Progress Report: Windows Vista Game Compatibility

By Sarju Shah - Posted on Thursday July 27th, 2006

Microsoft's new operating system radically departs from Windows XP. The company scrapped numerous legacy systems and upgraded others with improvements in networking, security, the desktop, and the component that matters most to us - DirectX, the technology that lets games talk to the system hardware.

Windows Vista makes a clean break from DirectX 9 and earlier versions by including two versions of DirectX. Vista will come with DirectX 10 and DirectX 9.0L. Older games will function by using DirectX 9.0L, and should, in theory, work fine. Microsoft has stated that games made for Windows XP will function, but games from the days of Windows 98 and DOS probably don't have much of a chance.

Standard Beta Disclaimer

Vista is still in Beta 2, and at least seven months from retail launch, but we had to see how our XP and older, classic games worked on Vista. We tested games from GameRanking's top-ten lists from the years 2000 to 2005, and we also tossed in a few notable games that were released prior to 2000 as well as a handful of games released this year.

We started testing with the GeForce 7900 GTX but quickly switched over to the Radeon X1900 XT after all the crashing games revealed that Nvidia's Vista drivers weren't quite mature enough for live testing. Note that this isn't indicative of Nvidia's final Vista performance levels. The OS is still over a half year away from launch, which gives Nvidia plenty of time to polish up its drivers.

Overall, only twelve games failed out of the thirty-five we tested. Most games worked fine after we patched all of them up to date. A few games automatically disabled the 3D desktop in order to function, but most didn't require us to fiddle around with any Vista settings to work. We encountered severe issues in a few games that made them difficult to play, but the nature of the bugs and the fact that the games could run leads us to believe that the problems have more to do with the immature state of video card drivers for Vista.