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.'"

Comments

Re:Damn DirectX...

[HFXPro]

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.

Re:All Aboard the FUD Train

[UnknowingFool]

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.

Re:Damn DirectX...

[TheRaven64]

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.

Tips for Vista Gaming:

[The MAZZTer]

1. Use Task Manager to set the game priority as "Above Normal". This should help the game get priority above all other programs, however if you need to task switch out for something your OS will be sluggish. This will work on any Windows.
2. Go to the shortcut Compatibility tab in properties and disable "desktop composition", which will disable Aero Glass while you're running the program, saving you 5-15% CPU while it's running in some cases. Of course Aero Glass is automatically turned off in fullscreen mode so this is only useful if you like running games windowed, and it's running slow.
3. You can go and disable all themes using the Compatibility tab, as well, which is also doable on XP. This won't grab you as much of a performance gain.
4. Lastly, you can kill as many programs and services as possible before gaming. Services you won't need to care about too much, however non-Microsoft services usually aren't vital and are most likely to chew up CPU (MS services take their role as "background" services seriously). If you want to take it to the extreme, try this, keeping in mind it was written for Windows XP, not Vista.

NVidia certainly dropped the ball

[hklingon]

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.

Turn Down the FUD

[ThinkFr33ly]

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.

Re:Why?

[gad_zuki!]

>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!

Re:Parent is spot-on.

[Spikeles]

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

Re:People Were Right!

[newt0311]

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). Thats because XP was nothing more than a repackaged version of windows 2000 with a different GUI. The kernel was essentially the same so a few very minor changes in the code (or sometimes none at all) were enough to port the drivers. Vista on the other hand, is a completely rewritten kernel. I don't know specifics, but there are probably massive changes in the driver structure in the kernel especially since the drivers must now support DRM, driver signing, etc... Not like I care, I am quite happy running Gentoo on my box.

Only themselves to blame

[pandrijeczko]

So in other words, there are a lot of gamers out there who are gullible enough to install a new MS operating system with the belief that it is going to provide a better gaming platform than what they had on Windows XP from the moment it is released.

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.