Gaming On Vista/DirectX10 on PC

[BHoward]

Vista is coming, and if you are on the bleeding edge of the technology wave, then you had better be prepared for what's in store.


Graphic drivers are still immature?

[stampeder]

Legendary PC/Console game creator John Carmack holds forth in this interview:

John Carmack Speaks on DX10, Vista, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii
Marcus Yam (Blog) - January 15, 2007 12:39 PM
dailytech

“Personally, I wouldn’t jump at something like DX10 right now. I would let things settle out a little bit and wait until there’s a really strong need for it.”

Those wishing to take the plunge into DX10 will also have to do so while upgrading to Windows Vista. Carmack, however, isn’t all that excited about upgrading to the new OS: “We only have a couple of people running Vista at our company. It’s again, one of those things that there is no strong pull for us to go there. If anything, it’s going to be reluctantly like, ‘Well, a lot of the market is there, so we’ll move to Vista.’”

Carmack then said that he’s quite satisfied with Windows XP, going as far to say that Microsoft is ‘artificially’ forcing gamers to move to Windows Vista for DX10.

http://www.dailytech.com/John+Carmac...rticle5665.htm

[stampeder]

Will Vista Run Your Games: The Final Word
By Jason Cross
February 5, 2007
extremetech

I have been living with Vista as my full-time OS on my home computer since around October, as well.
I'll share some of my experiences, as a gamer, with using Vista as my everyday OS leading up to
release, with a little perspective on where things stand today. First, let's find out if Vista got
game, by installing a bunch of popular titles.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2090571,00.asp

[BHoward]

Best advice from that article

The long and short of it is that Vista gamers can expect to generally lose a small amount of performance until a few months have gone by and the drivers can be better optimized. I expect this to happen pretty quickly, and for Vista performance to be comparable to Windows XP performance, overall (with some games up to 5% slower, some up to 5% faster).

[hugh]

I bought Windows 95/98 and XP essentially on Day one but not vista.

Contrary to what some will say, I believe that W95/W98 and XP all represented a significant leap in capabilities and was a worthwhile upgrade.

Among trusted sites, I've yet to find any glowing reasons for going Vista. Even the cheerleaders like PCWorld and PCMag can only come up with is Aero and "better security" which for me is not a big deal because I patch my XP and run anti everything software.

I can't understand after such a long BETA and RTM being several months ago, that so many drivers are still problematic.

I want to get Vista, I really do but I'm waiting for the articles that say - all the drivers are NOW available!

[BHoward]

Driver are still to be ironed out ... especially video drivers.

Nvidia, as every one knows, is far far behind.
Ati's have caused me numerous problems from BSOD to hangs. Some of this may be the new audio subsytems and interactions with it.

So far
3 BSOD ... all identified as being ATI drivers
3 Game hanges (CTL-ALT-DEL used to cancel task). All id'ed as ATI
2 Reboots ... probably because of my overclocking

W95 and XP had the same growing pains. Being a gamer, I remember waiting for both patches and driver fixes to actually play some games. There were no system tools, etc etc

The BIG thing for Vista will DX10.
Company of Heroes promises a DX10 patch in Feb
Supreme Cammander pomises a DX10 patch in March
C&C3 is suppose to ship with a DX10 patch.
Then the official DX10 games ie Crysis

May be time to buy 2 x 8800GTX's for my computer

[scrooloose]

I'm considering the Dell XPS 710 H2C system with Dual GTX8800's too. It's really expensive though so I'm waiting to see how much the price will drop. Now that Vista is released, some of my enthusiasm to upgrade has diminished. Based on my very brief experience with it on a test system, compatibility seems to be a major issue. Hopefully in a month or two, driver issues will get resolved.

I'm also waiting to see what ATI delivers for DX10! Either way, I'm definitely getting a DX10 compatible graphics card.

-Mike

[stampeder]

Vista not playing nice with gamers
Some XP favorites crashing or crawling; fix wait could be lengthy

Eric Lai
February 11, 2007 (Computerworld)

Windows Vista’s powerful new graphics engine may be one of its hallmark features, but it’s engendering complaints from a key segment of potential early adopters: hardcore gamers.

A small but significant number of games written for Windows XP either crash or creep along slowly on Vista, according to numerous complaints by game enthusiasts in online forums.

http://computerworld.com/action/arti...intsrc=hm_list