Windows Vista gaming - good, bad, or ugly?

by Vladimir Cole { Jul 28th 2005 at 8:41AM }

Windows Vista Official Logo Windows Vista, Microsoft's newest operating system, has entered its first beta period and the company has begun to provide information about the OS at the link below. So far, Microsoft has spent lots of time talking about how the system will be more secure, more connected, and easier to maintain, but they've been silent on the answers to questions that we here at Joystiq care about.

We want to know if Minesweeper will finally see an update. It's still the same old Minesweeper from Windows 3.11! We want to know if the computer will stop cheating in Solitaire. We want to know if this system is going to force us to turn off all of the fancy interface widgets just to coax extra frame rate out of our PC games. We've got lots of questions.

More information will be coming soon, of course. We'll certainly be watching this operating system and what it means for the world of PC gaming.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Mgs0008b221 @ Dec 18th 2005 9:06PM

I also have been wondering. I see this taking one of two truns.

A) It sall runs all the time, requiring editing startup items or disabling widegets/effects.

B) They get smart and add a code to games that disables effects when the game executable is started.

C) (I know I said 2) Computers by the time Vista is released will laugh at running only a game and effects at the same time, quad core by then will probably be kicking up.

Edward @ Dec 18th 2005 9:06PM

Check this out for some more information on Vista and games.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1841218,00.asp?kc=ETRSS02129TX1K0000532

Ben Hollis @ Dec 18th 2005 9:06PM

I heard part of the WinSAT APIs (mentioned in the Extremetech article) was the ability for game developers to request that Windows tone down all its fancy behind-the-scenes stuff while a game is running fullscreen - thus, the search indexer or whatnot will not run while you're gaming.