Gaming With Vista - The Beginning of the End?
The first Vista-only game from Microsoft arrived in our offices a few days ago for review. This distinction went to Shadowrun as a production delay slipped the Halo 2 release to a couple of days after Shadowrun. One of the interesting things about Shadowrun is that the box clearly indicates that it’s for Windows Vista, but required or recommended system specs are nowhere to be found. Vista introduced the Windows Experience Index (WEI) which is supposed to help gamers benchmark their systems and determine which games are supported, but the WEI required for Shadowrun is not even listed. A check of some of the major online retailers revealed that not a single one of them listed the WEI required for Shadowrun, or even the minimum required system specs to run the game. Some retailers even failed to note that Windows Vista is required! It wasn’t until after installing the game and attempting to run it for the first time that I was informed that the minimum WEI required is 4.0, and I only learned that because the system scored below a 4.0.
Now here’s where things get even more confusing. It took some serious digging, but I was able to find the minimum and recommended specs for the game:
Minimum system requirements:
CPU: P4 3.2 GHz processor or higher
Video: ATI X800 (256 MB or higher), NVIDIA 6800 (256 MB or higher)
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Recommended system requirements:
CPU: Intel Core Duo CPU or AMD FX Dual Core CPU
Video: ATI X1800 (256 MB or higher), NVIDIA 7800 (256 MB or higher)
Memory: 2 GB RAM
If you have spent any time trying to figure out the WEI for your system, then you’ll know that the rating your system receives is equivalent to the lowest score received in the benchmarks that the WEI test runs on your system. Now the minimum required CPU of a P4 at 3.2 GHz will score below a 3.0, meaning that a system with the minimum recommended specs for the game won’t even be able to come close to the required WEI. What’s going on here?
Things went from confusing to just plain bad when I tried to run the game. The system I was using is about two years old, with a P4 3.4 GHz CPU, an NVIDIA 7800 with 256 MB VRAM, and 2 GB System RAM. This is a machine that began life as a Windows XP gaming system and has never had an issue running even the most demanding PC games to date. However, attempting to play Shawdowrun on this system (it was recently migrated to Vista) was a nightmare. Even with the game settings set to the lowest values across the board, the game stuttered and paused constantly during the more action-packed sequences making it practically unplayable - and this on a machine that exceeds all of the minimum specs and hits two of the three recommended specs!
This whole experience has me worried for PC gamers. Vista is such a system hog that it can turn a rig perfectly suited to running system intensive games under XP into a stumbling dinosaur. Making matters worse, if you run a Vista compatibility check before upgrading everything will indicate that your system will do just fine under Vista, and if you look at the packaging or product pages for Vista-only games there’s no indication that P4 systems will have issues with the games.
If you spend several thousand dollars on a new system that can handle Vista and play games, then you run the risk of not being able to play your older, non-Vista compatible games on your new system just so that you can play Shadowrun and Halo 2. If you decide to pass on the new system, then you may find that you’re kept from playing more and more new games as Microsoft pressures game companies to move to Vista only production. However, with Microsoft’s push to integrate Xbox Live and Windows gaming you can also expect there to be far more games debuting on both PCs and the Xbox 360 in the future. This means that you can still play those new games without spending a few thousand dollars on a new PC by spending a few hundred on a new Xbox 360. Perhaps this was Microsoft’s strategy all along, to increase their share of the console market by throwing a big roadblock in front of PC gamers and hoping that many of them would take the detour to the Xbox 360.
June 5th, 2007 at 8:42 am
As a follow-on to my failed experiment to get Shadowrun to run on a gaming PC upgraded to Windows Vista, I decided to install Halo 2 on it and see what would happen. Halo 2 runs better than Shadowrun, but it still has its issues with slowdowns, particularly during cutscenes. I couldn’t get a smooth gameplay experience even with all of the game’s graphics settings set to their lowest values. Halo 2 is a game that originally debuted on the Xbox - I really have to wonder what’s going with Vista when it makes a two year old gaming computer struggle so much to play a game that was originally written to run on videogame hardware that is now six years old.