General: Will it Work With Vista?

Stradden

Jeremy Starley takes a look at what the new Window's Vista effects the average MMORPG gamer by telling us about his own experiences with the new Microsoft OS.

As we all know - or should know, unless we happen to live under a rock - Microsoft recently gave birth to a shiny, burbling baby operating system: Windows Vista. Ooh, look at it, it's pretty. And it's also pretty frustrating if you don't know what to expect.

Yes, installing a new OS is always an adventure. Sometimes that adventure ends happily ever after with a nice sunset-lit hand-holding session, but more often it seems to end with our hero being de-boned for a quick dinner with the local troll family. Have no fear, I'm here with a torch to fend off those nasty OS trolls and get you up and gaming with Windows Vista.

Read the whole report here.

Lowdos

Originally posted by Stradden

Take one barely finished, bug riddled game, and add one just released, barely supported OS and what do you get? A reason to stop playing MMORPGs and start drowning yourself in whiskey.

I LOL'd

Harafnir

Solid work. I am sure you just helped a ton of people from whiskeydrowning.

Veiled_light

Good article

taliderian

Here's a link to a post about the AL sound issues in Vanguard and a fix.

 

http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10186

mehhem

Originally posted by Lowdos

Originally posted by Stradden

Take one barely finished, bug riddled game, and add one just released, barely supported OS and what do you get? A reason to stop playing MMORPGs and start drowning yourself in whiskey.

I HAVE NOTHING POSITIVE TO SAY, SO I'LL JUST LAUGH AND MAKE JOKES ABOUT GAMES. 

Actually Vanguard runs fine for me.  I have an 8800GTS with the 100.59 drivers and also an X-Fi soundcard.  I don't have the alchemy software though. 



I can not get City of Heroes to run in Full Screen mode.  As of now I've been running in Windowed mode and that has worked alright.

Lowdos

Originally posted by mehhem

Originally posted by Lowdos

Originally posted by Stradden

Take one barely finished, bug riddled game, and add one just released, barely supported OS and what do you get? A reason to stop playing MMORPGs and start drowning yourself in whiskey.

I HAVE NOTHING POSITIVE TO SAY, SO I'LL JUST LAUGH AND MAKE JOKES ABOUT GAMES. 

Actually Vanguard runs fine for me.  I have an 8800GTS with the 100.59 drivers and also an X-Fi soundcard.  I don't have the alchemy software though. 



I can not get City of Heroes to run in Full Screen mode.  As of now I've been running in Windowed mode and that has worked alright.

Sure, why not laugh at games (or operating systems)? Software does't have feelings to hurt, afterall. There are things in life far worse to laugh at.



And in its current form, VGSOH is a complete joke. LOL.



I liked the article though, Stradden.

Veiled_light

Originally posted by Lowdos

Originally posted by mehhem

Originally posted by Lowdos

Originally posted by Stradden

Take one barely finished, bug riddled game, and add one just released, barely supported OS and what do you get? A reason to stop playing MMORPGs and start drowning yourself in whiskey.

I HAVE NOTHING POSITIVE TO SAY, SO I'LL JUST LAUGH AND MAKE JOKES ABOUT GAMES. 

Actually Vanguard runs fine for me.  I have an 8800GTS with the 100.59 drivers and also an X-Fi soundcard.  I don't have the alchemy software though. 



I can not get City of Heroes to run in Full Screen mode.  As of now I've been running in Windowed mode and that has worked alright.

Sure, why not laugh at games (or operating systems)? Software does't have feelings to hurt, afterall. There are things in life far worse to laugh at.



And in its current form, VGSOH is a complete joke. LOL.



I liked the article though, Stradden.

look what you've gone and done now you've upset Vanguard! Humph................. It's going to be crying in that corner for years now and gonna get nowhere!

Hope your happy now.

Rattrap

Blasphemy!

Vanguard runs just fine for me , i have 99000000 GT , and just 15 gb ram. And i never have to /flush more than once in 30 minutes!

And my freon water cooling on quadrupal AMD core , is not even glowing blue , like ever !

Actually my spaceship , is connected to PC 

Just kidding guys

 

Veiled_light

Originally posted by Rattrap


Blasphemy!
Vanguard runs just fine for me , i have 99000000 GT , and just 15 gb ram. And i never have to /flush more than once in 30 minutes!

And my freon water cooling on quadrupal AMD core , is not even glowing blue , like ever !
Actually my spaceship , is connected to PC 
Just kidding guys
 

Your PC is oldddddddd...

I'm on Ati x9950xtx, intel 300 core and 2000gb ram :P Cooled in 0.0 sec space.

 

i get a few stuttering problems on Vanguard but the graphics are AMAZING they are like totally better than a game from 5 years ago!

Nargg

I was running Vanguard under the 64-bit Vista Beta when Vanguard was still beta.  Worked beautifully, until both Vista and the ATI drivers were out of beta.  Now Vanguard has lots of graphical errors.  Sad, I'll miss playing Vanguard.  Or, maybe I won't, it wasn't that great anyway.

eburn

Well at least this is a fair Vista article, wished I hadn't stayed up for a day and a night googling to find all the info listed here to get WoW to run tho'. LoL

Gotta go buy a Creative card. Which isn't painful, always skipped a good sound card tho'.

korvass

Well for me, M$ can take that shiny new baby and go drown it. If Vista becomes the standard, and I'm forced to use it, then I'll probably end up buying a MAC and playing WoW till I die. *shrug*

Crysalis

Thank you very much for that very informative review of the new Windows Vista. I was seriously considering purchasing it when I started hearing all  about directX10 and all that jazz. But until I start hearing multiple good reviews of recent adventures with Vista then I shall most definately steer clear of it.



Thanks again.

eburn

Yeah, yeah. Lynch something new and strange. If anyone's used 95, 98, or XP then Vista follows the same means of improvement. "Notice I left off ME?" Support will catch up and yada, you won't even notice the switch.

Why do folks threaten Vista with buying a Mac? Don't they know it lacks the one key feature that helps them feel like turbo nerds without ever taking the MS cert? There's no right click, there's alt+click but no right clicking to allow you access to the depths of '1337ness'. So shadup, get 2 gigs of ram and deal with it.

Vista's nothing special in a bad or good way. It's just the obvious next step. Give it a year for support catch up and boom. Then you can sort of gripe about the usual Window's gripes. Just hopefully not as often.

Neobushi

You shouldn't get a new Windows OS until it's been out for a while.

Dajmin

Come on people! Has nobody learned that with a new MS OS, you must wait until at least the first Service Pack before it's actually worth using?

I point you back to the first minor patches released for XP - pre-SP1 some of them would screw up your install and require a total format. Pre-SP2 similar things were not unheard of.
Now we think XP is fine, nice and stable and relatively bug-free (or at least managable ones).

I'm happy with XP, and certainly can't see myself upgrading just because a new shiny OS has come out. I'll stick with it until all the games I play no longer have XP support

Vagelisp

In my opinion Windows Vista is not game ready yet. Of course many people with dream (to me) systems can enjoy their games on any operating system even it is the new microsoft's baby.

All of you that use this operating system must have in my mind that all grafix cards are designed for the directx 9.c interfaces and do not have the same perfomance on windows vista as they did on windows xp. Super card users will not notice much difference from 120 frames to 80 fps but lower end systems will suffer from flickering and strange interactions like crashing with no error messages since error handling is a memory and  perfomance consuming feature for the directx (direct api) calls. 

I think that we all must wait until directx 10 graphics cards are released and the Windows Vista operating system will allow poor people like me to enjoy them without much perfomance loss.

I ve found some screenies you might find interesting but i can't guarantee that they are true. (I wish they are!!!)

DirectX9 Vs DirectX10

DX9

DX 10

 

 

Age of Conan DX9

 

Age of Conan DX10 (WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO RELEASE THAT?! WHEN I GET MY RETIREMENT??) 

 

 

Age of Conan DX 9

 

Age of Conan DX 10

 

Halo: Combat Evolved DX 9

 

 

Crysis DX 10 ( I can't believe that)

 

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1941407,00.asp

"DirectX 10 versus DirectX 9

DirectX 10 will ship as part of Windows Vista. Most users won't see the impact initially, since the native desktop API for Vista is actually DirectX 9.0c (pixel shader 2.0), so current generation graphics hardware will work just fine. It's likely that we'll see DirectX 10 capable hardware by the end of the year, even if Vista doesn't ship. Those cards should work with DirectX 9.0, assuming you want to buy one.

One key aspect of Direct3D 10 is that it's almost certainly going to be a Vista only feature. Direct3D 10 depends on the new Windows Device Driver Model, plus some of the virtualization features built into Vista. Retrofitting DirectX 10 to Windows XP is possible, but would take significant engineering and QA effort. On the other hand, if Vista's schedule keeps slipping, Microsoft may need to reevaluate this stance.

So Direct3D 10 won't have an immediate impact, save for a handful of titles slated to ship not long after Vista launches. What does DirectX 10 offer?

• Consistency across hardware. Capability bits (cap bits) are gone forever. Cards are either Direct3D compliant or not. So you won't have the situation with Direct3D 9, where one vendor might support FP16 blending while the other vendor doesn't. The only differentiation between hardware will be performance.
• Geometry shaders. Geometry fits into the 3D pipeline between vertex shaders and pixel shaders, taking the spot occupied by fixed function primitive setup in DirectX9. With DirectX 10, a geometry shader can actually generate new geometry (primitives) from incoming vertices.
• A single, unified shader engine that offers consistent behavior across vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders.
• More sophisticated flow control, including switch statements.
• Texture arrays. Using texture arrays, with indices into those arrays, will increase the overall efficiency of texture transfers.
• Overall efficiency has been increased. According to Sam Glassenberg, DirectX 10 program manager, state changes are much less costly, batch overhead is substantially lower, and some of the new features, like texture arrays and geometry shaders, means that fewer calls are needed.

From the end users perspective, the concept of consistency is huge. Today, whatever GPU supplier (Nvidia or ATI typically) you choose means that you give up some feature that's available on one vendor's GPU, but not the other. With DirectX 10 hardware, running DirectX 10 software, performance is the key difference."  .......

 

Agent_X7

Originally posted by taliderian


Here's a link to a post about the AL sound issues in Vanguard and a fix.
 
http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10186

That may work in XP, but it does not work in Vista. With that fix, you will get stereo sound, and it will show your soundcard in the drop down. Note STEREO sound, not 2.1 - so no bass.

The only way that I have found for VG to give me 5.1 sound under Vista is the fix I listed in the article.

Karkas

I bought Windows Vista around the retail debut date.

At the moment, I have the following games on my PC:

 

City of Heroes (runs great if not better than when using XP/ had to implement -compatibleCursors 1 to see mouse icon ingame)

World of Warcraft (runs also great/ slight noise stuttering and popping, but vsync adjustment fixxed that)

Oblivion (no problems what so ever)

Rainbow 6: Vegas (no problems)

Company of Heroes (no problems)

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (no problems)

9Dragons (no problems)

2Moons (cannot run at the moment/ gameguard has an issue that causes a BSoD with either the video card drivers or Vista itself)

 

I am happy with Vista so far. I remember the fated rumblings of how XP would destroy gaming and ruin your PC, so I take everything in stride.

 

-ashe-

Valorus

Imagine that.  A writer wanna be for mmorpg getting in a cheap shot in at Vanguard. Personally I think people like you remove any credibility the gaming press has by adding low blows like this and I wanted to really let you have it, but then I thought to myself wait, this guy is so insignificant in the whole scheme of things that what he writes really doesn't matter one way or another.

robbyberry

Im in the beta of LOTRO and have yet had only 1 problem running it with Windows Vista, once it said the game needed the launcher to run but i was using the launcher,  This could be a game error though.



However i rolled the pc back 1 day and now its all good again, also Vanguard worked fine with my pc, but after seeing the beta of LOTRO i can safely say i won't be worried about going back to Vanguard

Silverleafs

My opinion is, staying on Windows XP till the price is lowering. For a student like me its a high sum of money.

 - Silver

Galias

One thing I'm worried about is LOTRO, so the previous poster helped ease my fears on that.



I have a new machine and have both XP and Vista setup discs...I'm debating what to install...



-G

boblibob

I personally think you have taken a rather unproffesional approach to this.



By that I mean you have only tested on one machine, from what i can tell anyway.



I mean, if i give my own experiences running these games.



WoW 60fps, no sound problems

Guild Wars, 60fps no problems what so ever

and Vanguard (a game I currently have windowed as a type this) runs very nicely at a minimum of 25fps in towns (of course that god damn hitching still happens) runs A-OK everywhere with a stable 30-50 fps when outside and in dungeons.



My spec (note: PC is 1 year old as of last week)



ASUS AX8 Version 2.0 

ATI X1900XTX 512

2Gig OCZ Platinum Ram

No Sound card, using mobo Stereo output

Running Windows Vista



In future i'll take your tech posts with a pinch of salt as they are far from detailed in there measurements.

This post is a simple whine from somebody who has the power to make a post into a news announcement.



I'm sorry you are having problems with your vista installation.

kspada

Thank you for the great article, it was very informative and helpful.