Introduction
Much has been written about the recent launch of Microsoft's Windows Vista and all the problems users are experiencing. A lot of that coverage has been very analytical in nature with lots of graphs and math, but very little in the way of user experience. I wanted to see how games played under Vista, so I grabbed a machine in the office, a copy of Vista Home Premium, a stack of games, and set to work. I wasn't interested in maximizing frame rates, over-clocking GPUs, or hard drive read/write speeds. I just wanted to see what happens when a normal person puts a game in and tries to play it. All through last year, Microsoft told us that Vista was being treated like a gaming platform, complete with a line of Games for Windows branded games and a "Games for Windows" magazine (the new defunct "Computer Gaming World"). They claimed Vista was moving in the direction of the game consoles by minimizing installs, easing the patch process, simplifying the game configuration, all that stuff that makes PC gaming somewhat painful. Eventually they want Vista to run games right off the disc with the hard drive being used as a scratch disc, similar to how the consoles operate. Obviously that isn't the case yet, but we can at least see how close they are.
I know I said we weren't going to get all technical here, but I want to talk a little about the hardware of the machine I used, and the install process, because it becomes relevant later. I decided to use the high-end gaming rig here at our office, and do a clean install of Vista Home Premium on it. The actual install was surprisingly hands off. Maybe I've installed Windows Server 2003 too many times over the last few years, but I was pleased by how little prompting and options I was presented with during the install. This was a clean install booting from the CD, so I went through partitioning, formatting, and the install itself, all minimal input from me. Most of it took place while I was away from the keyboard, and I would just check the screen from time to time. After about a half hour, Vista was all booted up and ready to go (or as ready as a Microsoft OS can be meaning I still had to download all the new updates). The machine I used is armed with an Intel Core 2 Quad processor running at 2.66 GHz and 2 GB of RAM. The video card is a 512 MB ATI Radeon X1950 in Crossfire configuration. This is more than enough machine to run today's games with most if not all their options turned all the way up. Vista introduces a new feature called the Windows Experience Index which gamers may find useful if it is ever used as an industry standard. The Windows Experience Index is a score ranging from 1 to 5.9 that Vista gives your computer after testing it in several areas including processor, memory, and graphics. You can then take that score and use it to see how software will run on your machine. If your computer scores a 2.2, and a game states it recommends a 3.4, you can bet that it won't run very well on your machine. Our gaming rig scored a 5.3 out of possible 5.9 in the Windows Experience Index, so I was confident that it could handle anything I threw at it.
"Company of Heroes" brandishes the Games for Windows logo
The first game I installed was Relic Entertainment's award winning World War II RTS "Company of Heroes". I choose "CoH" because it is the first game released that features the Games for Windows branding on the box and because Microsoft was handing out copies of the game to media members at its mammoth press tent during CES 2007 recently. It does not say anything about the Windows Experience Index on the box, so the only way to see what the game's score is right now is to already have it installed. Hopefully the game distributors will wise-up to this and start putting the score prominently on the box along with the system requirements. After installing "CoH", I opened up the Vista Games folder to find that it was already added to the games list with a bevy of information. By selecting the icon I could see a picture of the box, the rating, the version number, publisher information, a required index score, and a recommended index score. While the information is easy to see, I worry that some of it is inaccurate. The Games folder also provides links to the game's community and support websites, but this is hardly the patching and support service I would like. I want a button that says, "Check for patches" that forces Vista to check if there are any patches for all the games that are installed (like a Windows update for your games). The Games folder is an improvement from what XP provides (which is nothing at all), and a positive indication that Microsoft takes PC gaming seriously, but it's still a far cry from the utopia they preached. The required and recommended scores for "Company of Heroes" were both 1.0 which makes me question their validity. I ran it with all the graphics options cranked all the way up and, while it did run, it was unplayable. It wasn't until I turned some of them down from ultimate to high that the game smoothed out. I started a skirmish on an eight-player map with seven AI opponents, and after playing for about 20 minutes it crashed. I thought maybe it was all the AI giving the system fits, so I tried a two-player map only to find I was able to play for longer but the game still crashed eventually. For a title sporting the "Games for Windows" logo, I wasn't able to game on windows for very long.
"Company of Heroes" crashes often in Vista
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