downgrade the resolution. Don't blame ATI or NVIDIA, blame Microsoft for this one.
Supposedly if you are Genuine you don't have to worry about this. The only better than being Genuine is heaven..or so I've heard.
The problem is trying to buy a new computer without getting Vista. My dad needs a new computer and plays strategy/role playing games and how do I explain to him that his high-end Dell computer with Vista is going to crash playing some games. Talk about bleeding edge.
You're a troll, please go away. Not even MS could be dumb enough to do that.
Choo choo.
I have been running vista on my primary box since the RCs and playing Source engine and Unreal engine games the whole time without issue. The RTM edition came with less-than-perfect drivers for nVidia cards (polygon tearing at high res in Source).
100.whatever detonators work fine.
I put this down to any typical release where a bunch of kids get together on the internet to have a whine about it broke everything.
Of course you will expect lower frame rates with the WHQL drivers bundled with the OS. Any gamer going from their bleeding edge pre-alpha detonators box to stock drivers is going to notice the difference. When you update, these problems magically disappear.
Hey this is Slashdot and this is what makes news! I guess I better close this post by blaming it on Protected Video Path to close out the non-blaming-ms karma dive for a perfect +5 Interesting!
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
Now, off topic, I must confess that I no longer even read the Slashdot paragraph, but I just read the headline and then go straight to the comments to see what the controversial parts were.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
Enough said.
When playing games, writing music or capturing video you're always best with a very minimalist OS. I managed to get Windows XP do work fairly well doing audio work with 256MB by removing pretty much everything except that required for the applications.
Microsoft doesn't seem to understand that an OS is just for running applications, managing files and providing base services. They have to provide more and more features to make the upgrade justifiable. Games are better to stick to a dedicated XP install with all the bloat removed for now.
There are serious problems with many games because . . . well, good code takes time, and Microsoft has (quite reasonably) changed the architecture of the drivers significantly, and so we are seeing that some things are now very slow and others just plain don't work right. It is not DirectX's fault, just that code is new and yet is expected to work just as well as it used to in every possible situation - which isn't going to happen. The blame, if any, goes to Microsoft for not releasing the spec earlier, and to the driver writers for not doing a perfect job. Perfection is pretty hard to achieve the first time around, though, so I don't honestly blame anyone that much. It's just the way things are when you make big transitions. Frankly, I'm surprised things work as well as they do now.
If anyone would care to actually notice. Nearly all of the issues are from people running the 64-bit version of Vista and having problems with specific drivers. That's not a Vista problem. That's a driver problem. And there's nothing new there, same problems existed with XP 64-bit.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
OpenGL games only suffer when run in windowed mode, the same would happen in Beryl on linux. As soon as they go fullscreen then OpenGL games run at full speed.
"Oh boy"
Since when has gentoo had DirectX 10?
Cheers,
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
i was reading an article from the Upfront newsletter about this with engineering CAD software as well.
Nvidia lost all credibility with their predictions when they brushed off the 3D Mark benchmarks of their FX line of cards, stating that developers would use the Nvidia specific optimisations, and thus that the performance with the generic stuff was irrelevent. We all know how that ended ::stares at his FX 5900 Ultra that can't even run Oblivion well enough to be entertaining without third party hackish solutions, and even then::
Its just a sad attempt at justifying their garbage Vista drivers, I feel like. On the other hand, how bad Vista's backward compatibility is, is simply inexcusable in this case.
Not every bug for every game will be discovered during internal testing (and MS's buggy reputation doesn't help). Frankly, I'm glad that these gamers are having these problems so that by the time I upgrade in a year, there will be fixes or work-arounds.
On a related note: Vista's promise to reinvent gaming seems to be faltering out of the gate. Beside the problems listed in the article, MS isn't doing a good job of telling casual gamers what sort of videocards or hardware they'll need to effectively take advantage of DX10. Then you have contradictory reports from gaming studios that DX10 doesn't mean anything - yet. None of this is helping to make PC gaming "easier" for the masses. In fact it's complicating things.
To me at least this is as old as windows and perhaps it has always been true. A new OS reduces the performance of your computer when it comes to games.
Remember Windows 3.1 and before? The fast majority of games in those days were DOS games. Simple reason, the whole GUI was not needed and back then the OS and the GUI were still clearly seperated between DOS and Windows.
Same is true for linux, you can get far better performance for a single purpose graphical app doing things directly then going through X. Offcourse you loose the GUI but so what. Most games have their own anyway.
So when Windows 95 arrived a game like Quake would perform a lot better without it for the plain simple reason that with Windows 95 loaded you lost a shitload of memory to something you did not use that could have been used by the game.
Same thing with all those niceties added to the OS. Everyone knows you should disable as much as possible if you are serious about gamers meaning you effectively trim the OS back to what was offered with 95. No XP themes, no pre-loaded apps, no helpers. Nothing that either takes CPU cycles, memory or both.
Vista is the same story again. More "bloat" is added wich may or may not be what you want (but since these people who complain installed Vista they seem to want it) and when you are in a game that bloat is probably useless. When you are playing a game you just want the OS to do what is needed to keep the game running and nothing more. But that don't sell new OS'es. That don't have everyone gushing about how pretty this new OS is. Hell, you want an OS that gives you just the games, get a freaking Console, you weirdo!
Every new windows version gives early adopters problems.
You would PC gamers would know this. Did anyone here actually thing Neverwinter Nights 2 was going to be perfect straight from the DVD? If so, I want what you are smoking.
As for the whole DirectX 10 question, I remember a turn-based strategy game Battle Isle or something that was the first game I saw that was 95 only. It had been badly delayed because 95 had been badly delayed.
Tying your product to another product that has yet to sell is risky. Especially if said product has a track history of not being to nice at launch to the consumers of your product.
But hey, these dudes got VISTA! That got to be worth a couple if inches of ePenis.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Vista - so like a Mac that you can't even play games on it :-)
:-]
[And yes, this is a dig at *both* sides, so let's see how that goes down
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Nothing works on vista?
Funny, I run the 64-bit version of Vista and everything I run works just fine. Oh, and my system is much faster and much more responsive.
Why don't you name one application that doesn't work. Please, don't be a loser and mention a game.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Or, OpenGL+OpenAL?
I think the main problem is that most games don't do their own engines. This is a good thing, but then, most games end up using engines written for DirectX...
As for the games which do create their own engines, I'm guessing many of them don't see portability as an issue, or if they do, would rather be easily portable to the Xbox 360 than to anything else.
Here's hoping QuakeWars continues to ensure OpenGL is well supported -- the Doom 3 engine is alive and well, I hope...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
When Duke Nukem Forever comes out, PC gamers will forget about all those old, now dull looking toys.
Monstar L
Until game developers start releasing more games that are unix based I will be forced to eventually buy vista and that really pisses me off but what is a gamer to do?
It's only paranoia if your wrong...
I've never met a group of people who can cause so many problems as the Computer Ricers. The Computer Ricers are the people that continually screw around with their systems in a misguided attempt to get more performance. They run beta drivers, they squabble over 50 3DMark points (out of 10,000), they always have to run the latest, greatest software. These people break systems in ways I can't even dream of, they have problems that no normal person ever encounters.
Well when they do, they go and scream loudly about it on forums. It's never their fault, it's always the evil hardware manufacturer or OS maker or whatever. It's never the fact that they screw around with their software, overclock their hardware to the point of instability and so on, nope it's someone else and by god they are going to give them holy hell on a forum for it!
I encountered this with the 8800, nVidia's new card. I decided I wanted one, despite seeing people having tons of problems in forums. Well, I took the time to read the directions and make sure I had what I needed (such as a power supply that gave it sufficient power) and that I did what I should (such as using Drivercleaner to scrub the old drivers). Lo and behold, it works great. I don't have problems weird problems with it, my games don't crash, it's just a newer, faster card.
Basically I've found that you have to take any negative comments on the Internet with a grain of salt and check the source. If it's a tech professional who's done some proper testing, ok worth listening to (though a single point of data does not make a trend). However if it's a Computer Ricer, just ignore it. In all likelihood they caused the problems they are having.
I am not going to say who I work for, but I will say I work on drivers for one of the big two graphics card vendors.
Driver development for Vista is a nightmare. We are forced to work within rigid and sensitive specifications, wherein violations cause Windows to shut us down or restart the video subsystem entirely. In the past, delivering content to the screen was relatively straight-forward and we were free to operate as we needed to get our job done. Today, it is entirely up to Microsoft and if you dare wander outside their edicts and trigger their damned “tiltbits”, you are fucked. Debugging this system is almost entirely blind so we are forced to play wack-a-mole all day. On the bright side, our driver code is receiving a thorough audit. In the mean time, you guys are getting the product of a rapid hackfast, intended to get something out the door to meet our marketing promises.
When Vista becomes dominant in the mainstream, all of you can expect loads of problems unless Microsoft learn to lighten up. Sure, they want to enforce standards on their platform. We all know Windows sucks largely because of how badly drivers are written, but they are doing it by screwing with us, the hardware vendors. My group knows what the hell we're doing. We would not be one of the top two if we didn't, but Microsoft are making our lives nearly impossible because they do not consider in the least what we need to make good products.
My advice: do not think you can buy either ATI or NVIDIA and expect Vista to work entirely as advertised. Wait a year. Stick with XP or buy a Mac.
When did the R300 show up? How long until most games needed PS2.0? Do most current games even need PS 2.0? The first PS 3.0 only games have been out for a FEW WEEKS. R6 Vegas and maybe a half-dozen others. If you went Vista for DX 10, you must be smoking the MS angel dust. If Halo 3 never runs on my windows 2003 desktop, I won't miss it. I'll have plenty of time to wait for more games to take avantage of my PS 3 card, but I'll be running on a solid, time-tested OS. I think MS miscalulated what DX 10 exclusivity to Vista would draw. I think the early adopters will get screwed.
Why?
I mean, I can run a reasonably modern game with support for in-game cameras -- say, Doom 3 (native Linux port), which can show me just as much detail on an in-game screen as I see in the rest of the game -- or Half-Life 2, where the demo showed someone tossing a camera around, and the screens behaving realistically.
So what's so hard about, say, showing an OpenGL game in a window? Is it trying to run two GL apps at once, that don't necessarily cooperate (game and window manager)? Or is it a driver issue?
For the record, I don't know about the sort of stacking effect you'd have with the window manager trying to do GL stuff to a game window (which has its own GL stuff), but I do know that I'm able to get reasonably good performance out of running more than one GL game at a time in windowed mode on Linux (without Beryl).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As I recall, Microsoft had already begun development on a major service pack before Vista hit retail shelves. Are we really all that suprised to discover that there are some issues with the new O/S? This is just another example of a commercial beta release, if you ask me. I seem to recall that "Testers urge Microsoft to extend Vista Beta" news stories were a dime a dozen on several IT news sites after Microsoft confirmed the release date.
In regards to gaming performance and WHQL drivers, I tend to think that a significant number of PC gamers are smart enough to try updating video drivers if their video performance is buggy or slow. Maybe I am giving PC gamers too much credit? I just figure if you are unable to learn how to properly configure your O/S for optimal gaming performance, there is a large and far less technically inclined console market waiting for your business.
They'll make it a point to actually put some effort into QA. Course, since this is about games, you would think EA (and a lot of other games publishers) would maybe take some of that advice, too...
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
on vista's ui being part of the problem. If I recall when you launch a game the ui still is using the gpu so of course your going to get lower fps. On top of that any openGL game is being converted to DX calls so you will get slowdown with openGL games as well. Listen I realy could care less what OS you use, hell use a rock for all I care, but anyone that followed vista's development knew graphics performance with games etc would suck balls until gfx cards got faster to make up for the slowdown of all the knew *cough* cool ui features. Sure drivers might also not be helping but even with perfect drivers MS did say their would be slowdowns so I guess all the early adopters heres a lesson for you.
Microsoft apologists always blame the drivers.
If the end-user experience is bad, it doesn't matter who's to blame.
When microcomputers were new, a colleague of mine was raving about his North Star Advantage. He couldn't praise it too much. I asked him if it was reliable. He said it had been absolutely 100% reliable. So I asked if I could drop in that afternoon and have him show me WordStar, the hot new program I'd heard so much about.
There was a pause.
"Well, I can't do that today," he says. "I'm waiting for a new power supply. The old one failed again last week."
"But I thought you said your computer had been 100% reliable," I said.
"Oh, the computer has been completely reliable. It's just the power supply that keeps failing."
It may have been the power supply's fault, not the computer's, but, nevertheless, the effect was the same: he couldn't run WordStar.
(And just to fend off any misunderstandings: he was talking about the power supply North Star provided as an integral part of the system...)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I completely agree that beta testing of Vista is best left to others. For those folks who love buggy software which will break their devices and who love the mystery of trying to find out why things don't work anymore. Kind of like the car mechanic with the car that works when it wants too and whose hood is always up. I don't see myself rushing out to buy a buggy, DRM filled Operating System that doesn't offer anything new other than that the need for a whole new computer to use it and at that, the thing is more locked down and more user unfriendly than XP could have dreamed of being. Decreasing playback quality, lower frame rates from your video card and a slower computer so that it can constantly monitor whether or not you are using approved games, programs and media. No thanks. (thanks Peter Gutmann) If none of us buy it, if none of us are suckered into wanting it for the mythical DirectX 10 and the games that aren't out yet then perhaps it'll be rushed back to the labs and made more consumer friendly. Yah, like that'll ever happen. I won't get it until forced too either.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
I have an 8800GTX since Nov 15. Being a corporate customer, we've also had the various flavors of vista since Nov 30th. The new shiny 100.xx drivers are complete and utter crap across the board. The nVidia card touted as the ultimate in vista preparedness, the 8800, barely works on vista at all. See nVidia forums The class action stie and my own video. There are thousands of folks out there with issues. The nvidia drivers thread (70+ pages) has been deleted at least 3 times that I know of (from before the Jan 30th launch).
In my youtube video.. just using windows can cause the machine to spazz out randomly. For example.. I can't hit control-a to select all my icons.. it crashes the driver? WTF nVidia?
To make matters worse, nvidia appear to have thunked the 32 bit drivers into 64 bit address space... so there doesn't seem to be a true 64 bit driver out there for vista at all. Can anyone comment on this??
The 97.xx drivers.. what Microsoft shipped with vista.. are probably the best and most stable drivers at this point. On some of the other forums the reviewers have gone back to "stock" drivers for Intel and nVidia hardware.. and this eliminates some of the apparent vista stability issues. Some people have had ok luck out of the 100.xx drivers..
The truth is, I think, no one expects the vista drivers for hardware we already have to be this amazing break through. What is a bit scary is that the driver support is apparently so poor at this point in time... and it is poorest on hardware supposedly designed with vista in mind. The RTM drivers for vista/older cards aren't that bad.. they're playable in a lot of cases.. A lot of people, myself included, are having problems with source engine games IF the settings are cranked up way high. 800x600? No problem. 1920x1200 4xAA 4xAF.. Heloooo Pink Checkerboard Textures!
I'm not too terribly miffed I can't game quite as well on XP SP2... I am more than a little disappointed the drivers are buggy for basic things like.. screensaver... overlay video playback... being up for more than 4 hours? Given the state of Vista and that the graphics subsystem hasn't really changed much since RC1 I would have expected much better drivers-- especially since there are all these vista techdemos floating around.. at least in the case of the 8800+vista.
You're forgetting that GPU's are changing as well. Read up on the Nvidia 8800.
If playing computationally demanding games is important to you then it is simple really, upgrading Windows is pretty much always a big mistake.
...my computer has decent specs but downgrading is still better than wasting a few bucks on a RAM upgrade!
Every new version of Windows inherently runs at least slightly slower than the previous (and often much slower). I am still using Windows 2000 as games tend to run much faster with it than with Windows XP. I upgraded to XP but then went back to 2000 for that bit extra performance bonus
I wonder how many of those "mysterious" crashes have to do with Vista's built-in virtual memory randomizer. Such a thing exists also in OpenBSD and if I remember right, *A LOT* of old bugs were exposed in various packages... And since we all know the coding standards of a computer game...
There are two primary reasons for games not working perfectly on Vista:
1.) Crappy video drivers. (Especially nVidia drivers.)
2.) The game needs admin privs.
If you're a victim of crappy drivers, well, that's the price you pay for being on the bleeding edge, I guess. ATI's drivers are fairly good. They had WHQL certified drivers released before Vista's consumer launch. nVidia, on the other hand, is dragging their ass. They've had a long time to get these drivers done. If you want to blame somebody, blame them.
If the game doesn't run without admin privs, then blame the game manufacturer. How do you know ahead of time? Well, if it has the "Designed for Windows XP" logo on the box, you should be good to go. These games were certified by Microsoft, and as part of that certification, they couldn't do stupid crap like write to c:\Program Files. If your game doesn't have that logo, then who knows.
Luckily, games that require admin privs can still be run on Vista without too much trouble. Just right click the game icon and select "Run as Administrator". Even better, right click it, go to properties, select Compatibility, and check the "Run as Administrator" option so that it always runs as admin. This will solve 99% of most people's gaming issues.
But games that don't run on Vista have nothing to do with Vista's "complexity" (it's a freaking modern OS, of course it's complex...), and it has nothing to do with some DirectX 9 incompatibility (the Dx9 bits ship with Vista).
Not to mention the fact that other sites mention pretty good luck with running games on Vista.
As usual, compatibility issues have more to do with 3rd party incompetence than with the quality of Microsoft's OS.
And one Nvidia executive predicts that gamers may not routinely see games optimized for DirectX 10 until mid-2008.'
That's about the earliest I'll consider an "upgrade."
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Can't some kind of DirectX analogue be implemented on OSX?
.NET... :)
It can't be much harder than the Mono project re-implementing
Games are the only thing keeping me on Windows.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
Look, if you wanna play games buy a fucking console. If you want to use a good computer that isn't filled with DRM, don't by fucking vista. People need to wake the fuck up and stop following around the other MS sheeps.
Stable, reliable, secure OS, without all the flashy crap, user friendly, read/write MS Office docs.
Mac OS X.
Flame me all you want. I learned BASIC on Windows 3.11 (yes, 3.11 Windows for Workgroups). I build my own PCs. But I recently bought a mac, and it does pretty much everything you need. Even gaming!
Ok, I'm getting a bit sick of this same old boring Vista bashing (yes I know I'm on /. where MS bashing is a almost national sport). I have just been playing F.E.A.R. using a shock-horror NVidia card and it plays fine - I simply had to download the Vista driver from Nvidia's site (maybe some of the newer DX10 cards have problems, my DX9 is fine). In fact, it actually seems to play faster than in XP!
Though a great advocate of Open Source and Linux, I'd like to think we can appreciate the good in Vista instead of taking cheap shots every 10 seconds. These people probably had very specific problems and threw their toys out of the pram. I'm not even reading TFA, this is just annoying now. Rationality people! Us intelligent Linux-loving Lisp-defending geeks need to show the masses rationality!!!
These are the options available to the casual consumer, period. (And as far as I know, future versions of OS X are not going to kill drivers because they tried to display BR or HD-DVD content or did not validate a signature every nth time we flip a buffer...) I happen to think this is all a damn shame; who knows when OpenGL working groups will finish work on Longs Peak and at least start to play catch-up with DX10?
Bottom line: we are struggling to catch-up with where we were before Vista came out instead of improving our products. No Vista, and we are back on track. With Vista, our efforts are hampered.
Dedicated server for Land of the Dead will not run in Vista, it just freezes, without actually doing anything.
Anyone know about other Unreal Engine games?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
It depends on your method of x server acceleration.
XGL makes all calls from the window manager go through it, meaning other apps can't get 3D acceleration
AIGLX only gives 3D acceleration to those parts of the window manager that need it. That's the Indirect part.
I'm sure someone will pop along and explain it better than me soon.
What does this have to do with DRM? It's driver issues, plain and simple. As is always the case, don't use the WHQL-certified drivers provided by Windows Update. You'll always find newer, better drivers by visiting nVidia or ATI's web sites directly.
I assume you're referring to this article. How is that astroturfing? The response was done on the Vista team blog, which is a Microsoft property and is in no way trying to pass itself off as an unrelated third party. Whether or not you believe what they say has nothing to do with the response being astroturf.
That's the message they're sending all of us who are now jumping ship to console gaming instead. My next laptop will be either a Mac or Linux - I've had it (and I've owned a Microsoft OS machine since they first shipped them).
Besides, Spore is going to run on the Wii - why wait?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Which is why Neverwinter Nights runs significantly better in Linux than under even a clean XP install on my PC. Curse them for not releasing NWN2 cross platform (of course, from what I have heard I am not missing anything)
Finkployd
Best gaming play is still via the computer for many types of games. And I agree, don't buy Vista.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
An enemy has fired upon you... Cancel or Allow?
I would guess it's because when it's in a window on a 3d windowing system you're asking the graphics system to calculate the whole game screen, then to calculate the whole 3d window system besides. Just a guess.
I don't care if Microsuck won't release a DST fix for W2k, I'll be running that sucker until the Civilization series requires an OS upgrade.
Therefore, I've got a few backup copies of my w2k pro install disk, and I will be putting the original in a safe deposit box at the bank next week.
I didn't see a damn thing in XP that warranted the time spent, much less the money spent, on upgrading. Vista is no different.
Blar.
there is no such thing as a decent gaming PC for WinVista with less than 2GB of RAM, and a video card with at least 1GB of memory. Oh, and turn off the chrome Aero thing that sucks your system dry.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I currently run 4 computers at the house and 2 at work. The following information is only about the home computers. 1 - doesnt count its Linux and doesnt run any good games. 1 - is this machine i have used for general work for about 2.5 years and its about to be replaced by a MAC 1 - Macbook Pro that also goes whereever i go and then there is the GAME MACHINE! It is a special purpose Windows box running XP. Its gota nice fast Athlon and SLI Nvidia boards :) A very fast 70GB HD 15000rpm :) 4gb of ram, gigabit ether (dual) and a widescreen 24" on it. Wire mouse and Zboard keyboard :)
It plays wonderfully...now it never has seen anything but a few specific titles i decided were worth being on there (1942, CoD, DDo,...etc) it does great...but then again...its never browsed (not even once)...its never had AV...its never used for anything but games. Probably the most stable Windows box i have ever owned. But also extremely limited and not real damn cheap...but then again this middle aged (mf when did that happen) guy can compete with those sugar-pumped-13 year olds and still remain competitive :) the graphics are almost always run all the way up with best detail with no noticeable loss in performance. :) But again the key is not to load ANYTHING not absolutely needed....especially the windows stuff!!!
While this may seem (ok maybe it is) a but extreme. Its also the only way i have found that ANY version of windows after a few months was still basically rock solid.
Now you must excuse me....i gotta go ruin somebodies day online :)
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
So let's see here. DX10 games are coming mid-2008, and Fiji is due in 2009. Vista sucks on almost every computer it's possible to install it on.
I think we have another ME here, my friends.
Not to troll, but this is a good point in favor of playing games on consoles. They lack a mouse and keyboard setup, and they are less powerful than PCs for most of their lifespans, but if you like the games avaiable for them, they at least provide an almost completely stable, hassle-free platform for about five years before you have to replace them.
(Hmm, actually, I guess XP was a five-year platform, too.)
If he really likes strategy and role-playing games, some unidentified companies in the D.C. area are hiring.
He can get paid to play. They provide computers, too.
lol, games (and taxes :-( ) are the only reasons why I even have windows ....
That said, I'm not planning on getting vista any time soon. ("Never" would be good for me, but, some day, winxp64 won't be available to buy any more.)
Tell him the truth. Tell him that Vista has all sorts of problems, that his games will crash, and that due to OEM licensing deals, it is very hard to get a computer that has XP on it. His ire will be right where it belongs. On Dell and MS. Protecting the less technically inclined from the truth is not protecting them at all.
I nominate this comment for comment of the month.
I really hope it gets archived as +5 funny. Some whiny mac fanboys are modding it down.
~= scwizard =~
-> That's despite promises from Microsoft that Vista is backwards-compatible with XP's graphic engine, DirectX 9, and that it will support existing games.
Did we say "backwards compatible"? We meant to say, "Ass-backwards compatible." That means, we release our new stuff, our stuff breaks your old stuff, you fix your old stuff, and then your stuff is compatible. Ass backwards compatible. It's a new standard for compatibility. We invented it, so you need our permission to use it. Fortunately, by attempting to run your stuff under our stuff, you have accepted our terms for using our stuff, which includes you agreeing that when our stuff breaks your stuff it is your fault. If our new stuff breaks our old stuff, that is also your fault. That is why everything we do is Ass. Backwards. Compatible. (Dog.) By the way, when you fix your old stuff to work with our new stuff, you must fix it so that your new stuff does not work any more with anyone else's old stuff. That would not be Ass Backwards Compatibility.
trying to find many titles to run on Linux
And frankly, that's fine by me. It's got some bullshit problems due to excessive DRM, but it also has some nice new features. We're testing Vista in the office and I have to say that compared to XP, it's a *big* improvement. I'm going to hold back on deployment for a good year, but I'm also going to recommend that once a major service pack is released (say SP1), we'll migrate our Windows desktops (and junk older machines that can't handle Vista).
Most of our lab desktops run Linux, but there has also been a big migration to MacOS X. I don't expect Vista to affect that migration. Grad students, postdocs, and most professors seem to still prefer Unix. But most of the administrators are used to Windows and badly want an upgrade.
I think that even in the academic world there is real pent up demand for a new Windows. And from what I've seen, Vista is a pretty damn good. (though I still prefer nix on my home box)
What does this have to do with DRM?
two words : system overhead.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Nvidia's vista support is horrible. However ATI has some very nice vista drivers and I have no issues gaming at all. My FPS is the same as XP.
ehh, I had my doubts about XP when it came out.. I started using Vista RTM in November and have had a few problems with it. I want to strip it down, kill off a bunch of services and disable the new lame UAC shit.. it has potential but yeah, I think most of the comments here are right, wait for SP1 and it will be a production OS-- that's highly unprofessional, but it's what we've come to expect from the lumbering beast.
Smokedot.org
"You know, it amazes me how much FUD is spread merely because it's made by Microsoft."
Hatred and reason will never be found in the same post.
Huh?? Ive installed my entire array of FPS games, and even rts games. everything works like a charm, and actually runs faster. I do no have a dx10 card- x800xtpe, actually an x800xt, just added the pe with the pipelines.
1 ,00.asp
VISTA IS BEAUTIFUL- AND I HATE MS.
Before you speak- stfu and listen!
by the way- this ran on slashdot last week- http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,209057
Everything works on Vista- tried and true. Except Gametap- and thats their fault.
I installed Vista Ultimae on my old pc with 512mb of ram a p4 2.8 cpu and a nvidia 6200 128mb gfx card. I cannot for the life of me find any problems i got counter strike source installed and day of defeat installed i have nothing to complain about they both run as perfect as they ever did. i would love to report something bad about vista but after using it from launch day i cannot report one crash or any driver issues everything in my pc is supported including my old tv tuner card which was made in 1999. im reading all these bad reports about vista on the web using my pc with vista which runs much better than xp ever did and all i can do is scratch my head and wonder what the fuck is going on do i believe the article or my lying eyes?
I Predict A Riot
I see win2k has transcended your little list. Pity.
For you anyway.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
WHQL drivers, thats the problem. For the high end directx 10 cards there are no WHQL drivers, in fact, there are no drivers at all in certain cases (even for the brand new $600 cards). So in short, they would upgrade if they could. Maybe read around before flaming?
maybe someone has pointed this out - but the reason the FPS suck is not because vista sucks - but becuase the hardware manufacturers have failed to provide stable drivers for much of their hardware.
the 8800 gtx has terrible support at the momement with a number of users threating nvidia through www.nvidiaclassaction.org. in general NVidia has been doing a poor job of supporting their hardware, for example under XP 64 the drivers are equally bad - barely implementing what is needed to perform well. at the vista launch a large portion of their motherboards (680a, 680i, NForce4)did not have WHQL drivers relased.
many software publishers have clearly not tested their software with vista as well making things less smooth.
vista has been under development for an extrodinarily long time - give then ease of aquiring the OS (CTP releases, RC releases), and wide availability of development tools that contain support for vista, the blame falls squarely on the hardware and software vendors who have not updated their software for this release.
Ironically, the upgrade to Vista on my AMD 4x4 has gone without incident. All of my games continute to work at roughly the same level as before. There are still some performance issues and a few interesting features of vista relating to multicore machines.
"Us intelligent Linux-loving Lisp-defending geeks need to show the masses rationality!!!"
Ha! Obviously you're new here. We slap Lisp around almost as bad.
Wow, I'm fucking shocked, I am. Doom 3 doesn't run on a platform it wasn't designed for. Neither does Half-Life 2. Sure, we could blame the hardware that wasn't designed for it, or the drivers that aren't ready, but instead, lets slag Micro$haft. Damn them!!! *shakes fist*. They should have kept their Crappy Vista in the goddamn box until everyones drivers and hardware was ready for it! And also, they should have included a magic genie that would notice I was installing it on my MMX200 and automatically configure it for best performance! God damnit, this box has run games perfectly since Windows 95 without me having to upgrade it ONCE, why do I have to now just because I installed Vista?!? WTF?!? Stupid Micro$uck and their money-grubbing ways!
There, did I cover the majority? Good, now STFU. New programs have trouble. New drivers take time to get to maturity. Old games need tweaks to work on new systems. It's the way life goes.
I think I should post a Slashdot story the next time I try to play my beautiful original copy of Descent on my XP3400+. I mean, goddamnit, things run so fast that one tap of the keyboard and I've flown across the room and slammed into a wall, and then that damn little yellow guy who's usually so weak I play bumpercars with him kills me before I can blink. Obviously, this is a Microsoft problem. StUpId MiCrO$hIt!
(But damnit, that's still the best 3/8 of a second in gaming....)
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Perhaps MS are "pushing towards DX10", but by ignoring DX9 issues they leave you in no man's land. MS: that is a very stupid place to dump people when you're trying to get them to switch to Vista to boost your revenue stream.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Reviews such as here and here show that Vista gaming performance is actually better than XP's in Direct3D applications, at least with AMD's more mature drivers. OpenGL performance, on the other hand, is horrible, along with Nvidia's drivers altogether. But Vista gaming isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be.
Any application that was written to use the Documents & Settings folder to store some information/install does not work. I get 3-5 reports a day of clients that wanted to be bleeding-edge and go with new vista machines and their software doesn't work. Maybe they should buy new software, but I'm just stating what I'm seeing in the real-world.
And then there was E
It gets me 1000fps on counter-strike source (mine's the XFX version), so I'm happy. I'll never go back to a mere 100fps! :-)
This reminded me of a question I'd had years ago: Suppose DX10 games start shipping and I've got a DX9 graphics card, say a 7800GTX.
Can I play these new games at all without buying a new card?
I'm sure the old one could manage a decent framerate on the new game just without the new shaders and whatnot. The last time this happened I managed to buy a DX9 card before any DX9 games appealed to me so I've never had to deal with it firsthand.
Did I answer my own question?
Isn't this OSX?
Need to buy a new computer for Vista? Why not just buy a Mac.
NWN2 isnt worth playing until they can:
;) Walls of Ice and other nifty placable spells
1: Eliminate graphic lag. It makes the game unplayable even on minimal settings. (Im playing on a laptop bought last december.. nice one at that)
2: Get epic out fast. 20 levels is not enough.
3: No Linux client.. I dont think there's a linux server either. Game stopper right there.
4: Not enough spells, classes, or goodies. PrC with NWN1 and expansion packs are much better. Even PrC 2.2 + super-spell pack was toasty fun
5: Im guessing the same stupid limits will be in place too.. I havent checked em: max +20 ab, max +12 statup (stuff like that the PrC has had to build around)
The NWN makers wont like it, but I consider PrC essential to any mod, including the original 3. This is also why I wont buy the downloadable ones as you cant apply PrC. In essence, the only really good thing about NWN2 is the DM toolsets. They're nice. But that's it.
Considering that Microsoft provides little or no free support for its products, I think that every sale of Windows represents pure profit for them.
The aspect you mention, that Vista is so bad that nobody will use it, is the key to the better security claims - obviously if nobody uses it, malware cannot attack it.
Cross platform (as much as possible) base it on nix*/linux, and focus it on purely running games, nothing else.
Work in with NVIDIA/ATI and get the game developers.
Invite people to create a multi-boot environment, and see how it goes.
The moment another, cheaper, OS can run games as fast, I'll stop stealing it. Until then I'll continue to run Linux on VMWare (paid for) to get all my real work done, but VMWare is a bit heavy to run in the background while gaming.
MS, please fix the Vista drivers so I may reinstall my pirate copy and continue to say that MS isn't totally evil.
Ever done a `man` on `top` ?
Jesus Christ.
I was wondering if MS were trying to drive xbox sales by limiting gaming experioence on Vista...
"Drivers are a different kettle of fish, lots of direct IO commands and assembly language, i don't doubt it's a huge codebase although 20 million does seem kinda high.."
Shall I explain it?
*flips coin*
Ah, hell. This is slashdot. You can figure it out.
That makes no sense, though. The graphics system would have to calculate a 2D system if a 3D system wasn't there, and a 3D system doesn't use any more resources than a 2D one when it's not actually moving (or it shouldn't, anyway).
Again: We can do this anyway, within a game. Why can't we do it outside of a game?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Alright, I am just going to come clean. This has to be said, enusing witchhunt be damned. My employer must acknowledge our mistakes (and hopefully start issuing some refunds) but also call out Microsoft on it too. Anyway, I am an engineer and I want to avoid politics.
Another poster made a comment linking to a video on YouTube showing NVIDIA driver problems in Vista.
Notice how the screen blacks out while the gentleman plays the movie? To simplify (grossly), this is Vista treating our instructions as specification violations (not handling encrypted content when expected, for example) and assuming the video being played is premium content (it isn't, but it wants authenticated anyway) and enforcing restrictions. Every time this happens, Vista resets graphics or kills instructions sent by the driver (notice the error message from the tray). Again, “tiltbits”.
The misallocated texture buffers is another matter entirely which I have not personally worked on. My one coworker tells me this is looking more and more like a bug with DX10. Not something I can comment on here.
As mentioned before, our efforts to resolve it are stymed by the fact that any attempt to read memory or trace the driver is treated by Vista as a “hack” attempt (thus causing graphics reset). This is going to make tracking down all these issues take a long time. At least we are not alone—seems ATI are in the same boat with us.
I would suggest that those same people need to take some example from the majority of us using open source software who are *fully aware* that if you make a major update to your system, you may end up screwing up a piece of software that you were able to run fine previously.
I'm sorry, but whether you use Linux or Windows, you're a complete and utter fool if you always run the "latest and greatest" version of everything AND expect everything to run smoothly out of the box.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
BlackViper where are you, your services are needed now more than ever?
Windows programs have had to deal with relocation of DLLs since the beginning of Win32. Service packs and even security updates have changed the base address of DLLs, so only marginal programs have problems.
Many Windows programs have the unfortunate habit of assuming that the address of a kernel32.dll function in one process is the same as another (see LoadLibraryW code injection trick). Because of this, and because a relocator that doesn't waste memory is difficult, Vista only changes addresses on boot.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Much more power, much less crap to cut out... You can run it on almost anything, and the hardware requirements are tiny.
Try it some time, you might like it.
Any 'system overhead' due to DRM only kicks in when you're playing DRM'd content, and at the discretion of whoever recorded the content.
/. (again), the article is completely misinformed. I have only had problems with one game which is now 10 years old. All 4 games mentioned in the article run perfectly on my system. Even Theme Hospital runs without a hitch.
So, yes, you might notice some problems if you're trying to watch a Blu-ray disc and play Counter-Strike at the same time, but I have attempted something similar (I have a DRM'd music file that sets off the Protected Media Path) with no ill-effects at all.
Unfortunately for
I haven't seen a single article on here about Vista since it's release which isn't crammed to the brim with ill-informed FUD.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
DirectX is not equal to OpenGL. Direct3D is equal to OpenGL. Big software houses that make game engines can afford to use OpenGL for their engines, because all their investment goes in the engine. Other software houses that want to make rich games can not afford not to use DirectX, because DirectX is a one-stop solution, including everything a game programmer might need, whereas with OpenGL one has to use many different libraries, often incompatible between themselves, and in various states of development.
And please do not start posting links to SDL/OpenAL/etc before you go and use them yourself. They are a pain in the a$$, compared to DirectX and the Microsoft development environment.
It all depends on the speed of your graphics card. Lets say you have a fairly modern recent card (I'd say a 7600GT) and it's a few months from now and you're trying to run Crysis in DX9 mode. Your graphics card has to render that world, which is detailed and so is likely to stress your video card, then it has to render the glass, shadows, etc. outside the game.
Aero glass is not a simple 2D windowing system like in XP, it's a fully 3D hardware accelerated system. Which means you're trying to run two games at the same time (sorta).
"Oh boy"
I mainly play world of warcraft, which did take a performance hit. I play it in windowed, not full screen mode (though maximized so it looks full screen). The main reason for doing this is so when I alt-tab to something else, I can see a little preview window of what is going on in WOW when I hover my mouse over its application in the task bar. This is great for when on a gryphon flight or a boat, I can read slashdot or other news stories and know when to switch back without having to alt-tab back. Mostly my FPS is fine, a tad less but more than enough for WOW. The only annoying thing left is some occasional CPU spikes which I haven't been able to nail down (it happens even if I'm not running wow).
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
I've been running Vista Ultimate on my laptop since December. Being a developer, I run a local instance of SQL Server, various development IDEs, and I am an avid gamer. Just two weeks ago I attended a coworker's LAN party and decided to bring my laptop (it's a pretty beefy alienware). I had absolutely no problems playing the following games:
Counter-Strike
Far Cry
Battlefield 1942
Warcraft 3
If you are running Vista and have a problem running a game, try going into the executables properties and first try to run it as administrator, if that doesn't work run in it compatibility mode. Battlefield was the only game on that list that required me to do this.
Also, FYI, I achieved framerates in these games of around 60fps, which while isn't a number a graphics afficiando would brag on, it's more than sufficient to have a smooth gaming experience.
- In the past, unstable drivers have been one of the major sources of instable systems (aka bsod).
- Vista wants to serve to the movie and the music labels, so they thigthen all screws to ensure encrypted paths to the video- and music-subsystems.
My guess is, microsoft would be in some sort of breach of contract if they didn't ask you to write to those constrained apis. I'm not at all surprised that there are problems now to deliver good drivers.I guess (or at least *hope*) this will be the last attempt to force DRM upon the consumer. This should go to show that it costs a big amount of effort (and money) and in the end the system will still be cracked with minimal effort. It also hope, it will show that opening up the source is a huge benefit to everyone as it will allow to make better products and not to reinvent the wheel again and again and again.
I'm sure happy, I'm not in your place writing those drivers.
Just my to 2 cents
i still use win98 lite. I do have to do a complete reinstall once a year but thats no bad thing - and pretty easy to do now. And by using as little MS stuff (Opera, OOffice) as possible with a firewall on my modem/hub it is very fast and very secure. I even got doom3 to run on it. I am trying to move to ubuntu but its like being back in the days of win95 and learning how to get things working let alone using it. I'll get there one day (but i have been at it for a few years now). /.s are always rude when people say they are still using win98 - it may be rubbish but at least its fast and small.
It was 19 hundred and ninety and eight, when I, a mere computing novice, rushed to the store and purchased the latest and greatest update to windows to my perfectly operable 5 month old PC. After the "upgrade", my system was trashed. The cd rom worked half the time, my favorite game became extremly buggy, and the sound showed up whenever it took a notion. And all of this was accompanied by oh so many pretty blue screens, with their helpful messages and hexadecimal character strings. So Microhard can keep their Vista eye candy and I will keep my reasonably operable XP SP2. And this will be my last windows system, thank you very much.
FAQs are evil.
"Chris Donahue, manager of Microsoft's Games for Windows group, says the company has tested 1,000 popular games from the past five years. Most work well with Vista, he said, declining to elaborate how many had problems and why."
"I'd be very surprised to see any games that hit the market from this point forward straight out not support Windows Vista," - Chris Donahue.
They thought the games we had to be compatible and expect the games to come to be compatible. If the games they already thought were compatible have proven to be incompatible... what does that mean for the upcoming titles? Maybe they need an Oxford Dictionary, because this is not the first time these folks have dropped the ball on compatibility. Maybe they just don't understand the meaning of the word?
Is this a conspiracy to force all die hard PC gamers to buy Xboxs? FPS or RTS with a controller? I have used the perfect setup (PC keyboard and mouse) why would I want that? Oh because I can't play anything on my PC now because MS can't sort their shit out? Or just Microsoft not really able to figure out what they're doing? Or Both? They don't sell PC, but they do sell Xboxs.
So if we switch to a third person view we'll be ok then?
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
While GP may or may not really be a developer for ATI/NVIDIA, managers in general are known for sugarcoating problems rather than being honest. Thus I would not expect Dwight Diercks to tell us the full truth.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I don't get it. I'm having no problem playing Leisure Suit Larry on my Windows 95 machine...
Navy Tim www.navytim.com
Again, please, what's an example? I really have a hard time believing you because those directory names aren't fixed, and every application I've used that uses that theme (which is all of them it seems) works just fine.
I haven't encountered any problems except for antivirus software, which is to be expected.
Honestly, I hear this crap on slashdot all the time. Why is it so difficult to name one application that has a reasonably large installed base?
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Norton Internet Security.
You cannot install from the discs. You are basically stuck using an ISO image to get Norton installed onto Vista PC's. It's a pain in the ass for the guys in at my work, but it's the only way they've gotten it to work.
Juris Law --- which is used by a ton of lawyers, will not work on vista at all.
... i've seen a couple of apps that need UAC turned on to install, seems stupid
Jonas Construction software -- which is used by MOST large industrial A/C contractors, gets random errors printing forms due to vista.
Also, this is moreso a minor bug with vista, but when installing Adobe Acrobat 8.0, if you have User Account Control turned OFF, it errors out and says the TEMP FOLDER is full
there are a bunch of others i've run into on the job, i'll keep you informed as the calls come in
And then there was E
I have not seen any issues - NONE
This may be due to my system being hand built to run Vista
I get 5.9 scores on everything except the CPU, which gets a lowly 5.3.
The heart of the system is Dual geForce 8800's in SLI - sweet!
Whatever, I run vista with only a gig of ram, my 64 bit chip, and a nvidia 7600 GT card and counter-strike source plays as well as it did in XP. It does crash occasionally, but thats because I only have a gig of ram.
It's mostly because you're sharing the hardware between two GL apps. Also depending on the hardware you either get the game rendering directly to a rectangle on screen (r200 does this), or it renders to a texture in the window manager (nvidia does this, I think), which lets you do things like in those Novell compiz demo videos but is way slower since it has to render through both apps.
I have to wonder, then, why bother to support Vista at all until next year?
OK, I'm bitter. Game execs seem to be willing to care more about the young and unproven DirectX 10 than all the people on (the mature platforms) Mac OS X and Linux who are probably more than willing to pay a little extra for a good game.
It' slike that episode of DS9 I watched last night: clothing Ferengi females simultaneously doubles both the consumer base and workforce. Like the FCA, execs of game publishers and developers are more concerned about exploiting their current market (and a too-immature and almost non-existent market) than about expanding it into a larger base.
Economically, it doesn't make sense.
It makes me want to throw chairs at people.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Shouldn't be. In fact, someone was commenting on how they were doing some sort of swapping in/out of the video card?
I want you, and everyone else here, to try a simple test: Download some of the first OpenGL tutorial demos -- you know, the ones which show you a triangle and a square -- and run those. Notice how your CPU usage is almost none? That's because it only has to render a single frame.
You can have all the glass in the world, but if it isn't changing, it shouldn't be using any resources at all beyond a flat 2D image.
Oh, and I've run multiple games at once, just to see how it worked. Surprisingly, it didn't slow me down too much. The only way I'd really expect a huge performance hit is if there was some transform happening on the game window itself -- for instance, if I drag it, and it wobbles, then that should definitely lag the game. But it should be reasonably fast once I drop it and it settles.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If so, why are you STILL following me? ;)
:P Just learned you were on here. Got spies everywhere. 8) )
(Sorry Terry, couldn't resist.
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
I'm curious if the same thing would happen on OS X... Also, what about DirectX windows? (Does DirectX even have a windowed mode?) I seem to remember all the uproar was about layering OpenGL on top of DirectX -- I'm guessing, looking at this now, that DirectX games would have to go through the same thing (if they run windowed).
From what I can remember benchmarking at before, my UT2004 is running at fullscreen, at decent speed, on Beryl on Linux. It does this because I told Beryl to not do any sort of indirection on fullscreen windows. (This took me from ~25 fps to ~50 fps, so I know it did something.)
(As far as I'm concerned, it should kill the indirection as soon as there aren't any effects on that window anymore. Of course this means a drop shadow would lag you... Maybe the indirection will get fast enough, eventually, that no one will care?)
I also have one old 2D MMO which I run in a window, and apparently the latest Beryl SVN has a keystroke for toggling indirection on a given window. Therefore, I should be able to easily run that game at full speed. However, it's old enough and slow enough that it really shouldn't matter, so I haven't checked out the SVN version. Also, there is a keystroke for taking an app fullscreen, which would presumably disable the indirection.
I mean, other than the "running a whole separate game" thing, there shouldn't be much performance degredation for simple GL apps -- no more, at least, than if you were actually running two windowed GL games side by side.
Also tried: xv works, with no noticeable performance hit until I started dragging the window around (dragging any window which does animation causes the whole WM to lag -- not significantly (down to maybe 10 FPS, which seems to be what OS X's UI operates at), but noticeable.
Also: Surprisingly, xvmc works, again with no noticeable performance hit. It does cause problems when dragging a window around, though -- I believe this used to work pretty much as expected, whereas in Beryl it's possible to figure out what's going on, but it's far from graceful.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I removed 5GB of bloat (how language files can take 800MB is beyond me, a .dll per language???) and theres a few tweaks like disable UAC. When Microsoft are forced to remove every major app from their OS, and I can strip out unuseful-to-me features I will buy their OS. Uhm no not really, at least not until they stop polluting the protocols.
http://www.vlite.net/
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
Hear hear.
There are so many games that I wish I could run on what would effectively be a command-line XP system.
If I'm playing a game, I don't want it to keep track of time, the weather, incoming messages, a pretty picture on my desktop, the state of the dvd drive, and whether I've got the latest update. I don't multitask while gaming. I don't play EU3 and edit spreadsheets at the same time.
I want every erg of horsepower and CPU bandwidth chewing through game data.
*Occasionally* (about 5% of the time) I *might* run an mp3 player in the background. But if I had something that would screw multitasking, I would forego that in a heartbeat.
I don't suppose anyone here has what amounts to "XP as DOS", do they?
-Styopa