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Vista Not Playing Nice With FPS Games

Posted by kdawson on from the shoot-em-up dept.

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.'"

3 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. Damn DirectX... by DarkMorph · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Damn DirectX... by rsmith-mac · · Score: 4, Interesting
      As odd as it is to face it, it doesn't seem like the gaming audio market has much of a leg to stand on any more. On-board audio is widely popular, and even among gamers the proportion owning modern SoundBlaster cards is fairly low. Hardware acceleration for such a small & shrinking market is just one more headache for a developer, when they could just use an off-the-shelf audio system like FMOD/Miles which can do everything in software and drive as many audio channels through DirectSound as is required. The cost of course is the CPU penalty and the quality penalty (the later to keep the former in check) which means to a certain extent everyone who is above the median is getting dragged down.

      But for better or worse*, this is the way things will go. Creative is living on borrowed time unless they can convince developers to use OpenAL themselves, or they convince FMOD/Miles to put in two paths to support both groups. I don't think they'll be successful without a great deal of bullying.

      * Worse, IMHO. I use cans for gaming and good head related transfer functions(required for 3D audio over headphones) are not done in software due to the heavy performance hit. There's still a distinct advantage to using hardware here(the X-Fi in particular)

  2. Parent is spot-on. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.