Why you won't be upgrading to Vista anytime soon

Windows Vista launched earlier this week for consumers, and by the looks of things, most people ignored it. After doing some searching around, I can say that's probably the wise thing to do.

First of all let me say that I tested Vista during the Release Candidate phase, and was unimpressed by the features I saw. Nothing about the new OS from Microsoft gives us a compelling reason to upgrade from XP. More importantly, Vista is just plain bad for gamers. Here's why:

Performance

Benchmarks around the Web are showing that upgrading to Vista will cause most games to run slower. In some instance as much as 30% slower! Most power gamers that I know will spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade their system to get a few percent more performance. Spending hundreds of dollars for on OS upgrade that downgrades system performance isn't going to sell well.

More information can be found over at Tom's Hardware Guide, as well as many other professional hardware sites.

Lots of people are speculating on why this is, but it appears to me that the big problem is all of the extra processes that Vista runs for security reasons. Good for security? I don't know, but Vista is bad for games.

Sound Support

I was astonished when I tried a late Release Candidate and it did not support my Creative Labs Audigy 2 sound card. I was even more surprised to find out that the week that Vista released Creative still didn't have supported drivers for Vista for their sound cards. Creative does have Beta drivers for Vista, but they are currently estimating March 2007 for certified drivers. Many people are reporting sound problems in games with Vista. A big reason for this is that Microsoft, again in it's wisdom, dropped DirectSound and DirectInput from Vista. They instead went with a new driver abstraction layer ported from XBox 360. Ok, porting games is one thing, but porting console drivers? I don't even know where to start.

Did we mention Security?

Another problem that early adapters are reporting is that Vista security is causing numerous problems with online games. In particular many of the MMO games are having problems because Vista doesn't want to give these games access to the Internet. That seems like it should be easy to fix, but I have heard of cases where the work around was to actually run some games in Windows 95 compatibility, not Windows XP compatibility, but Win95/Me! Go figure. In some cases the games have to be run with elevated administrative rights. So much for security.

Price

Assuming you can decide on a version of Vista that will suit your needs, you will be paying anything from US$199 to US$399 to upgrade to Vista. If you can wait until you need a new PC, that price can be hidden, but it won't disappear. As for myself, I don't expect to need a new PC for a couple of years.

So lets sum up, for a few hundred dollars you can purchase a new Operating System that makes your games play slower, reduces or completely eliminates your sound and can make it hard or even impossible to play online games.

I think I'll pass.

Does that mean I won't ever get Vista? Of course not. Unfortunately Microsoft's monopoly in the desktop software Operating System space makes that impossible. At some point the games I want to play are going to require DirectX 10, and that means we have to use Vista. Is that extortion? Of course it is, but that's par for the course with Microsoft.

In the meantime, I may even purchase a new copy of XP Professional, just to give me a backup plan if one of my computers completely fails.

For now, just say No to Vista.