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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.'"

12 of 437 comments (clear)

  1. People Were Right! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Everyone who accused Vista of copying OS X were dead on!

    1. Re:People Were Right! by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 5, Funny

      They copied OS X's inability to play mainstream games.

    2. Re:People Were Right! by Tim+Browse · · Score: 5, Funny

      Game developers are too stupid to write portable code but that's unrelated.

      You're right. It's because they're stupid. Game developers don't do Mac versions of games because they're too stupid. It's not because the PC games market is pretty small compared to consoles, so the much smaller Mac market is objectively tiny. And you don't ever see games that run on more than one platform. And game developers are never beholden to deadlines or budgets that make producing a Mac version not only uneconomical but also a pain in the neck.

      No, it's because game developers are stupid. And probably lazy, too.

      Thanks for your piercing insight.

    3. Re:People Were Right! by PopeRatzo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
  2. 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.
  3. They even copied THAT from the Mac by Space+cowboy · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!
  4. Re:All Aboard the FUD Train by UnknowingFool · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  5. 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.

  6. Re:Why? by gad_zuki! · · Score: 5, Informative

    >Why would anyone rush out and buy a new operating system?

    To bitch about microsoft apparantly. Hello, I am running software on a platform it wasnt designed to run on using new and unstable drivers and I am surprised things are not working as well as on my xp sp2 system! Now I shall submit this grievance to slashdot!

  7. Slowed by Security by QuantumFlux · · Score: 5, Funny

    An enemy has fired upon you... Cancel or Allow?

  8. Re:What did you expect? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  9. Re:What did you expect? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The audio stack is completely new. It bypasses your video card

    Damned. How will I watch my MP3s now?