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.'"

Comments

Everything works for me

[Tukz]

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.

Re:Everything works for me

[Jurily]

So far, I've really had nothing to complain about, the new UI aside. I was pretty pissed that there was no classic theme.

I'm still pissed about Vista not having the XP style. That one was much nicer.

Re:Everything works for me

[teridon]

In the special case where you:
    - have an Nvidia card
    - don't mind using Nvidia's closed-source drivers

Then setting up dual, hardware-accelerated screens on Linux is also trivially easy -- just run nvidia-settings.

Re:Everything works for me

[Nursie]

Oh bullcrap. just use xrandr.

Plug in extra screen, run xrandr to list displays and modes. Then run it again to switch on the new monitor at a chosen resolution and relative position.

If you've got nvidia then the nvidia-settings applet will do the same (and don't tell me that's "hard", you do the same in windows for nVidia and ATI)

I'm sure there are windowed versions, but this works perfectly for me.

Re:Everything works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot remember when I last had a bluescreen in XP or any reason to wish for a better sound implementation.

the sound implementation in Windows Vista and Windows 7 have one thing going for them over XP and older: You can now set and mix volumes at an application level. That gives you the option to quiet down or even silence a particularly annoying program altogether so irrelevant notification beeps won't interfere with a game you're playing or movie that you're watching. It can be surpisingly useful at times.

Re:Everything works for me

[pato101]

Also, you can add a gnome-panel and drag it to second screen (press ALT and drag and drop it), and then place a window list applet to it: from that moment, each panel shows only the windows residing at that monitor.
Compiz also is pretty well aware of the screens, so you can do scale ("exposé") to only one of the monitors if you wish.

Re:Everything works for me

[Ash Vince]

Not sure what you were doing wrong, but I have found the Nvidia linux driver to be brilliant. You need to run nvidia settings with root priv's so it can output the xorg.conf file, but this is to be expected. Even without root privileges you can change most stuff in the current session to get dual screens working, it will just forget it all next time it run.

My setup is to have one screen running at 1200*800 on my laptops native lcd, then have a TV output using a VGA to TV converter running at 1024*768 as this is the highest resolution it supports. I do have to choose which part of the screen I want to view but that is to be expected as it cannot scale two different shaped rectangles to be the same shape without distorting one, and that would annoy me.

This might be different if I was interesting in dual heading them or something but since I want them running in clone mode where both have the same image on them I knew things would be a little clunky.

Round pegs rarely fit into square holes without a little bit of persuasion :)

Re:Everything works for me

[gabebear]

What was wrong with multi-monitor support on Linux? To me Linux's multi-monitor support has always been the most useful/powerful since I can tie any monitors together into separate X sessions. My latest encounters with Vista dual-screen have left me wondering if Microsoft is doing enough dual-screen testing. None of Microsoft's apps use their standard widgets anymore, which means they have to do a LOT more testing to make sure this stuff works correctly.

My multi-monitor history:

• 2000 - dual headed Win98 w/ 2x S3 Virge
  • Worked surprisingly well, but no frills(didn't have real 3D yet and everything loaded on the first monitor).
  • TV card completely failed to work in 2 head mode (an ISA overlay-only card)
• 2000-2003 - dual headed PowerMac 6500 with a Rage2 and Voodoo5
  • Supported dragging opengl windows between cards, even if the frame-rate on the ATI was 1/1000th the 3dfx.
  • PowerMac's built-in TV did overlay when on ATI card, but when the TV window was dragged to voodoo5 it went into a blitting-mode which made the colors look a bit washed out and ate my CPU(still pretty seamless considering it worked).
• 2003-2007 - three headed 1.7Ghz Linux Box with an S3 Virge and a dual-headed Geforce4MX
  • Not quite as seemless(if the S3 was combined in Xinerama to the Geforce, then accelerated OpenGL only worked on the first screen...
  • Kept S3 in it's own X session and dual-screened the Geforce4MX monitors with Xinerama
  • BT878 TV card that could either be put into overlay mode and work on first monitor, or blitting-mode and work on both and eat my CPU(not as seamless as Mac, but still decent)
• 2007-2009 - Macbook w/ GMA950 (occasionally with extra monitor)
  • OpenGL works on both monitors...
  • TV now runs through a HD-Homerunner and MythTV(from my old Linux desktop). MythFrontend on MacOS works on both screens nicely...
• 2008-2009 - Stock Dell, Vista w/ dual-headed Radeon(work computer)
  • For some reason Office 2007 doesn't play nicely with dual-monitors on this computer. Any application with the ribbon interface scrambles the toolbar if I remote-desktoped into this computer.
  • The screens would randomly trade places on restart... sometimes the left would be #1 and sometimes it was #2...
  • I tried a number number of app-switchers, all the second toolbar apps had serious issues, but I do like 'My Expose' http://lifehacker.com/software/expose/download-of-the-day-my-expos-vista-235893.php

Re:Everything works for me

[Anonymous Coward]

No, run nvidia-settings, click the 2nd screen and say 'enable'. It's basically the same process as on windows now-a-days.

Re:Everything works for me

[cyanid3]

There is a classic theme, what are you talking about? Desktop Personalization > Basic and High Contrast Themes > Windows Classic.

Re:Does it matter, its all DirectX

[smash]

DX is only part of the platform. DX doesn't cover stuff like file access, memory management, processor scheduling, etc...

Gaming is Amazing on Windows 7 (here's a list)

[RaigetheFury]

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.

Re:Performance increase...

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:Everything works for me - But.....

[shutdown -p now]

Windows 2000 (aka Windows Classic) style is present in both Vista and Win7.