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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Disclaimer: The above post is a complete load of bollocks.
Protected Video Path is not some complex trickery embedded deep in the bowels* of the OS snooping on your every move. Think of it as a wrapper codec, like an encrypted stream. Highly simplified it works like so:
Your HDDVD has an encrypted movie on it, which you want to play. Windows has a quick check to see if all your components support PVP.
If they do support PVP, then it sets up a stream which passes the encrypted movie all the way happily thru the video card and out across to your shiny HDCP supporting screen, which decrypts it and plays it for you.
If they don't support PVP, it sets up an unencrypted low-res stream, and plays it. Or it can't play it.
If you download a damn high definition Xvid (or h264, or whatever) you can play it to your hearts content. PVP does NOT STOP YOU from playing content. It _allows_ you to play protected crap, which you would not be able to play otherwise. Of course we all know its totally futile, because everyone will download nice hidef rips, the movie studios will cry, and we'll have paid extra cash for these stupid HDCP chips et al.
* Well I'm sure some enabling stuff is in the drivers, but its just passing an encrypted stream around.
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
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...
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.
Stop using facts damnit! :)
People are so desperate to bash Vista that they'll take any ol' piece of information and twirl it around to create something entirely different. It's ridiculous. Why can't they just let people whatever OS they want in peace?
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.
Gee and here folks were complaining that Apple didn't have iTunes ready for Vista. So where were all the game softeware companies. Too. twiddling their iPods perhaps?
indeed .. Vista is like a bad linux distro out of 98' ..
If I have to do all that just to get a game running smoothly, it's painfully obvious why Windows will never be ready for the desktop.
What planet are you on? Vista has less games and less users than the ENTIRE OS X population. Maybe if you limit to 10.4 it would be close. There are games I can get for Mac OS X and Windows XP that do not work on Windows Vista. As the article stated, it is nvidia and ati's fault for their shitty drivers. OpenGL based games have terrible frame rates. With the nvidia 8800 driver I can get my 7300 to run Enemy Territory without crashing but not the official driver for my card. WoW, Halflife: Source, ET, Darwinia, uplink and age of empires II work on my system. I have not gone through a full install of all the games I like yet. Star Wars: Knights of the old republic will not run at all. It seems to be a detection issue with the video card. I hate companies that do that. The configure/splash screens work but then it just crashes.
When I first installed vista, ET, Quake 3, RTCW and several other quake 3 based games would not run. They do work on my iBook G4. I only get 13fps in ET on that iBook and yet it was faster than Vista on a Pentium D. Funny how that works.
By far the worst issue with vista is nvidia and ati. They can't seem to ship stable drivers for it. My audigy card sometimes drops audio after several hours of use but its still working better than my video card. If you haven't gone to vista, wait until there are drivers. I don't know how OEMs are shipping computers with vista yet. The drivers can't be working right on those systems.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
See, this is good news for me. I don't really want to change to Vista. I've tried it, I even own a legit copy of it, but decided to put it aside for the time being and put XP Pro SP2 back on my PC.
By "mid-2008", I'm hoping SP1 or SP2 includes the abandonment of DRM, and I assume that by then there will be plenty of web sites that will tell me how to run a "trimmed" version of Vista the same way I do right now with XP Pro.
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.
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).
Maybe Microsoft will decide to focus on the Xbox and Zune and Dynamics (whatever that is) and leave the operating system to people who care. Sort of like Apple, who seems to be edging its way out of the computer business and into the much more lucrative "entertainment industry" (are THEY in for a shock). And I just don't buy the idea that computers are all going to be embedded and consoles and set-tops, etc etc. As long as there are people who want to be creative (and scientists) there will be a need for some type of general purpose cipherin' box onto which you can impose your will (to some extent) and make do what you want to do.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Y'know, if everyone's having problems writing advanced graphics drivers for Vista, perhaps the real problem is the structure MS implements. After all, it's technically MS's responsibility that the emulation software for DX9 and OGL works. More so the former than the latter perhaps, but they have yet to do even that.
While I blame Micros~1 for foisting this on the computing populace, a very large measure of blame rests upon you guys (ATI/AMD, NVidia) for going along with it.
When Microsoft presented their protected video path/DRM/copy protection suite and asked you to sign on to it, your correct response should have been, "Fuck off." (An ideal subsequent response would have been to get cracking on Linux and/or Mac support, since it was clear Microsoft was going to cause you more trouble than it could possibly be worth, and raise your engineering and support costs to ridiculous levels.)
You knew it was The Wrong Thing to do, and you did it, anyway. Please explain yourselves.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
He's got a good point there. If everyone wasn't riding the DirectX cock, they could code in OpenGL instead (like iD and the Unreal team) and therefore make their games a hell of a lot more portable.
In the end I guess it's a numbers game. If you're targeting a specific platform, you code whatever is native for it. This is changing due to the vast landscape of consoles with PPC chips and ATI/NVidia chips in them. I'm betting that in the future alot more devs will turn to OpenGL to make their games extra-portable for PC as well as next-get consoles.
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.
its called a monopoly. It puts companies in a position where they can't say "Fuck off" because doing would result in a massive loss of customers
Well it's more like the prisoner's dilemma imho. If both ATI and Nvidia said "fuck off", MS would have a big problem. If only one of them said it however...