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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.'"
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.
Direct X provides an all in one interface. OpenGL is just a graphics specification and is pretty much strait procedural. A lot of places would rather not have to do DirectX for sound and input and then also use opengl which feels somewhat out of place. That said, I wish more games were OpenGL. I love OpenGL.
Reserved Word.
Many new systems being sold through retail stores only come with Vista.
They aren't?
I don't know about game output but Vista will definatly degrade your high def signals if you aren't using MS-blessed drivers and hardware.
Trolling is a art,
You!=everyone
Some gamers have experienced issues with their favorite games. And I'm sure some of them updated to the newest drivers as a first resort before posting problems on the internet. Really this was not unexpected. Every new release of software (especially a Windows OS) is not without problems. This only reinforces my opinion that if I were to get Vista it won't be until SP1 at least. The pattern for MS may still hold true:
Version 1.0: Buggy, unstable. Win95, ME, XP
Version 2.0: Some fixes, more stability. Win98, XP SP1
Version 3.0: More fixes, mostly stable. Win98SE, XP SP2
Version 4.0: There is no version 4. Start with another Version.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Expect to see OpenAL take over from DirectSound; Vista's driver model doesn't support hardware acceleration for DirectSound, but it does allow vendors to impalement other APIs with direct paths to the driver. The Creative drivers, for example, support accelerated OpenAL and EAX, but can't support accelerated DirectSound.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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 misunderstand, he is not talking about cheap computer components, he is talking about OEM Windows licences. OEM licences are more restrictive, they can only be installed on a single motherboard for example.
Heck everyone loves cheap OEM parts!
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.
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!!!
>Why would anyone rush out and buy a new operating system?
To bitch about microsoft apparantly. Hello, I am running software on a platform it wasnt designed to run on using new and unstable drivers and I am surprised things are not working as well as on my xp sp2 system! Now I shall submit this grievance to slashdot!
How about reading this.. http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=357
Which contains a much more authoritative response from Dwight Diercks - Vice President, Software Engineering at NVIDIA
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
I highly doubt this will happen. Without it, people cannot play HD-DVD or BlueRay Discs. Time will tell if either will succeed, but their is no reason to believe the successor to DVDs wont require DRM.
I don't have time at the moment to fuss with all the production software I use to get it running on XP. Sonar, Premiere, Steinberg Wave-lab, Pro-Tools, etc. I've got oddball little directx plugins for all those programs that I rely upon. I can't afford the time or energy right now to play with all this just to keep MS' quarterly earnings healthy
People have wanted MS to change their ways for years, MS finally comes out with a secure design, which OF COURSE breaks 1000's of programs, now people complain about it. Unfortunately the MS platform encouraged people to right crappy code, they ALWAYS had the ability to right the programs properly in the first place, but time is money. Companies had years to test their apps with Vista (Ive been installing betas for over 3 years now), personally I find this makes companies look bad when they cannot be ready for a release. It just goes to show how much some companies don't care about their customers, a lot of companies will abandon old products and just say 'Sorry, you have to buy our new version, no extra features, but it works with Vista!... Pay up!!!'
I don't remember XP's rollout being this much trouble. I remember being elated at how it just seemed to have drivers for everything I was running and and there was a significant improvement over Win98 and NT (which most of the music software didn't like).
The differences between XP and 2000 is minimal, ever notice how many drivers work for both XP and 2000? By the time XP hit the scene 2000 was our in full force and had drivers all over the place, so their was not a huge speed bump for drivers.
I read some interesting articles from Alex Seropian, former president of Bungie studios (before MS bought them).
:/
He made several arguments against the common wisdom of the time regarding Mac ports - mostly saying that any significant cost of porting was due to a lack of planning for porting. Having written OpenGL code with and without thinking about how hard it would be to port the code to DirectX, I can definitely understand what he is talking about. He claimed that by planning for a cross platform release from the beginning, the cost added to their development was minimal relative to the profits from the additional market - and the goodwill from the mac community. While mac sales accounted for only a small portion of their total profits, some profit is always better than no profit, at a relatively small additional risk.
But most dev houses are stuck in somebody's proprietary API's, or don't have the expertise or forethought to write portable code - because it does add a different dimension to your development process. So a mac version requires a complete rewrite of all shaders and graphics libraries for opengl, all sound libraries to openAL, and probably new loading classes to handle the endianness (although this, at least, has changed a bit). Not to mention the fun issues you can have with differences in floating point precision
Basically the overall point is that porting is expensive and only worth the cost for best-selling games, but planning for cross platform development will likely give you similar returns on a small scale to your windows release.
I'd have to agree with your assessment.
FMOD recently dropped OpenAL driver support. In our upcoming game (I pretty much handle all the audio programming), we've decided to go with a software-only mixing solution based via FMOD. It gives us a degree of freedom that we always lacked when supporting hardware solutions. A year or two from now, the CPU impact will be considered negligible, even for software I3DL2 (basically, EAX 2) implementations. And, quite frankly, I get awfully tired of worrying about driver and hardware compatibility issues. You'd think that it wouldn't be so difficult to write a stable audio driver... The fact that buggy audio drivers won't be able to blue-screen Windows Vista is a *good* thing.
The lack of support from Vista and FMOD finally put the nail in the coffin for accelerated audio.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
You're kidding right? OpenGL is dying, and has been for years. DirectX, especially with DirectX 10, is so far ahead of OpenGL in terms of its architecture, far cleaner interface, and very standardized features (yes OpenGL has them all with extensions.. oh what a great solution!) that OpenGL is truely like coding a game in the 90s. Oh wait, that's when OpenGL was designed, and it's barely changed since. I loved OpenGL back in the day but, like most 15 year-old things in Computer Science, it's time has passed.
Yes, I'm a graphics programmer at a major game developer. Yes, I'm shipping one of (possibly the) first DirectX 10 games. Yes, Vista SUCKS. But DirectX 10? It's been done right, finally.
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.