Vista and Gaming Article.........

About time MS put some time and effort into pc gaming. :(



But do you really thing re-branding games is going to help, in UK it will not make much of a difference because most shops have a PC game section.
 
I really do like the way vista is going in terms of games support. A few little problems though:

1) This Live Anywhere sounds great but how much is it going to cost? After all you have to pay for Xbox Live, so it makes sense that this will be a subscription service too. PC gamers aren't used to having to pay for online gaming (except for MMOs of course) so I'm not sure they will like that.

2) This new branding may distort people's views on PC games. I'm worried that people might start to avoid buying games that don't have this branding. But then again I'm not sure EA will like sticking a huge Microsoft advert on their games, and EA have enough power for this not to be a problem.

Overall though the branding seems like a great idea. And it's good that all games have to be compatible with the 64 bit version. It's one step closer to more games being made that actually run in 64 bit.
 
Psyk said:
I really do like the way vista is going in terms of games support. A few little problems though:

1) This Live Anywhere sounds great but how much is it going to cost? After all you have to pay for Xbox Live, so it makes sense that this will be a subscription service too. PC gamers aren't used to having to pay for online gaming (except for MMOs of course) so I'm not sure they will like that.

2) This new branding may distort people's views on PC games. I'm worried that people might start to avoid buying games that don't have this branding. But then again I'm not sure EA will like sticking a huge Microsoft advert on their games, and EA have enough power for this not to be a problem.
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I totally agree with point 1, I’m not too sure about point 2 though, EA (and everybody else) already brand their games as xbox/ps2/gamecube etc. why would this be any different?

I’m a bit worried about the system rating thing, it sounds good in theory but what happens in say 2 years time when hard ware has totally changed? Will a single core athlon still be a 4.1 out of 6? Will games/systems be re-rated every say 3 months to factor in their decline compared to the best hardware available? Won’t this just confuse the mainstream gamer types it’s meant to be helping? Does this mean that boxes can’t carry scores as they will be out of date eventually, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of the system as you will have to install a game to see what its rating is?
 
You're thinking from the enthusiast's point of view. Most people who buy PCs are subsequently shocked at how badly games run on them. They have no idea what 'integrated intel graphics' means or why they should avoid it. The muppets in the local PC superstone sure as hell aren't going to enlighten them if it costs them a sale.

What MS are trying do is make it so that you can go out and buy a certified PC, and then go out and buy any branded game safe in the knowledge that it'll run fine without you having to muck about with dozens of settings that scare you silly.

Can only be a good thing.
 
Should be a good thing if it isn't watered down. I've heard a lot of the OEMs are annoyed at the new rating and no wonder as they'll (hopefully) no longer be able to claim their on-board graphics are powerful for gaming.
 
Cronox said:
I totally agree with point 1, I’m not too sure about point 2 though, EA (and everybody else) already brand their games as xbox/ps2/gamecube etc. why would this be any different?
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Because they have no choice but to put that branding on their console games. They are fixed platforms so they legally can't release games without MS/Sony/Nintendo's permission. There are no such restrictions on PC games. Even though MS make Windows they have no right to say what can and cannot be made for it (this is basically what all the law suites are about, people feel that MS aren't giving companies enough freedom to develop windows software).

I suppose my concern is that if this branding really takes off and becomes a de facto requirement to publish a PC game then MS will have too much power over the industry. They already have a lot of power and personally I think they are doing a good job so far, but things could go horribly wrong if they get too much more.
 
probedb said:
This is a not so rosey look at gaming on Vista!

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2850
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Good to see an alternate view there. I suppose I'm not really surprised that current games don't perform as well. The real test is when we start to see games that support DX10. I think that we might see a small performance increase when comparing a game running in DX9 on XP to the same game running in DX10 on vista. Or at least, not such a big drop in performance. But I suppose even then you'll have to turn off DX10 specific features to get a good comparison.
 
any comparison on games between xp and vista at the moment is useless. Where running beta software which is not bug free and definitely not optimized, like drivers in xp are. Wait until 2months after vista ships then we can compare.

I can't even get the nvidia drivers to install on vista yet..

I didn't think I would bother buying vista, but I think I will, it looks nice , has some good features and more to discover. Can't wait for more drivers and x64 programs to become available. I don't want to run some x86 program..
 
Sleepery said:
You're thinking from the enthusiast's point of view. Most people who buy PCs are subsequently shocked at how badly games run on them. They have no idea what 'integrated intel graphics' means or why they should avoid it. The muppets in the local PC superstone sure as hell aren't going to enlighten them if it costs them a sale.

What MS are trying do is make it so that you can go out and buy a certified PC, and then go out and buy any branded game safe in the knowledge that it'll run fine without you having to muck about with dozens of settings that scare you silly.

Can only be a good thing.
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I had a monkey trying to tell me that an sony vaio laptop with intel graphics would play Quake 4 fine, because it had 512 meg ram and a fast (ish) processor.
I asked him if it would be ok if I kneecapped him if it didn't, pointed out that intel onboard graphics are incapable of playing even the simplist of games at any details settings and that no matter how fast your processor is its not going to make up for having to run the game in software mode.
I think he was crying by the time I had finished with him.
 
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