Torture the official version of Vista with 15 games

When you cheer for Vista's gorgeous interface, will you find that your favorite game can no longer run?

In early December, Vista was officially released for professional users. It is said that the Conference was only popular with Win95. Maybe it takes too long for users to wait after XP, or Microsoft has high expectations for Vista. In short, from Microsoft's perspective, we hope Vista can bring enough influence to the industry and provide users with a new experience. If this is the case, it must be tested by the market, especially the recognition of the majority of users. Among Windows users, game players are a force that cannot be ignored. As a result, Vista's game performance became the focus of this user group.

I have the honor to experience and test the official version of Vista. Due to limited time, the test may not be comprehensive. I hope to understand.

This test is divided into two parts: qualitative and quantitative. The former is used to determine which games can run in Vista, while the latter focuses on how they run. I believe that these two questions are also of interest to players. In terms of testing, Vista itself has high requirements for PCs, especially memory, so testing is forced to use high-end configurations. In addition, the G80 series Vista driver is still not completed at the time of the deadline, so the video card part can only use X1900XTX.

First, we must clarify two issues: Vista has X86 and X64 versions. As for the current situation, X64 software driver support is terrible. Therefore, X86 version is used as the testing system. There is also the problem of user permissions, although many users have not noticed that they use XP, they log on through an account with Administrator permissions. But in Vista, we must be concerned about this issue. By default, the user permissions of Vista are smaller than those of XP, resulting in the failure to install and run the game. So you also need to pay attention to it.

So far, the Vista door has been fully opened. Please be prepared to start the Vista game tour as I start.

1. World of Warcraft

This blizzard-famous multiplayer online RPG Game must be played by no one in the game. According to the current test, WOW runs well in Vista. You can start the game without special settings. Besides, it is very eye-catching to run in window mode. I just don't know if such a gorgeous game screen and fancy system interface will make players overwhelmed at the same time.

2. Cell Division: chaotic law 0

Currently, almost all Ubisoft (Ubisoft) games cannot run normally in Vista, but Ubisoft is one of StarForce's customers. Therefore, the problem may not be in the game but in StarForce. According to the working principle of StarForce, it installs a low-level driver to access the optical drive, which is not recognized by Vista. However, after querying the relevant information, we found a solution. StarForce has recently released a dedicated Vista driver. Although it is troublesome, it has finally solved the problem.

3. Scroll of ancient times: drowned

During the test, the game performed very well. If the game was in full screen mode, you would not notice that Vista was used. It is the second game in the entire test that can run in the desktop mode. The effects of a 3D desktop game are quite different. However, after testing, this is the first game that must use 2 GB of memory to ensure smooth operation. However, this is also excitable, because even in XP, 1 GB of memory is barely equivalent to The Elder Scrolls.

4. Half-Life 2

I have to admit that Valve's game compatibility is good. The download of Steam is available, the game is also available, and the subjective feeling has no significant impact on the game performance. Half-Life 2, Half-Life2: Lost Coast, Counter Srtike: Source, or the new Half-Life 2: episode One can run smoothly and enable special effects. It seems that Microsoft has made a lot of effort in Vista's game compatibility with DirectX9. As a result, although it cannot be ensured that all Steam platform games can run, at least the Source engine-based games should be fine.

5. Battlefield 2

The author first let the game go naked without any official patches at the beginning of the release, and then tests with the latest patches. The results should be satisfactory. At least there were no particularly objectionable exceptions. However, due to compatibility issues with the anti-bot, Battlefield 2 will be quickly kicked out by servers in the case of online games. This is an unpleasant situation for players. The solution is very simple. Right-click the BF2 icon and select "compatibility selection" as the property to run this program as an administrator. This function should not be unfamiliar to XP users who have some experience. In the past, 98 to XP was also effective in achieving smooth transition through this method.

6. F. E.A. R

Will the arrival of F. E.A. R be the end of Vista? As one of the most technically competent games, our new Vista will face unprecedented challenges. Out of curiosity, I switched to a 800 m Weigang DDR2 memory and wanted to see the performance in 1 GB memory. As expected, the test was interrupted due to latency. Another game that requires 2 GB of memory in Vista was born. However, it is expected to meet the memory requirements of the elder brother scroll. Here, we need to mention that, during the comparison between disabling and enabling the 4X/8X anti-aliasing Test, it was very unexpected-the performance difference was 30% compared to the score, compared with its game, the decline has increased by 2 ~ 3 times.

7. DOOM 3 and Q 4

These two games, the same as the Doom3 engine, are also based on OpenGL API games. It is said earlier that OpenGL drivers, either NVIDIA or AMD-ATi, are not doing well in Vista. So they are also listed in the test list here. The results are satisfactory. One thing I especially appreciate is that its game can run directly without installation. In this way, players with both XP and Vista can directly run the originally installed Doom 3 and Quake 4 in XP without reinstalling them. This feature is believed to benefit players in the future virtualization technology.

8. Virtual life 2

The so-called "Vista-Ready" game is easy to install and run. You don't have to worry about such problems. You can also add the "-w" parameter to the shortcut to enable the window mode to run the game. This is what I want to do most in Vista. The crystal clear system interface provides an unprecedented sense of gaming experience. However, those with "astigmatism" vision should be used with caution.

9. Civilization 4

During the test of civilization, everything started smoothly, installed and run. But when the game tries to change the video settings, it suddenly becomes dumb-No setting options are available. However, after an automatic upgrade in the game is selected, everything becomes normal. This is not a joke, and we hope that the less the better.

10. Empire 3

As the main game of Microsoft, it is naturally not sloppy. There are no problems throughout the test. Apart from enabling HDR and AA at the same time. This is not just a game issue, but it should be irrelevant to Vista.

11. Soft flight simulator X

This game has a small audience, but it is a very realistic flight simulation game. It should be declared that before testing, we knew that this game would hardly have any problems in Vista. However, it should be added that Microsoft promises to launch a patch that supports the DirectX 10 API for the game. It may be unknown that the game will become the first batch of D10 games.

12. Legend of National rise 4

The National rise series has always been a third-class citizen of Microsoft games, and its propaganda is far less powerful than that of other games. The running status in Vista is as miserable as it is. Although the installation is normal, you will be prompted that your audio driver is too old when you enter the game. After that, the game was followed by a tricky problem, and the screen was always very flickering. All the options set in the attempt to mediate the video do not work. There is no way to verify whether it is a question of atidriver, game, or Vista. In this case, click "Check for Updates" in the main menu and upgrade it to the latest version. It is assumed that in this case, the first response will be to directly Delete the game.

13. Action: peak warrior

As a few games that support Ageia physical cards, the physical card driver is automatically installed during the installation process, regardless of whether your computer has installed a physical card. This is the reason why an alarm will appear during the installation process. The idea is that the driver of the physical processor is only compatible with Windows XP, but the physical engine software will still be installed. After this warning, everything returns to normal. Whether in single-user or multi-user mode, gaming attempts to access the network, like in Windows XP SP2, do not need to be set in Windows Firewall.

14. Black and white 2:

This is an alternative "God" game where players play the role of God. You can manipulate everything, or choose whether you are a benevolent God, a god of war, or an evil god. This game is another game that perfectly supports Vista, even with a 1600x1200 resolution. At the same time, it does not show any performance degradation when compared with XP with the same hardware conditions. After trying several different worlds and changing all the game settings, there is still no problem.

Is it better than blue?

When XP was about to replace 98, many users complained that the same game was running much slower than 98 in XP. This is mainly because XP has added many additional functions in the system compared with 98. At the same time, we need to consider that the transition from XP to Vista kernel should not change from the DOS real mode to the NT protection mode from 98 to XP, therefore, it is not a major factor that increases the overhead of the kernel. So Will Vista, which combines multiple functions and reinstalls, be dragged down by its own "re-engineering? To prove this, I have conducted a complete comparative test, including benchmarking software and testing of some of the previous games.

First, it is necessary to analyze why Vista eats memory like this. The dazzling 3 D desktop process dwm.exe removes 7.0 MB of memory. IE 100 eats 90 MB of memory. If you open several more windows to browse the file system, it may increase the memory by more than MB. The Sidebar will eat about 30 mb of memory. Therefore, we divide the platform memory into 1 GB and 2 GB. Then the video card uses the more popular 7600GT.

From the test results, Vista's memory management mechanism is still very good. In general, when running the 3Dmark test, there is no obvious gap between 1 GB memory and 2 GB memory. That is to say, for mainstream games, 1 GB of memory is enough for Vista. However, there is a need to be reminded that you should carefully observe scenarios such as switching to read hard disk data and exchange a large amount of data. The read/write frequency of 1 GB memory platform hard disks is obviously high, there have also been occasional instant screen stops. Although not obvious, the impact on many gamers should be obvious. In addition, from the future development trend, the memory overhead of the game process will gradually increase. Therefore, 2 GB memory is expected to become the standard configuration for mid-and high-end game players in the near future. As for the current high memory prices in the domestic and international markets, we recommend that you buy a Vista game PC with 1 GB memory temporarily, and upgrade it after the memory price drops.

The gap between Vista and XP in game performance is evident. Basically, the number of game frames in Vista is equal to that in other games.