Does anyone know what Game developers think about Vista?
With Microsoft moving much of the display work to the video card, what is left for the high end games we are, or will be playing in the months ahead?

Games, like, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, need lots of video horse power, but
Windows Vista's hardware requirements for displaying things like "AERO Glass" need to have a high end video card and 256 Megs of RAM. With 512 being best.

I just wonder what they think, as for years, the video card has been the game Company’s domain.
I like to play games like Half-Life 2, DOOM 3 and Call of Duty 2 with everything turned up as high as I can get it. I don't see how I can do with with Vista unless I am always turning something down or off. Which might be a pain.

I can't see myself getting this OS for this and several other reasons, but I would love to know what other gamers think too.

I will be disappointed if Windows Vista doesn't outperform XP as far as graphics applications goes (games, graphic design programs, what have you). If they have made things more efficient, adding a more graphically robust GUI won't have a dramatic effect on a system. Alternatively you could just "turn it off"... I have also heard some rumors of a Game Mode that you can put the OS into, where you would basically shut everything down for a graphically intensive app..but that was awhile ago... I haven't read much about it in awhile

Ill be suprised if the GUI doesnt slow things now. On the other hand games will use DX11...

It will be faster for playing games and applications. The irony is you will need better hardware.

I'm still trying to figure out if my graphics card will handle "Aero" or not.

To enable Windows Aero, PC systems must meet the following criteria for graphics hardware, with either discrete or UMA solutions:
1.
DirectX 9 class graphics hardware that supports WDDM and Pixel Shader 2.0
2.
A minimum of 32 bits per pixel
3.
Appropriate graphics memory for specified monitor resolutions expressed as total pixels (X dimension multiplied by Y dimension):
1.
64MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolution of 1,310,720 pixels (equivalent to 1280 x 1024) or less
2.
128MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 1,310,720 pixels and less than or equal to 2,304,000 pixels (equivalent to 1920 x 1200)
3.
256MB of graphics memory to support a single monitor at resolutions higher than 2,304,000 pixels
4.
Graphics memory bandwidth, as assessed by Windows Vista’s built in system assessment tool WinSAT.EXE, of at least 1,800MB/s at following resolution:
1.
Desktop PC: at a monitor resolution of 1,310,720 pixels (equivalent to 1280 x 1024)
2.
Mobile PC: at the native resolution of built-in display

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/win.../vistarpc.mspx

This requires some thought about how they will improve. Go to NVIDIA and here is what they say

"This exciting new operating system from Microsoft will make multi-media and 3D applications, interactive entertainment and games better on a PC than they ever could be previously."

If your machine can handle ityou will have better performance. The logic is the os is now built with 3d graphics specifically in mind. When XP was coming out 3D accelerator was still infant technology.

The Benchmarks will be hard to fake ... cheers

I just bought the game Oblivion last week and have been enjoying it, but frame rates are low because of the high system requirements on both the CPU and Video Card. Forum after forum have tweaks on how to turn off Windows XP features so that frame rates will be a bit better, and this is even for cards, like ATI's X1900XTX, and nVidia's 7800GTX.

I'm worried that an OS that needs all the horse power that Vista is asking for will leave very little for games like Oblivion.

It completely sucks to have a system become useless after 2 years

The big problem I see with video cards is the introduction of PCI-E. This is a step up from AGP but you need to upgrade your entire computer or buy a new mother board to use these cards

If you're having problems with Oblivion, think about me still stuck in AGP world. If I can run Doom 3 Im lucky

Understandable argument because that is frustrating. But technology has always been like that. Yes, my two year old computer is turning obsolete... I have a laptop I bought from Dell and now they have one the same size/weight with a duel core a few months later. Lets see if the performance promise really adds up. Supposedly Vista will have better performance for games.

It would be interesting to see if benchmarks from the beta at least match XP, but since its not done yet I guess that wouldn't really be a fair argument.

I for one can't see how the OS, in this case, Vista will make games run any faster. It's hardware that does this work for us. For example; the game Oblivion. It's both CPU and GPU dependent. The faster your CPU and video card the better the game plays. The OS is the platform for letting you run the game, but it's also using up CPU and GPU cycles as well.
If you press the Ctrl Alt Delete key at the same time you will get the Task Manager to come up. Now you can see things like, Processes, CPU Usage and the Commit Charge.
Commit Charge lets you know how much RAM is getting eaten up.
On my rig, I have the following-
Processes - 43
CPU Usage – (This always Varies)
Commit Charge 320M / 2460M

If I shut down several things that I don’t need running, I can get to a
Commit Charge 265M / 2460M

Then when I’m running Oblivion my Commit Charge is, 661M / 2460M

I’m guessing if I closed down my anti-virus and third-party firewall I could save a bit more, but that still means the OS (Windows XP) is using a Commit Charge of 250M.
Now Vista is even bigger and flasher, and even if you can turn some ‘stuff’ off or down, it’s got to be using more CPU and GPU cycles.

Everything I’ve read says my rig will run Vista, but I’m not convinced that it will let me run Oblivion at the frame rates I’m getting now. Now if I have to start turning things off or down in my games that would be unacceptable. The OS is there to assist me, not hinder me.
And in the new issue of PC Magazine (Dated May 9), they have a “Truth behind the Delay of Windows Vista.) and in there they say one of the reasons is ‘concerns about performance.’

I’m going to take a ‘wait and see’ approach.