Gaming Post-Vista — Myths and Realities

Ant writes "An article at Ten Ton Hammer answers personal computer/PC gamers' question on what's coming their way with Microsoft's newest operating system/OS, Windows Vista. With the PC primed to be the primary distribution platform for certain gaming categories (MMOGs in particular) for many years to come, it's important to know exactly what we're getting into when Vista rolls out worldwide on January 30, 2007. Jeff 'Ethec' Woleslagle offers a quick, non-technical rebuttal to several of the more ambitious PC gaming rumors cropping up around the internet." From the article: "Games which seek to take advantage of DirectX 10 high-end features like Shader Model 4.0 (which the graphically revamped version of EVE Online will aspire to use) will require a computer fully compatible with DirectX 10. This in turn requires a GPU fully optimized to work with DX 10 (such as the first-to-market NVidia 8800). The Microsoft requirements for a DX10 'optimized' GNU and system are fairly strict, so jaded gamers take note: this phrase is more than a marketing maneuver. For those among you that can't afford a major hardware upgrade anytime soon, don't fret (yet). Microsoft's XNA framework enables developers to easily develop parallel versions of a game for DX 9 and DX 10. Here's hoping that developers and publishers will be equally accommodating in releasing XP / Vista compatible games in the same box."

IMHO by 2008 we get Vista only games

[gsn]

Pretty soon, several games will be Vista only - Halo 2 comes to mind. I'd say by 2008 most stuios will start being Vista only or XP but with reduced settings. This is ok - serious gamers tend to upgrade hardware much more frequently than the average Joe user - every 1.5 years I thinkis about right. New games are pretty high priced so pretty much only serious gamers are buying them anyways - the average Joes wait a while until the price goes down. My only concern is that Vista is supposed to divert all system resources towards games when in play - wether it will actually work before a few dozen patches is a concern - and Vista consumes a crap load of resources even to run in the background - how much of a dent will that be on performance?

Vista? Direct X 10?

[Yvan256]

If anything, developpers should stop, take a good look, and switch to Open GL (which works on Windows, OS X and Linux/BSD AFAIK) instead of getting even more dependent on Microsoft proprietary "solutions".

Re:OpenGL?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well.. the ps2 isn't quite the same as the ps3.
If you're saying nobody's using opengl for their Playstation 3 games and rather write to the hardware because of optimization (because we all know we can't optimize our games if we using opengl.. right...) you're saying nobody's gonna use direct3d for the xbox360.
And stop spreading fud about opengl... "opengl is still getting it's act together".. ffs!

If you're doing a vista-only game you bend over to get a hard pounding and nothing else... gladly not everybody acts like a whore in this industry.

Re:Vista? Direct X 10?

[Svartalf]

And, how many times does it need to be said that there's alternatives to each piece. In fact, the big studios don't use much of ANY of DirectX' stuff directly- because they're anticipating a port to a console. So they use Miles, FMOD, or OpenAL for sound. They typically have rolled their own network stack code, but now, there's TNL, RakNet, and Grapple (It's not portable yet, but that's on my plate, so it's soon...). There's little reason to be even USING their DirectX APIs because they LIMIT you (And in some cases, MS has deprecated them- DirectPlay, the network layer, for example...)- and in many cases, things like Miles works MUCH better than the DirectFoo equivalent and plugs into the same low-level hooks in the OS.

Unless you're targeting X-Box, there's little need for using DirectX. If you plan on targeting X-Box, you're better off making a rendering
abstraction layer that insulates the game from the choice of either, picking other things for sound like Miles or OpenAL, and then grabbing
a license for TNL/RakNet or rolling your own or grabbing Grapple and finishing the minimal work to make it run under Windows.

I'll pass.

[Yfrwlf]

"it's important to know exactly what we're getting into when Vista rolls out"

Who says we're going to get into it, Zonk? What I find amusing is that Microsoft tries to say it will be better/faster/stronger/smarter. Faster? Definitely not. If you want to run games on it, you'll be running the game AND Aeros. I heard something about Vista possibly disabling Aeros while you're playing a game. Um, no. I'd like to play online games while windowed so I can do other things too, and that would require both to be fully running. Just because they want to cram DRM into the kernel so it can monitor me means I need to run out and buy a box with 2 gigs RAM and a 256 meg graphics card to support their bloated OS? Pass.

Programmers are going to have to start making games for Linux if they want my money, I'm done with Microshaft.