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."

Forget Graphics, Think Audio

[rsmith-mac]

It's not the graphical changes that gamers should be worried about with Vista, it's the changes to the audio subsystem. MS completely rebuilt that subsystem for Vista, it's now a black-box for all intents and purposes that takes program inputs and dumps fully processed audio streams that just need to be hit with a DAC to be presented. The problem with this is that it means that audio cards can no longer bind to the audio subsystem at anywhere other than this endpoint, which breaks a lot of 3D audio features such as EAX and some HRTF's(for simulating 3D audio from directions where there are no speakers) since these cards need the raw data from the games and not the fully processed streams.

OpenAL bypasses this limitation, but anything that uses DirectSound3D(which is most older games and some modern games) now gets neutered on systems with high-end audio cards. Of course this mainly screws over Creative since EAX3+ is a closed spec anyhow(and you won't find much love for that), but since no one is or will be working on a competing standard anyhow, it's just going to make things harder for everyone since it breaks the only modern standard.

The graphical changes due to DX10 won't cause much trouble, MS has thought this through both forwards and back, but there are going to be a lot of angry EAX users once Vista comes out.

Re:Vista? Direct X 10?

[lolocaust]

That would work, and games could be ported easily to everything except the Xboxes. Even in 10 years time it'll be simple to port a classic game to a mobile phone to maximize revenue. I'm interested to know why large developers tend to go for DirectX solutions when they have to port it to openGL anyway for the Playstations and the last two Nintendo consoles.

Re:OpenGL?

[big4ared]

Very few people use opengl for a variety of reasons. The main reason is that in order to do anything useful, you have to use a ton of extensions. That, and opengl is still getting it's act together. Microsoft finished their API for next-gen graphics (DX10) as well as providing a reference rasterizer last December. Right now, Kronos group just has some proposals for things like geometry shaders and stream out, but nothing definite. So if you're developing a Vista-only game, the choice is pretty obvious. In terms of cross-platform compatibility, the number of units that a typical game would expect to sell for Linux or Mac is so small that it's not worth the cost. What most games are more concerned about is PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii, generally in that order.

Re:At least in the short-term.

[big4ared]

Generally, the more units the game sells, the more platforms that will be supported. So even if only 1% of WoW's users use Win2k, it still makes sense to support it. So the huge cash-cow games like WoW will support everything. The question is what will the smaller games do?

Re:Minimum requirements

[Mac Degger]

I've always wondered, seeing as it's the only hardware survey I really have access to; how representative is the Valve hardware survey? Did the numbers you worked with compare or where there large differences?