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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.