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Will Vista Run Your Games?


F.E.A.R., Call of Duty 2, Rise of Legends

It's well-known that F.E.A.R. is a real system hog. Sure, it's one of the most technologically impressive action games yet released, but to really enjoy it with all the bells and whistles you need a hefty PC with lots of RAM and a beefy video card. It just so happens, that's what we have here.

And boy, do you want a lot of RAM. With only 1GB of RAM in our system, gameplay was a bit choppy with frequent hard drive access. Upgrading to 2GB fixed this problem.

Performance is a bit of an issue, too. F.E.A.R. is one of our standard benchmark games. When we ran the built-in benchmark at 1280x960 with all the visual detail levels maxed out, but with no AA or AF enabled, we saw a whopping 30% drop in performance against a similarly configured Windows XP machine (though our average frame rate was still around 60fps). Enabling 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering only made the situation worse: the frame rate dropped from an average fps of 70 down to a pitiful 32! Clearly, some driver work or OS optimization needs to be done here – most of the other games we tested didn't exhibit a drop in performance this dramatic.

In multiplayer, the same problem exists with servers using Punkbuster as with Battlefield 2. Simply run the game as an administrator to avoid getting kicked off Punkbuster servers.

Call of Duty 2
Infinity Ward's epic WWII shooter runs quite well, with no problems during installation or gameplay. Curiously, though CoD2 uses Punkbuster and we joined Punkbuster-enabled servers, we never got the permissions error we got in other games. It looks like you can play CoD2 online without checking the "run as Admin" box. Performance was just a little beneath Windows XP with no AA/AF applied, but enabling those features slowed things down considerably. It was still playable with our high-end card, but we're talking 38fps instead of 50fps. It's not as bad as the situation with F.E.A.R., at least.

As an interesting side-note: when we benchmark Call of Duty 2, reads our recorded single-player demo file from the main/demos subdirectory and then dumps out a results file in the same place. This didn't work under Vista at first, because the OS prohibits applications from writing to or modifying anything under the Program Files directory (where Call of Duty is stored) with limited permissions. If we run the game as Administrator, the benchmark results file is produced as expected.

Rise of Legends