Windows Vista and Gaming

[Koudelka]

Hey all.

I was hoping to get some advice on possibly upgrading to Windows Vista. I am still running Windows XP Pro.

I'm purely a gamer, and i watch a few DVD's here and there on my PC.

I keep hearing all sorts of negative comments towards Vista in terms of Gaming. LOTS of games either do not work at all on Vista, or are infested with errors/bugs when working on Vista. But, they work pristine on any other OS.

However, I have been hearing that Vista is coming a long way in terms of fixing these problems and is becoming more compatible to the Gaming crowd. Also, some games will be coming out soon with DirectX10 and i also have an DirectX10 capable video card. I'm not sure whether i should make the jump to Vista yet or not. I would hate to start encountering all these problems i keep hearing of.

Any comments/suggestions are appreciated!


My rig:
A8N32-SLI Deluxe
Evga 8800GTX Ultra
AMD 4800 X2
SB Audigy 2 Plat

 

[Mem]

I have not encountered any games that I can't play,compatibility with Vista is very good IMHO.


My current games list.

Jedi academy
Jedi outcast
World of Warcraft and exp pack
Vanguard
Steam(CS,TFC,DoD) etc...
Space rangers 2(without starforce protection)
Stalker
Prey
UT2004
Baldur's Gate with exp pack
Baldur's Gate 2 with exp pack
Morrowind with exp pack
Oblivion
UFO-Afterlight
9 dragons
Silverfall
KOTOR
KOTOR 2 (with sound fix DLL. patch)
Might & Magic 8
Starcraft with Brood Wars
XCOM-Enforcer

This is on Vista x64 btw.

Some games you may need to run in XP Compatibility mode and as admin,you can do this by right clicking on exe.file of the game and selecting properties then compatibility tab.


I should add UFO:Alien Invasion to my list too,free game which you can download from here.

 

[blackangst1]

I concur with Mem ^^^^^

IMHO DirectX 10 isnt an issue. It's not even released, probably buggy as hell, so few games are written for it I wouldnt even consider hardware choices based on DX10 at this point.

 

[nerp]

Vista is only a bad idea for gaming if your system is crippled in some way, either with a very weak processor or not enough memory. There might be a game or two with specific compatibility quirks, but it seems that many problems with a lot of games that were thought to be due to Vista were in fact due to video card drivers. Recent driver updates from both ATI and NVIDIA have made drastic improvements.

Running games on my Opteron box with 2GB of ram has been delightful under Vista. During the first few weeks after release, many games were terribly slow for me but that's because all NVIDIA had to offer was early beta drivers. The situation is much different now and I can't imagine going back to XP for any reason, let along gaming.

 

[Koudelka]

Thank you guys very much for the replies. They have helped tremendously.

I think i'm going to go ahead and upgrade to Vista then 🙂 Thank you very much.

 

[drum]

i have most recently played halflife 2 and fear without even a hint of a problem

 

[Woofmeister]

Some of my games actually run better in Vista than in XP Pro. You'll probably see a slight performance hit and the drivers still have a long way to go, but Vista is already a viable gaming platform.

 

[spherrod]

:thumbsup:

Originally posted by: Woofmeister
Some of my games actually run better in Vista than in XP Pro. You'll probably see a slight performance hit and the drivers still have a long way to go, but Vista is already a viable gaming platform.