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

All Aboard the FUD Train

[ozphx]

Choo choo.

I have been running vista on my primary box since the RCs and playing Source engine and Unreal engine games the whole time without issue. The RTM edition came with less-than-perfect drivers for nVidia cards (polygon tearing at high res in Source).

100.whatever detonators work fine.

I put this down to any typical release where a bunch of kids get together on the internet to have a whine about it broke everything.

Of course you will expect lower frame rates with the WHQL drivers bundled with the OS. Any gamer going from their bleeding edge pre-alpha detonators box to stock drivers is going to notice the difference. When you update, these problems magically disappear.

Hey this is Slashdot and this is what makes news! I guess I better close this post by blaming it on Protected Video Path to close out the non-blaming-ms karma dive for a perfect +5 Interesting!

Nvidia executive...

[Shados]

Nvidia lost all credibility with their predictions when they brushed off the 3D Mark benchmarks of their FX line of cards, stating that developers would use the Nvidia specific optimisations, and thus that the performance with the generic stuff was irrelevent. We all know how that ended ::stares at his FX 5900 Ultra that can't even run Oblivion well enough to be entertaining without third party hackish solutions, and even then::

Its just a sad attempt at justifying their garbage Vista drivers, I feel like. On the other hand, how bad Vista's backward compatibility is, is simply inexcusable in this case.

Re:People Were Right!

[IntergalacticWalrus]

OS X is perfectly capable of playing mainstream games. Game developers are too stupid to write portable code but that's unrelated.

Re:Tips for Vista Gaming:

[MurphyZero]

Well, perhaps Windows should have a "Make Computing in Windows Easier" Tab. Not necessarily one that, when activated, installs Linux as I am sure someone was going to suggest--we are talking about gaming. A tab that has choices like Enter Gaming mode, or Enter Online gaming mode, which then proceeds to turn off MS services and other crap that are not required. When done, you could then select limited productivity mode, which would then restore the bloatware OS, probably with at most 1 restart.