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Gaming On Windows 7
Jason Wilson writes "Windows 7 comes out Oct. 22, and many gamers are wondering whether it will be a boon for gaming, as Microsoft promised Vista would, or a disappointment (like Vista was at its launch). Former ExtremeTech editor Jason Cross, who's covered games and tech for 13 years, discusses the pluses and minuses of Windows 7 for gamers — how it differs from Vista, if it'll run older games, and the benefits of 64-bit computing. 'Windows 7 basically takes the Vista codebase and rewrites, refines, optimizes, and overhauls most of the internal stuff without making dramatic changes to the driver stacks that Vista did over WinXP. The changes to the fundamental driver models are small and mostly serve to improve performance. Plus, the hardware makers — especially the graphics guys — are on top of the changes this time around. Nvidia and ATI have been shipping quite good Win7 graphics drivers for months now.'"
I have Windows 7 RC installed, and I was very surprised to see every game I had installed, still worked flawlessly.
Even Starcraft, which is very aged game, worked just fine.
At the same time, I have only found 1 application that didn't work, and I couldn't get to work even with XP compat, admin rights or any other tweak.
So that's quite good imo.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
First, it is August 6th/7th for some of us. Only people without MSDN etc. wait till October ;)
Second, "it just works". Pretty well acutally ;) I like it a lot more than Vista. Using RC1 right now in the important systems already ;)
DX is only part of the platform. DX doesn't cover stuff like file access, memory management, processor scheduling, etc...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
You don't need DX10 hardware to run windows 7, nor do you need DX10 to run aero (will work on DX9 hardware, though I've not tried anything lower than that). Try putting Windows7 on your 3.3Ghz machine, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised....
Even OpenGL (which has vastly better forward and backwards compatibility than DirectX) suffers from this to some extent. For example, the ancient indexed colour mode is not supported on some newer implementations - although only many it can still be used but it is just slow (implemented in software). In general, OpenGL programming models have better longevity and stability than DirectX (and possibly the best of any widely used API). The downside to this increased stability/good compatibility between versions is that features are adopted at a slower pace than for DirectX (although OpenGL extensions are developed at a rapid rate).
IMHO, if you need graphics you should use OpenGL instead of DirectX these days (JoGL under Java is an easy way to use OpenGL). They have approximate feature parity and similar programming models (the types of shaders), but OpenGL has the advantage of working on Windows AND everything else (all those iPhones and Playstations and Macs and Linux and Solaris boxen).
I'm an avid gamer... and my tastes are all over the place. The only issue I've had in ANY game in the following list was with World of Warcraft, and only during the loading of your character after the character selection screen. If in windowed mode, you go do something else then come back... it will crash wow. Otherwise, once it loads completely it's fine. (10-15second window).
World of Warcraft
Starcraft
Left 4 Dead
Half Life 2 (And all the mods: Zombie Panic, Team Fortress 2, Action Halflife 2... etc)
Quake 3
Doom 3
OpenArena
NeverWinter Nights (all expansions)
NeverWinter Nights 2
UT2003
UT3
Crysis
Battlefield 2
etc etc etc
Not a single error. Not a single problem with Windows 7. The only thing I can wonder about is the resources needed. I run a beef machine... GTX 275, quad core proc, 4gb ram... while not an elite gaming rig... it's pretty nice. I experience no lag, no latency... in any game, at least not due to what I would deem as a Windows 7 issue. The effects are not noticeable.
XP, while great, loads in less time, but seemed to crash more frequently with newer games. Most of the NVIDIA drivers I've used have been great.
The only complain I have about Windows 7 is how it buggers out my network when I do a fresh boot or a restart. I have to disable the network card and reenable it (5 second process) and everything is fine. Repeated motherboard driver updates and network card updates have had no change. Oddly enough... on a fresh install of Windows 7 Beta... it doesn't do this. Only after about a month. Could be hardware on my side but /shrug.
Knowledgeable users manage this problem. They still suffer from it ; even the "sensible" software we install likes to add resident tasks. And virtually nothing can clean your registry out without risking terminal damage to your OS (unless you really know what you are doing, and I used to be one of these people - but I let the knowledge atrophy because it's more trouble than it's worth).
One of the best utilities for this is Autoruns.
It certainly prolongs the MTBRBICWC for Windows (Mean Time Between Reinstalls Because It's Clogged With Crap).
Linux definitely scores points here for storing application-settings in their own hidden folder in your home directory. Uninstall the app? Delete the folder. Or not, if you don't mind - it's not slowing anything else down, they all look in their own folders, not in one giant nasty binary blob database.
"Anyways, What I found in 7 was that gaming performance in about 70-80% of my games had improved, even on very early drivers."
Windows Vista drivers for the most part work in 7 - so you aren't using "early" drivers but rather drivers that have been out and improved upon for almost 3 years.
I can give you some real data to back that up:
According to Bitkom (the German organization for IT, telecoms and new media), 73 percent of online games are played trough the browser (e.g. Flash games). And the most used gaming device by far, is the PC.
So that whole "PC gaming is dead" thing, is just a "monkey see, monkey do" parroting problem. A tiny group of uninformed but loud people said it first, and a ton of parrots repeat it over and over. Hmm... it does remind me of the 40s. :P
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Maybe the OP is right in regards to GTA4 specifically, but the OP in general is very very wrong. Personally though, I would be very surprised if the DX10 engine requires a heftier CPU than the DX9; that would indicate very poor programming on the part of Rockstar. DirectX 10 has even less dependency on CPU performance than DX9. It's an API to queue and dispatch commands to GPUs. In fact, it should be less CPU demanding than DX9, since it abandons the fixed-function pipeline, maps more directly to the underlying hardware and most importantly- allows you to offload more of the rendering to the GPU by providing geometry shaders.
So yeah, if a game's DX10 engine is sucking more CPU power than DX9 for equal visual quality, then the game's developers are doing something wrong.
Windows 2000 (aka Windows Classic) style is present in both Vista and Win7.