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

[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

[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

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

[shutdown -p now]

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