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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.'"
Everyone who accused Vista of copying OS X were dead on!
We all knew this was the way it was going to be. This isnt a newsflash for anyone. I have a dx10 compat gfx card, but I'll stick to XP for gaming way after SP1 for Vista comes out. Drivers for Vista just plain and simply not up to snuff yet.
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.
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.
With the push towards DX10, is it really that surprising? I wouldn't accuse MS of maliciously hindering DX9's performance, but it's not hard to imagine them not putting much effort into it. Or at least not into DX9 APIs/functions not being used by Aero.
disclosure: I'm a developer at ATI and am writing this anonymously.
Vista's DRM is the fault in nearly 100% of the problems we're seeing. A game tries to output at 1280x1024 or greater and the DRM kicks in trying to downgrade the resolution. Don't blame ATI or NVIDIA, blame Microsoft for this one.
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.
You're a troll, please go away. Not even MS could be dumb enough to do that.
Now, off topic, I must confess that I no longer even read the Slashdot paragraph, but I just read the headline and then go straight to the comments to see what the controversial parts were.
Acting stupid isn't much fun when there's someone around who knows better
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Since when has gentoo had DirectX 10?
Cheers,
Roger
Do you have any better hostages?
i was reading an article from the Upfront newsletter about this with engineering CAD software as well.
Not every bug for every game will be discovered during internal testing (and MS's buggy reputation doesn't help). Frankly, I'm glad that these gamers are having these problems so that by the time I upgrade in a year, there will be fixes or work-arounds.
On a related note: Vista's promise to reinvent gaming seems to be faltering out of the gate. Beside the problems listed in the article, MS isn't doing a good job of telling casual gamers what sort of videocards or hardware they'll need to effectively take advantage of DX10. Then you have contradictory reports from gaming studios that DX10 doesn't mean anything - yet. None of this is helping to make PC gaming "easier" for the masses. In fact it's complicating things.
Only problem with nVidia drivers I've had, since Vista Beta 2, is that console windows can't go fullscreen, since "The system does not support fullscreen." This means you can rule out playing DOS games, unless you use DOSbox (which is slow) or a virtual machine solution (which can be very difficult to set up right). Not too big a loss since even with tools like VDMSound DOS game emulation under NT has never been great.
To me at least this is as old as windows and perhaps it has always been true. A new OS reduces the performance of your computer when it comes to games.
Remember Windows 3.1 and before? The fast majority of games in those days were DOS games. Simple reason, the whole GUI was not needed and back then the OS and the GUI were still clearly seperated between DOS and Windows.
Same is true for linux, you can get far better performance for a single purpose graphical app doing things directly then going through X. Offcourse you loose the GUI but so what. Most games have their own anyway.
So when Windows 95 arrived a game like Quake would perform a lot better without it for the plain simple reason that with Windows 95 loaded you lost a shitload of memory to something you did not use that could have been used by the game.
Same thing with all those niceties added to the OS. Everyone knows you should disable as much as possible if you are serious about gamers meaning you effectively trim the OS back to what was offered with 95. No XP themes, no pre-loaded apps, no helpers. Nothing that either takes CPU cycles, memory or both.
Vista is the same story again. More "bloat" is added wich may or may not be what you want (but since these people who complain installed Vista they seem to want it) and when you are in a game that bloat is probably useless. When you are playing a game you just want the OS to do what is needed to keep the game running and nothing more. But that don't sell new OS'es. That don't have everyone gushing about how pretty this new OS is. Hell, you want an OS that gives you just the games, get a freaking Console, you weirdo!
Every new windows version gives early adopters problems.
You would PC gamers would know this. Did anyone here actually thing Neverwinter Nights 2 was going to be perfect straight from the DVD? If so, I want what you are smoking.
As for the whole DirectX 10 question, I remember a turn-based strategy game Battle Isle or something that was the first game I saw that was 95 only. It had been badly delayed because 95 had been badly delayed.
Tying your product to another product that has yet to sell is risky. Especially if said product has a track history of not being to nice at launch to the consumers of your product.
But hey, these dudes got VISTA! That got to be worth a couple if inches of ePenis.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Vista - so like a Mac that you can't even play games on it :-)
:-]
[And yes, this is a dig at *both* sides, so let's see how that goes down
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Grr... the first half of my post got lost in a non-closed p block... lemme try again:
100.59 detonators work fine for me as well. They are way better than the bundled drivers, which have a video overlay bug that can cause system hangs if you drag windows over a video overlay. nVidia card owners be warned. Like I said though, 100.xx are noticeably faster and haven't crashed or hung yet for me.
Only problem with nVidia drivers I've had, since Vista Beta 2, is that console windows can't go fullscreen, since "The system does not support fullscreen." This means you can rule out playing DOS games, unless you use DOSbox (which is slow) or a virtual machine solution (which can be very difficult to set up right). Not too big a loss since even with tools like VDMSound DOS game emulation under NT has never been great.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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!
When Duke Nukem Forever comes out, PC gamers will forget about all those old, now dull looking toys.
Monstar L
Until game developers start releasing more games that are unix based I will be forced to eventually buy vista and that really pisses me off but what is a gamer to do?
It's only paranoia if your wrong...
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.
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.
Why?
I mean, I can run a reasonably modern game with support for in-game cameras -- say, Doom 3 (native Linux port), which can show me just as much detail on an in-game screen as I see in the rest of the game -- or Half-Life 2, where the demo showed someone tossing a camera around, and the screens behaving realistically.
So what's so hard about, say, showing an OpenGL game in a window? Is it trying to run two GL apps at once, that don't necessarily cooperate (game and window manager)? Or is it a driver issue?
For the record, I don't know about the sort of stacking effect you'd have with the window manager trying to do GL stuff to a game window (which has its own GL stuff), but I do know that I'm able to get reasonably good performance out of running more than one GL game at a time in windowed mode on Linux (without Beryl).
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As I recall, Microsoft had already begun development on a major service pack before Vista hit retail shelves. Are we really all that suprised to discover that there are some issues with the new O/S? This is just another example of a commercial beta release, if you ask me. I seem to recall that "Testers urge Microsoft to extend Vista Beta" news stories were a dime a dozen on several IT news sites after Microsoft confirmed the release date.
In regards to gaming performance and WHQL drivers, I tend to think that a significant number of PC gamers are smart enough to try updating video drivers if their video performance is buggy or slow. Maybe I am giving PC gamers too much credit? I just figure if you are unable to learn how to properly configure your O/S for optimal gaming performance, there is a large and far less technically inclined console market waiting for your business.
They'll make it a point to actually put some effort into QA. Course, since this is about games, you would think EA (and a lot of other games publishers) would maybe take some of that advice, too...
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Microsoft apologists always blame the drivers.
If the end-user experience is bad, it doesn't matter who's to blame.
When microcomputers were new, a colleague of mine was raving about his North Star Advantage. He couldn't praise it too much. I asked him if it was reliable. He said it had been absolutely 100% reliable. So I asked if I could drop in that afternoon and have him show me WordStar, the hot new program I'd heard so much about.
There was a pause.
"Well, I can't do that today," he says. "I'm waiting for a new power supply. The old one failed again last week."
"But I thought you said your computer had been 100% reliable," I said.
"Oh, the computer has been completely reliable. It's just the power supply that keeps failing."
It may have been the power supply's fault, not the computer's, but, nevertheless, the effect was the same: he couldn't run WordStar.
(And just to fend off any misunderstandings: he was talking about the power supply North Star provided as an integral part of the system...)
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I completely agree that beta testing of Vista is best left to others. For those folks who love buggy software which will break their devices and who love the mystery of trying to find out why things don't work anymore. Kind of like the car mechanic with the car that works when it wants too and whose hood is always up. I don't see myself rushing out to buy a buggy, DRM filled Operating System that doesn't offer anything new other than that the need for a whole new computer to use it and at that, the thing is more locked down and more user unfriendly than XP could have dreamed of being. Decreasing playback quality, lower frame rates from your video card and a slower computer so that it can constantly monitor whether or not you are using approved games, programs and media. No thanks. (thanks Peter Gutmann) If none of us buy it, if none of us are suckered into wanting it for the mythical DirectX 10 and the games that aren't out yet then perhaps it'll be rushed back to the labs and made more consumer friendly. Yah, like that'll ever happen. I won't get it until forced too either.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
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.
Wait, what's the problem with Dosbox being slow? Are there any Dos games that required more than a Pentium 1? I'm fine with a few orders of magnitude of slowness.
If playing computationally demanding games is important to you then it is simple really, upgrading Windows is pretty much always a big mistake.
...my computer has decent specs but downgrading is still better than wasting a few bucks on a RAM upgrade!
Every new version of Windows inherently runs at least slightly slower than the previous (and often much slower). I am still using Windows 2000 as games tend to run much faster with it than with Windows XP. I upgraded to XP but then went back to 2000 for that bit extra performance bonus
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...
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.
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.
Can't some kind of DirectX analogue be implemented on OSX?
.NET... :)
It can't be much harder than the Mono project re-implementing
Games are the only thing keeping me on Windows.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
One way or another, early adopters almost always get screwed.
Ok, I'm getting a bit sick of this same old boring Vista bashing (yes I know I'm on /. where MS bashing is a almost national sport). I have just been playing F.E.A.R. using a shock-horror NVidia card and it plays fine - I simply had to download the Vista driver from Nvidia's site (maybe some of the newer DX10 cards have problems, my DX9 is fine). In fact, it actually seems to play faster than in XP!
Though a great advocate of Open Source and Linux, I'd like to think we can appreciate the good in Vista instead of taking cheap shots every 10 seconds. These people probably had very specific problems and threw their toys out of the pram. I'm not even reading TFA, this is just annoying now. Rationality people! Us intelligent Linux-loving Lisp-defending geeks need to show the masses rationality!!!
Dedicated server for Land of the Dead will not run in Vista, it just freezes, without actually doing anything.
Anyone know about other Unreal Engine games?
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
Sorry, but when I "blew my money on hardware", there was 1) no way for me to test with a real game of the future. I don't have a time machine, and 2) If the developers would catch on and use Nvidia's proprietary "extensions" (for lack of better term) as opposed to using the standard API was as good a guess as any. If they had released something similar the generation before, the developers -would- have done it, but ATI picked that generation to become great(er), and thus developers told Nvidia to screw themselves.
In other words: without a time machine, there was no way to verify it. AND Nvidia didn't change (much) since then, as shown by them being yet again incredibly behind with their driver implementations.
It depends on your method of x server acceleration.
XGL makes all calls from the window manager go through it, meaning other apps can't get 3D acceleration
AIGLX only gives 3D acceleration to those parts of the window manager that need it. That's the Indirect part.
I'm sure someone will pop along and explain it better than me soon.
What does this have to do with DRM? It's driver issues, plain and simple. As is always the case, don't use the WHQL-certified drivers provided by Windows Update. You'll always find newer, better drivers by visiting nVidia or ATI's web sites directly.
I assume you're referring to this article. How is that astroturfing? The response was done on the Vista team blog, which is a Microsoft property and is in no way trying to pass itself off as an unrelated third party. Whether or not you believe what they say has nothing to do with the response being astroturf.
That's the message they're sending all of us who are now jumping ship to console gaming instead. My next laptop will be either a Mac or Linux - I've had it (and I've owned a Microsoft OS machine since they first shipped them).
Besides, Spore is going to run on the Wii - why wait?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Which is why Neverwinter Nights runs significantly better in Linux than under even a clean XP install on my PC. Curse them for not releasing NWN2 cross platform (of course, from what I have heard I am not missing anything)
Finkployd
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.
i doubt doubt it one bit. I've had this fear that the system has become too complex to be flexible enough for developers. I suggest ATI and Nvidia just pull out of the vista market all together...
Stick with either XP until they force MS to remove the DRM paths and strict driver oversight... or simply push linux has a gaming platform and start developing not only drivers for linux, but also code to improve it as a desktop system.
An enemy has fired upon you... Cancel or Allow?
I would guess it's because when it's in a window on a 3d windowing system you're asking the graphics system to calculate the whole game screen, then to calculate the whole 3d window system besides. Just a guess.
you live in a dream world?
Windows 98 was a disaster compared to 95 in stability.
Windows 98 introduced brand new cutting edge levels of instability
Windows 95 was very simple bland and stable
Windows 95C added new features but was kept simple and a true stability upgrade.
Wheres 2k in your list?
1. Windows 95
2. Windows 95C
3. Windows 98
4. Windows 98SE
5. Windows ME
Tell me with a straight face the latest revision is always the best
I don't care if Microsuck won't release a DST fix for W2k, I'll be running that sucker until the Civilization series requires an OS upgrade.
Therefore, I've got a few backup copies of my w2k pro install disk, and I will be putting the original in a safe deposit box at the bank next week.
I didn't see a damn thing in XP that warranted the time spent, much less the money spent, on upgrading. Vista is no different.
Blar.
So let's see here. DX10 games are coming mid-2008, and Fiji is due in 2009. Vista sucks on almost every computer it's possible to install it on.
I think we have another ME here, my friends.
Not to troll, but this is a good point in favor of playing games on consoles. They lack a mouse and keyboard setup, and they are less powerful than PCs for most of their lifespans, but if you like the games avaiable for them, they at least provide an almost completely stable, hassle-free platform for about five years before you have to replace them.
(Hmm, actually, I guess XP was a five-year platform, too.)
lol, games (and taxes :-( ) are the only reasons why I even have windows ....
That said, I'm not planning on getting vista any time soon. ("Never" would be good for me, but, some day, winxp64 won't be available to buy any more.)
Tell him the truth. Tell him that Vista has all sorts of problems, that his games will crash, and that due to OEM licensing deals, it is very hard to get a computer that has XP on it. His ire will be right where it belongs. On Dell and MS. Protecting the less technically inclined from the truth is not protecting them at all.
Driver support for 7xxx series Geforce cards is crap as well, it's not just the 8800. It's an Nvidia problem though, not an MS one per se.
I nominate this comment for comment of the month.
I really hope it gets archived as +5 funny. Some whiny mac fanboys are modding it down.
~= scwizard =~
Microsoft released specs well over a year ago. Vendors have had plenty of time getting at least decent drivers out but THEY dropped the ball. If there was a problem with Vista you would be hearing about it from the CryTek guys. This is a driver issue which has been created by pure laziness...mostly from nvidia who somehow cant figure out how to turn SLI on for anything but the 8XXX series GPU's.
And frankly, that's fine by me. It's got some bullshit problems due to excessive DRM, but it also has some nice new features. We're testing Vista in the office and I have to say that compared to XP, it's a *big* improvement. I'm going to hold back on deployment for a good year, but I'm also going to recommend that once a major service pack is released (say SP1), we'll migrate our Windows desktops (and junk older machines that can't handle Vista).
Most of our lab desktops run Linux, but there has also been a big migration to MacOS X. I don't expect Vista to affect that migration. Grad students, postdocs, and most professors seem to still prefer Unix. But most of the administrators are used to Windows and badly want an upgrade.
I think that even in the academic world there is real pent up demand for a new Windows. And from what I've seen, Vista is a pretty damn good. (though I still prefer nix on my home box)
Ya, I agree with you there. XP SP2 is pretty damn stable and sweet. I'm typing this in it right now.
~= scwizard =~
What does this have to do with DRM?
two words : system overhead.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
ehh, I had my doubts about XP when it came out.. I started using Vista RTM in November and have had a few problems with it. I want to strip it down, kill off a bunch of services and disable the new lame UAC shit.. it has potential but yeah, I think most of the comments here are right, wait for SP1 and it will be a production OS-- that's highly unprofessional, but it's what we've come to expect from the lumbering beast.
Smokedot.org
I installed Vista Ultimae on my old pc with 512mb of ram a p4 2.8 cpu and a nvidia 6200 128mb gfx card. I cannot for the life of me find any problems i got counter strike source installed and day of defeat installed i have nothing to complain about they both run as perfect as they ever did. i would love to report something bad about vista but after using it from launch day i cannot report one crash or any driver issues everything in my pc is supported including my old tv tuner card which was made in 1999. im reading all these bad reports about vista on the web using my pc with vista which runs much better than xp ever did and all i can do is scratch my head and wonder what the fuck is going on do i believe the article or my lying eyes?
I Predict A Riot
I see win2k has transcended your little list. Pity.
For you anyway.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
WHQL drivers, thats the problem. For the high end directx 10 cards there are no WHQL drivers, in fact, there are no drivers at all in certain cases (even for the brand new $600 cards). So in short, they would upgrade if they could. Maybe read around before flaming?
maybe someone has pointed this out - but the reason the FPS suck is not because vista sucks - but becuase the hardware manufacturers have failed to provide stable drivers for much of their hardware.
the 8800 gtx has terrible support at the momement with a number of users threating nvidia through www.nvidiaclassaction.org. in general NVidia has been doing a poor job of supporting their hardware, for example under XP 64 the drivers are equally bad - barely implementing what is needed to perform well. at the vista launch a large portion of their motherboards (680a, 680i, NForce4)did not have WHQL drivers relased.
many software publishers have clearly not tested their software with vista as well making things less smooth.
vista has been under development for an extrodinarily long time - give then ease of aquiring the OS (CTP releases, RC releases), and wide availability of development tools that contain support for vista, the blame falls squarely on the hardware and software vendors who have not updated their software for this release.
Ironically, the upgrade to Vista on my AMD 4x4 has gone without incident. All of my games continute to work at roughly the same level as before. There are still some performance issues and a few interesting features of vista relating to multicore machines.
NT3.5, NT4, Win2k? :)
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Wow, I'm fucking shocked, I am. Doom 3 doesn't run on a platform it wasn't designed for. Neither does Half-Life 2. Sure, we could blame the hardware that wasn't designed for it, or the drivers that aren't ready, but instead, lets slag Micro$haft. Damn them!!! *shakes fist*. They should have kept their Crappy Vista in the goddamn box until everyones drivers and hardware was ready for it! And also, they should have included a magic genie that would notice I was installing it on my MMX200 and automatically configure it for best performance! God damnit, this box has run games perfectly since Windows 95 without me having to upgrade it ONCE, why do I have to now just because I installed Vista?!? WTF?!? Stupid Micro$uck and their money-grubbing ways!
There, did I cover the majority? Good, now STFU. New programs have trouble. New drivers take time to get to maturity. Old games need tweaks to work on new systems. It's the way life goes.
I think I should post a Slashdot story the next time I try to play my beautiful original copy of Descent on my XP3400+. I mean, goddamnit, things run so fast that one tap of the keyboard and I've flown across the room and slammed into a wall, and then that damn little yellow guy who's usually so weak I play bumpercars with him kills me before I can blink. Obviously, this is a Microsoft problem. StUpId MiCrO$hIt!
(But damnit, that's still the best 3/8 of a second in gaming....)
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Perhaps MS are "pushing towards DX10", but by ignoring DX9 issues they leave you in no man's land. MS: that is a very stupid place to dump people when you're trying to get them to switch to Vista to boost your revenue stream.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Who needs anything other than WoW?
Actually, I bought Win95 on release because of the built-in networking. That feature was nice, but the frequent crashes were bloody annoying!
In my experience (talking only about Win9x series) Win95b was better, but Win98SE was the most stable of the lot.
I would rate them this way:
1. Win98SE
2. Win95b and c (no significant difference)
3. Win98
4. WinME
5. Win95
I would still be running Win98SE if I could. It was faster, had better legacy support (yes, I still play old games), and (until recently) was more stable than XP. Well, not really. I got fewer crashes in Win98SE, but those I did get frequently took out the whole machine. In XP I got more crashes, but they almost never locked up the whole system.
Unfortunately, XP-only games and lack of MS support for Win98SE forced me to "upgrade" about 4 years ago. Just to maintain performance, I also had to upgrade my CPU and RAM. If I had still been running Win98SE, those purchases would have meant a performance boost, instead of merely maintaining the status quo.
Reviews such as here and here show that Vista gaming performance is actually better than XP's in Direct3D applications, at least with AMD's more mature drivers. OpenGL performance, on the other hand, is horrible, along with Nvidia's drivers altogether. But Vista gaming isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be.
Actually, since 0.62 (I think) DOSBox has run pretty well on any modern machine thanks to the addition of a dynamic core. Forget running games requiring Vesa though, except under Linux. Oddly, Windows apparently has severe issues with Vesa, but X seems to have no such issues.
Today is red jello day - all workers must eat all of their red jello. Failure to comply will result in five demerits.
It gets me 1000fps on counter-strike source (mine's the XFX version), so I'm happy. I'll never go back to a mere 100fps! :-)
This reminded me of a question I'd had years ago: Suppose DX10 games start shipping and I've got a DX9 graphics card, say a 7800GTX.
Can I play these new games at all without buying a new card?
I'm sure the old one could manage a decent framerate on the new game just without the new shaders and whatnot. The last time this happened I managed to buy a DX9 card before any DX9 games appealed to me so I've never had to deal with it firsthand.
Did I answer my own question?
There's Intel, VIA and I'm sure others I've never heard of waiting to step in sell their stuff for these machines in Nvidia and ATI don't. It may be a rigged game but it's the only one in town - good linux/bsd/mac/etc drivers are not going to sell a lot of video cards.
NWN2 isnt worth playing until they can:
;) Walls of Ice and other nifty placable spells
1: Eliminate graphic lag. It makes the game unplayable even on minimal settings. (Im playing on a laptop bought last december.. nice one at that)
2: Get epic out fast. 20 levels is not enough.
3: No Linux client.. I dont think there's a linux server either. Game stopper right there.
4: Not enough spells, classes, or goodies. PrC with NWN1 and expansion packs are much better. Even PrC 2.2 + super-spell pack was toasty fun
5: Im guessing the same stupid limits will be in place too.. I havent checked em: max +20 ab, max +12 statup (stuff like that the PrC has had to build around)
The NWN makers wont like it, but I consider PrC essential to any mod, including the original 3. This is also why I wont buy the downloadable ones as you cant apply PrC. In essence, the only really good thing about NWN2 is the DM toolsets. They're nice. But that's it.
Considering that Microsoft provides little or no free support for its products, I think that every sale of Windows represents pure profit for them.
The aspect you mention, that Vista is so bad that nobody will use it, is the key to the better security claims - obviously if nobody uses it, malware cannot attack it.
The moment another, cheaper, OS can run games as fast, I'll stop stealing it. Until then I'll continue to run Linux on VMWare (paid for) to get all my real work done, but VMWare is a bit heavy to run in the background while gaming.
MS, please fix the Vista drivers so I may reinstall my pirate copy and continue to say that MS isn't totally evil.
Ever done a `man` on `top` ?
That makes no sense, though. The graphics system would have to calculate a 2D system if a 3D system wasn't there, and a 3D system doesn't use any more resources than a 2D one when it's not actually moving (or it shouldn't, anyway).
Again: We can do this anyway, within a game. Why can't we do it outside of a game?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This small company with a pretty much unknown developer used said extensions to make his game run faster on NV hardware than ATI... That time coder's name happens to be John Carmack.
-]Phreak Out[-
This small company with a pretty much unknown developer used said extensions to make his game run faster on NV hardware than ATI... That time coder's name happens to be John Carmack.
Out of curiosity, what game could you possibly be talking about? A game where Carmack made use of nVidia extensions prior to becoming a well-known developer? I mean, Wolfenstein 3D came out before nVidia was even founded, and Doom 1 came out the same year as nVidia. You might be able to argue that Carmack was a fairly unknown developer until the release of Doom 1, but after that, I certainly don't think you could say that...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
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.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Windows programs have had to deal with relocation of DLLs since the beginning of Win32. Service packs and even security updates have changed the base address of DLLs, so only marginal programs have problems.
Many Windows programs have the unfortunate habit of assuming that the address of a kernel32.dll function in one process is the same as another (see LoadLibraryW code injection trick). Because of this, and because a relocator that doesn't waste memory is difficult, Vista only changes addresses on boot.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Any 'system overhead' due to DRM only kicks in when you're playing DRM'd content, and at the discretion of whoever recorded the content.
/. (again), the article is completely misinformed. I have only had problems with one game which is now 10 years old. All 4 games mentioned in the article run perfectly on my system. Even Theme Hospital runs without a hitch.
So, yes, you might notice some problems if you're trying to watch a Blu-ray disc and play Counter-Strike at the same time, but I have attempted something similar (I have a DRM'd music file that sets off the Protected Media Path) with no ill-effects at all.
Unfortunately for
I haven't seen a single article on here about Vista since it's release which isn't crammed to the brim with ill-informed FUD.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
Windows just isn't ready for the desktop.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
DirectX is not equal to OpenGL. Direct3D is equal to OpenGL. Big software houses that make game engines can afford to use OpenGL for their engines, because all their investment goes in the engine. Other software houses that want to make rich games can not afford not to use DirectX, because DirectX is a one-stop solution, including everything a game programmer might need, whereas with OpenGL one has to use many different libraries, often incompatible between themselves, and in various states of development.
And please do not start posting links to SDL/OpenAL/etc before you go and use them yourself. They are a pain in the a$$, compared to DirectX and the Microsoft development environment.
I mainly play world of warcraft, which did take a performance hit. I play it in windowed, not full screen mode (though maximized so it looks full screen). The main reason for doing this is so when I alt-tab to something else, I can see a little preview window of what is going on in WOW when I hover my mouse over its application in the task bar. This is great for when on a gryphon flight or a boat, I can read slashdot or other news stories and know when to switch back without having to alt-tab back. Mostly my FPS is fine, a tad less but more than enough for WOW. The only annoying thing left is some occasional CPU spikes which I haven't been able to nail down (it happens even if I'm not running wow).
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
intel and via would have a ways to go to develope hardware on the level of nvidia's and atis. Perhaps intel or via could just buy up the old 3dlabs?
i know its a pipe dream. I'm not a linux zealot, or a mac one actually. I'm just ready for a good change for the better. I'd atleast like to see these two major companies say "NO.. we will not deal with your drm scheme, it is too complex and its hurting us... remove it if you want us to support windows"
The people need some kind of leverage against DRM and the problems it creates for users as well as hardware manufactures... which ultimate is the users problem. Clearly these companies are having serious problems with vista.
I've been running Vista Ultimate on my laptop since December. Being a developer, I run a local instance of SQL Server, various development IDEs, and I am an avid gamer. Just two weeks ago I attended a coworker's LAN party and decided to bring my laptop (it's a pretty beefy alienware). I had absolutely no problems playing the following games:
Counter-Strike
Far Cry
Battlefield 1942
Warcraft 3
If you are running Vista and have a problem running a game, try going into the executables properties and first try to run it as administrator, if that doesn't work run in it compatibility mode. Battlefield was the only game on that list that required me to do this.
Also, FYI, I achieved framerates in these games of around 60fps, which while isn't a number a graphics afficiando would brag on, it's more than sufficient to have a smooth gaming experience.
- In the past, unstable drivers have been one of the major sources of instable systems (aka bsod).
- Vista wants to serve to the movie and the music labels, so they thigthen all screws to ensure encrypted paths to the video- and music-subsystems.
My guess is, microsoft would be in some sort of breach of contract if they didn't ask you to write to those constrained apis. I'm not at all surprised that there are problems now to deliver good drivers.I guess (or at least *hope*) this will be the last attempt to force DRM upon the consumer. This should go to show that it costs a big amount of effort (and money) and in the end the system will still be cracked with minimal effort. It also hope, it will show that opening up the source is a huge benefit to everyone as it will allow to make better products and not to reinvent the wheel again and again and again.
I'm sure happy, I'm not in your place writing those drivers.
Just my to 2 cents
It was 19 hundred and ninety and eight, when I, a mere computing novice, rushed to the store and purchased the latest and greatest update to windows to my perfectly operable 5 month old PC. After the "upgrade", my system was trashed. The cd rom worked half the time, my favorite game became extremly buggy, and the sound showed up whenever it took a notion. And all of this was accompanied by oh so many pretty blue screens, with their helpful messages and hexadecimal character strings. So Microhard can keep their Vista eye candy and I will keep my reasonably operable XP SP2. And this will be my last windows system, thank you very much.
FAQs are evil.
"Chris Donahue, manager of Microsoft's Games for Windows group, says the company has tested 1,000 popular games from the past five years. Most work well with Vista, he said, declining to elaborate how many had problems and why."
"I'd be very surprised to see any games that hit the market from this point forward straight out not support Windows Vista," - Chris Donahue.
They thought the games we had to be compatible and expect the games to come to be compatible. If the games they already thought were compatible have proven to be incompatible... what does that mean for the upcoming titles? Maybe they need an Oxford Dictionary, because this is not the first time these folks have dropped the ball on compatibility. Maybe they just don't understand the meaning of the word?
Is this a conspiracy to force all die hard PC gamers to buy Xboxs? FPS or RTS with a controller? I have used the perfect setup (PC keyboard and mouse) why would I want that? Oh because I can't play anything on my PC now because MS can't sort their shit out? Or just Microsoft not really able to figure out what they're doing? Or Both? They don't sell PC, but they do sell Xboxs.
So if we switch to a third person view we'll be ok then?
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
While GP may or may not really be a developer for ATI/NVIDIA, managers in general are known for sugarcoating problems rather than being honest. Thus I would not expect Dwight Diercks to tell us the full truth.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I don't get it. I'm having no problem playing Leisure Suit Larry on my Windows 95 machine...
Navy Tim www.navytim.com
Again, please, what's an example? I really have a hard time believing you because those directory names aren't fixed, and every application I've used that uses that theme (which is all of them it seems) works just fine.
I haven't encountered any problems except for antivirus software, which is to be expected.
Honestly, I hear this crap on slashdot all the time. Why is it so difficult to name one application that has a reasonably large installed base?
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Whatever, I run vista with only a gig of ram, my 64 bit chip, and a nvidia 7600 GT card and counter-strike source plays as well as it did in XP. It does crash occasionally, but thats because I only have a gig of ram.
It's mostly because you're sharing the hardware between two GL apps. Also depending on the hardware you either get the game rendering directly to a rectangle on screen (r200 does this), or it renders to a texture in the window manager (nvidia does this, I think), which lets you do things like in those Novell compiz demo videos but is way slower since it has to render through both apps.
I have to wonder, then, why bother to support Vista at all until next year?
OK, I'm bitter. Game execs seem to be willing to care more about the young and unproven DirectX 10 than all the people on (the mature platforms) Mac OS X and Linux who are probably more than willing to pay a little extra for a good game.
It' slike that episode of DS9 I watched last night: clothing Ferengi females simultaneously doubles both the consumer base and workforce. Like the FCA, execs of game publishers and developers are more concerned about exploiting their current market (and a too-immature and almost non-existent market) than about expanding it into a larger base.
Economically, it doesn't make sense.
It makes me want to throw chairs at people.
grey wolf
LET FORTRAN DIE!
Shouldn't be. In fact, someone was commenting on how they were doing some sort of swapping in/out of the video card?
I want you, and everyone else here, to try a simple test: Download some of the first OpenGL tutorial demos -- you know, the ones which show you a triangle and a square -- and run those. Notice how your CPU usage is almost none? That's because it only has to render a single frame.
You can have all the glass in the world, but if it isn't changing, it shouldn't be using any resources at all beyond a flat 2D image.
Oh, and I've run multiple games at once, just to see how it worked. Surprisingly, it didn't slow me down too much. The only way I'd really expect a huge performance hit is if there was some transform happening on the game window itself -- for instance, if I drag it, and it wobbles, then that should definitely lag the game. But it should be reasonably fast once I drop it and it settles.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Unfortunately they don't have much choice.
If so, why are you STILL following me? ;)
:P Just learned you were on here. Got spies everywhere. 8) )
(Sorry Terry, couldn't resist.
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes
I'm curious if the same thing would happen on OS X... Also, what about DirectX windows? (Does DirectX even have a windowed mode?) I seem to remember all the uproar was about layering OpenGL on top of DirectX -- I'm guessing, looking at this now, that DirectX games would have to go through the same thing (if they run windowed).
From what I can remember benchmarking at before, my UT2004 is running at fullscreen, at decent speed, on Beryl on Linux. It does this because I told Beryl to not do any sort of indirection on fullscreen windows. (This took me from ~25 fps to ~50 fps, so I know it did something.)
(As far as I'm concerned, it should kill the indirection as soon as there aren't any effects on that window anymore. Of course this means a drop shadow would lag you... Maybe the indirection will get fast enough, eventually, that no one will care?)
I also have one old 2D MMO which I run in a window, and apparently the latest Beryl SVN has a keystroke for toggling indirection on a given window. Therefore, I should be able to easily run that game at full speed. However, it's old enough and slow enough that it really shouldn't matter, so I haven't checked out the SVN version. Also, there is a keystroke for taking an app fullscreen, which would presumably disable the indirection.
I mean, other than the "running a whole separate game" thing, there shouldn't be much performance degredation for simple GL apps -- no more, at least, than if you were actually running two windowed GL games side by side.
Also tried: xv works, with no noticeable performance hit until I started dragging the window around (dragging any window which does animation causes the whole WM to lag -- not significantly (down to maybe 10 FPS, which seems to be what OS X's UI operates at), but noticeable.
Also: Surprisingly, xvmc works, again with no noticeable performance hit. It does cause problems when dragging a window around, though -- I believe this used to work pretty much as expected, whereas in Beryl it's possible to figure out what's going on, but it's far from graceful.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
1. Release almost-working drivers because messing with Vista's screwed DRM model makes developing a driver take too long
2. Receive complaints from users
3. Make the default answer in the FAQ to the following:
"Issues can arise from using Microsoft(TM) Windows(TM) Vista(TM). The way Vista handles video hardware is known to cause problems. Unless you need to run software that requires DirectX(TM) 10, we recommend downgrading to Windows(TM) XP(TM), where this problem does not exist. This is an OS-side problem and we can't vouch for the stability of Vista drivers."
Instead of telling Microsoft to piss off just inform the end users that Vista's DRM protection is the reason the drivers are late and/or don't work as advertised. Once the gaming media starts complaining about tilt bits Microsoft might consider loosening their requirements.
Of course that would also be a great opportunity for an advertising campaign by Mac game distributors, both among end users and developers.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I removed 5GB of bloat (how language files can take 800MB is beyond me, a .dll per language???) and theres a few tweaks like disable UAC. When Microsoft are forced to remove every major app from their OS, and I can strip out unuseful-to-me features I will buy their OS. Uhm no not really, at least not until they stop polluting the protocols.
http://www.vlite.net/
Teasing the nobles, and rightfully so!
I was being somewhat sarcastic... though the interwebs have trouble with that. I was talking about DOOM3, which runs great on NV hardware, and ok on ATI hardware... Partly due to an extension in the NV hardware for shadows.
-]Phreak Out[-
Hear hear.
There are so many games that I wish I could run on what would effectively be a command-line XP system.
If I'm playing a game, I don't want it to keep track of time, the weather, incoming messages, a pretty picture on my desktop, the state of the dvd drive, and whether I've got the latest update. I don't multitask while gaming. I don't play EU3 and edit spreadsheets at the same time.
I want every erg of horsepower and CPU bandwidth chewing through game data.
*Occasionally* (about 5% of the time) I *might* run an mp3 player in the background. But if I had something that would screw multitasking, I would forego that in a heartbeat.
I don't suppose anyone here has what amounts to "XP as DOS", do they?
-Styopa