Vista Not Playing Nice With FPS Games

Via SlashDot

Vista not playing nice with gamers

Some XP favorites crashing or crawling; fix wait could be lengthy

Windows Vista’s powerful new graphics engine may be one of its hallmark features, but it’s engendering complaints from a key segment of potential early adopters: hardcore gamers.

A small but significant number of games written for Windows XP either crash or creep along slowly on Vista, according to numerous complaints by game enthusiasts in online forums.

“Formatted PC, installed Vista, updated any drivers possible. Now half [of my] games will not run, or run with corrupt graphics,” lamented one poster on Jan. 31 in a discussion forum at graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp.’s Web site.

“You installed Vista. You deserve your problems. Heh,” replied a second poster.

Most of the problems have been found in popular first-person shooter games such as CounterStrike, Half-Life 2, Doom 3 and F.E.A.R.

Games, especially first-person shooters, tend to strain a PC’s graphics capabilities much more than business or even multimedia applications.

Besides the occasional crash, the most common reports appear to be games whose animation speed, measured in frames per second, suffers under Vista.

Users have compiled lists of games with Vista issues.

gamers’ forums cite crashes and low frame rates.