“Feature creep” is a problem familiar to corporate developers. It describes what happens to applications that never get finished because their feature set is a moving target. But Windows Vista is apparently being hit by a different kind of feature creep: its performance is being slowed down by some of its features. And not the ones anybody seems to care much about, at that.
The Inquirer is reporting that Microsoft is telling game developers that Vista will run their products 10 to 15 percent slower than XP. The reason is that the Vista desktop uses DirectX.
DirectX is a set of graphics and sound application programming interfaces that let developers address video and sound devices in a PC in a standard way. Ironically, Microsoft originally put DirectX into Windows to entice game developers to port their programs to Microsoft’s OS.
But with Vista, Microsoft’s own developers have relied on DirectX — and more particularly its 3D graphics capability — for the fancy Aero interface. It’s DirectX that gives Vista that blurred, semi-transparent border around windows. (It’s also DirectX that is one of the reasons many existing PCs won’t run Vista: Vista requires DirectX 9, and most PCs need an upgrade. Fortunately it’s not a showstopper — you can download it from here.)
Microsoft thinks the Aero desktop is so important it won’t let it be turned off — at least that’s what it’s telling developers. (I certainly can’t find a setting in Vista that will let me downgrade the interface to something less resource-intensive, like the “Windows Classic” look with plain gray borders, even though I might want to.)
As far as I’m concerned I care about DirectX perhaps even less than I care about games, but I’ll bet there’s going to be screaming from the gaming community over this — and that’s one more community heard from as Microsoft marches toward alienating as many customers as possible with Vista.
So, in other words Vista will suck for Gamers. And one of the main types of people who upgrade are those who play videos games. After all Gamers always want bigger better faster so always are willing to upgrade for the bells and whistles. But if running the latest Operating System is going to not allow you to play as well? And it’s going to give a performance hit, compared to running WindowsXP? I don’t know one person who would upgrade. Perhaps at work, but that’s even doubtful since they won’t care about eye candy and will just want what works. Perhaps those that get new PCs, but more then likely they’ll either order without OS, or order with Windows XP Pro, like they currently do.
Tags: Gaming, Interesting, Microsoft
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