Windows Vista fails to win over gamers
By Jonathan Schlaffer
DirectX 10 was supposed to be the "holy grail" of Vista that would bring gamers in by the droves but this did not happen. It seems some marginal gains in effects isn’t enough to overcome the headaches of Vista.
Things do look better when rendered in DirectX 10 but its hard to say that its ugly when looking at it in DirectX 9 only. Gamers typically have the best systems with the fastest hardware and don’t have the usual problems other users might face when upgrading to a new, demanding operating system like Vista.
According to Yahoo, statistics from Valve show only that 15 percent of gamers currently use Vista. There is no way to run DirectX 10 effects under Windows XP.
It appears that gamers just feel like everyone else, the rest of the headaches Vista brings to the table just aren’t worth a marginal graphics upgrade (provided the graphics hardware is DirectX 10 capable).
Crysis was supposed to be the game that made every gamer come to the DirectX 10 table and gobble up Vista but that did not happen so the question remains, what will it take? Perhaps a game like Alan Wake?
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May 11th, 2008
I suspect a LOT of hard core gamers have Vista installed for DX10 games, then dual boot back to XP for everything else. Since DX10 games aren’t even 15% of the market yet, I don’t think Valve Vista stats mean anything.
May 11th, 2008
Ha. I told you Jonathan. You didn’t believe me. I told you those improvements were almost useless. You owe me a beer.
May 12th, 2008
I tell you what it would take to get gamers over to Vista.. PERFORMANCE, PERFORMANCE, PERFORMANCE!
Seriously, DX10 Crysis looks almost identical to DX9 but runs like a sedated turtle.
Really, what gamer will ditch an OS (XP) that runs like a rocket for another that doesn’t when there’s so little to gain?
May 12th, 2008
I have Vista 64-bit and XP 32 bit. dual boot, as stated by DavidB. I use XP for most of my games. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Games seem to run just fine in XP. Few games come in DX10 anyway. Vista requires more RAM than XP does. So I’d rather use XP and have a little more RAM to work with.
Geforce8800gts
2g ocz ddr800
AMD 3800+ x2
1.5 mbps serial raid (x3 80g drives)
XP / Vista