By Alec Meer on February 23rd, 2010 at 8:44 pm.
As a sad coda to the happy-party we all had about the Just Cause 2 trailers a few hours back, word’s out that the unhinged free-roamer won’t work on Windows XP. It’s a DirectX10-only game, so even if you have a relatively recently 3D card you’ll need Vista or Windows 7 if you want to fire grappling hooks at planes. Probably, anyway – there’ve been several DirectX-10-on-XP projects, and though I confess I’ve not followed them closely, I’d be surprised if no-one comes up with a way to make this work. Anyone know where that stuff’s at now? Incidentally, before anyone takes the “get with the times, granddad” line and suggests most people have Vista or 7 now, take another look at January’s Steam PC survey. At 42.15%, Windows XP is still by far the most common operating system. That’s a crazy amount of potential customers to leave in the cold. I’d have more sympathy if it was specifically a PC game, but the 360/PS3 versions that will surely be the lead foot for JC2 won’t be DX10, so it seems odd that this should be. If it’s super-pretty and genuinely DX10ed to the hilt it’s good news, potentially, for those of us who are fully upgraded, but it’s an odd decision nonetheless.
Full system specs below – do you have the right hardware hats but the wrong OS trousers?
Minimum:
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7 (Windows XP is unsupported)
- Processor: Dual-core CPU with SSE3 (Athlon 64 X2 4200 / Pentium D 3GHz)
- Graphics Card: Nvidia Geforce 8800 Series / ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with 256MB memory or equivalent DX10 card with 256MB memory
- Memory: 2GB RAM
- DirectX: Microsoft DirectX 10
- Hard Drive: 10GB of free drive space
- Optical Drive: DVD-ROM drive
- Sound Card: 100% DirectX 10 compatible sound card
- Internet Connection: Internet connection required for product activation
- Input: Keyboard and mouse (Microsoft Xbox 360 controller optional)
Recommended:
- Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows 7 (Windows XP is unsupported)
- Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6GHz or AMD Phenom X3 2.4GHz
- Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 Series with 512MB / ATI Radeon HD 5750 Series with 512MB or equivalent DX10 card with 512MB memory
- Memory: 3GB
- DirectX: Microsoft DirectX 10.1 with Vista SP1
- Hard Drive: 10GB of free drive space
- Optical Drive: DVD-ROM drive
- Sound Card: 100% DirectX 10 compatible Dolby Digital 5.1 sound card
- Internet Connection: Internet connection required for product activation
- Input: Keyboard and mouse (Xbox 360 controller optional)
23/02/2010 at 20:47 blargy says:
I knew there had to be something wrong with this game. It just looked too good to be true.
Then again if this is the only bad thing with it I will be happy. Win 7 is working great for me.
23/02/2010 at 20:48 Springy says:
“As a sad coda to the happy-party we all had about the Just Cause 2 trailers a few days back…”
I had to check to see when it was posted then. Scared the hell out of me, I thought I’d lost 48 hours there.
23/02/2010 at 20:48 bhlaab says:
XP user here, bummed out completely!
23/02/2010 at 20:48 pkt-zer0 says:
This is pure bullshit considering it’s also running on DX9-level consoles. (Not that I’m affected personally, since all I’d need to do was actually install Win7, but still.)
23/02/2010 at 21:28 Jad says:
Exactly. That was in fact one of the few silver linings of the dominance of the Xbox 360: it slowed the pace of that old bugbear of the PC-console war, the upgrade cycle. It’s kind of nice to have a middle-of-the line PC at 1920 x 1080 resolution with settings cranked up pretty high for even the most recent of releases. I’ve always been a PC guy more for the freedom it brings, the mods, and the mouse-and-keyboard than the graphics.
Anyway, making a game with consoles as the lead platform with a DirectX number higher than 9 actually requires extra work on the developer’s part. I guess its nice to have some focus on the PC, bravo JC2 devs, but not at the expense of a large number of gamers.
23/02/2010 at 20:49 Sweedums says:
im running a dual boot at the moment, XP is on my main 500GB drive, while Windows 7 is on my secondary, 160GB drive, so i can cater for most games…. hopefully this game will be as fun as it looks
23/02/2010 at 20:49 Dreamhacker says:
What did DX10 ever do for us?
23/02/2010 at 23:54 MWoody says:
Well… I can’t seem to turn V-Sync on in the control panel for DirectX games in Vista with an NVidia card. Does that count?
23/02/2010 at 20:50 Mike says:
Touche, advancing pace of modern technology. Touche.
23/02/2010 at 20:51 rmtx97 says:
What about your old XP games? I will just dread having to make a dual boot or partition or something. Seems like a ton of work.
23/02/2010 at 20:52 rmtx97 says:
Odd. I thought I hit the reply button for @blargy
23/02/2010 at 20:56 dadioflex says:
Dual-booting Windows XP and 7 is a piece of cake. You can even tell it which to load by default without having to mess around with arcane loaders – it’s a simple option in W7.
I got a copy of W7 when the pre-order was on so I’d have it for cheap, but I’m waiting until my next build before using it. Probably won’t be until the summer.
23/02/2010 at 21:39 jon_hill987 says:
Don’t worry about dual booting. I have come across nothing that works in XP that I haven’t been able to get to work in 7, in fact I have had the odd older game that won’t work right in XP work better with 7.
23/02/2010 at 23:07 frymaster says:
assuming you’re not running something that needs foxpro ODBC database drivers, it’s a safe bet everything will work.
hell, even systom shock 2 plays as well, if not better, than I managed to get it to run on XP or vista
23/02/2010 at 20:53 UK_John says:
I remember a Gamespot video review of the first STALKER where they were incredulous that the game didn’t work on Vista – this in 2007. Do you think for a second the major media will be just as incredulous that this game will not work in XP? With Microsoft supported unfailingly by the major media, I think not.
This, DRM, the multiformat market and DOSBox, the combined killers of AAA PC gaming!
23/02/2010 at 23:12 Lilliput King says:
Somethings always dying in your posts, John.
24/02/2010 at 18:05 UK_John says:
We have 23% decline ion sales last year – 40% over the last 4 years. 3 years ago Gamespot reviewed 102 PC games, last year it was 68. Average review score at Gamespot in 2008 – 78%, in 2009 it was 68%
I don’t just bleat out positives with no research or investigation, I look at information available on the web and synthesis it. 5 years ago I said the PC format as a mainstream AAA gaming format had 5-6 years left. I still say 2011 is looking good as the last year of mainstream AAA PC titles being released.
23/02/2010 at 20:55 Vinraith says:
It’ll just be all the cheaper when I’m finally able to play it in a couple of years, then.
23/02/2010 at 21:55 Rich says:
There’s my silver lining.
23/02/2010 at 23:02 qrter says:
Ha. Good point.
23/02/2010 at 21:00 iainl says:
Well, I’ve got my Windows 7 OS trousers, but my Radeon HD 4670 makes me think that running to the 360 release is probably the answer for me anyway…
23/02/2010 at 21:01 Ed from Brazil says:
I say good riddance. I have 7 even on my netbook.
23/02/2010 at 21:03 MJS says:
No DX9 support is bad for me, for some reason dx10 just hates my system and any game that runs in it will crash within a number of minutes. Though for some reason, for the brief hour or of what I played at the weekend Shattered Horizon seems to be the lone exception to that.
23/02/2010 at 21:23 Mark O'Brien says:
I have Vista and a Radeon 4870.
DirectX 10 crashes for me every single time as soon as the game gets past the menu. Oddly, DirectX 10 worked fine on my older Nvidia 8800 GTS.
I have never been able to resolve the problem, but Shattered Horizon was the first time it stopped me playing something I wanted to. I’m not liking this trend either, especially since DirectX 10 compatibility was my major goal when building the system.
My best hope now is that some day a clean install of Windows 7 will magically fix it.
23/02/2010 at 21:47 MJS says:
4870 as well (doesnt happen to be a saphire does it?) ive tested on both vista 64 and win7 64, different drivers, BIOS, hardware changes, Memtest etc and nothing. :(
23/02/2010 at 21:49 Mark O'Brien says:
Ah, that’s interesting. I think it probably is a sapphire? It’s got a gig of memory, and I think there’s a “HD” in the name of it. I’m also running Vista 64.
Sad to hear that it doesn’t work on Windows 7.
Maybe a 32 bit OS installation is the answer.
23/02/2010 at 22:33 Starky says:
Why is it people always blame the operating system(or at least associate)? Specific hardware/driver problems that are the sole responsibility of the hardware vendor, not Microsoft.
That’s like blaming Ford that their are potholes on the street when you drive your Mondeo.
Like all the backlash about gaming performance in Vista when it launched, in which 90% of the problem lay with the hardware vendors not having drivers any where near optimized.
Seriously if your DX10 cards are crashing whenever they run DX10 games then something is faulty (assuming you’ve tried OS reinstall/driver updates/rollbacks and it is happening with more than one game in DX10 mode) – RMA those cards for a replacement.
At the very least contact your vendor for support on the matter.
23/02/2010 at 23:02 Mark O'Brien says:
I don’t think anyone is blaming the OS.
I blame ATI. They possibly didn’t implement support for Vista 64 bit properly.
I probably should have returned the card. But since DX9 was fine I thought that it was probably a software issue that would be fixed by some later driver update or something like that, so I never returned it. I’ve probably had it for more than a year now so it’s too late.
23/02/2010 at 23:22 Ed from Brazil says:
What? I don’t know of any XP games that won’t run on 7, except those with STARFORCE, and those won’t run because Win7 correctly denies Starforce access to the lower parts of the machine. Anyway, the Steam version of those games (Splinter Cell CT, PoP TTT) run perfectly well on 7. There is no RATIONAL reason to keep XP, it’s old, clunky and unstable. Anything it does, 7 does better on a modern, decent machine. And for business apps, there’s always XP mode. Games don’t even need that.
And really, who knows if they decided to go with DX10 just to fuck the XPtards? Maybe there’s an actual technical or aesthetic reason, like, you know, DX10 works better for lighting, and it looks better too.
23/02/2010 at 23:27 Starky says:
@mark, honestly it might not be ATI even, it honestly sounds like a hardware issue – if it was software I can’t imagine that it would be on all DX10 games.
In which case the responsibility lies with the Vendor, not ATI themselves.
23/02/2010 at 21:06 Pidesco says:
Either there’s a lot of money outside of sales changing hands here, or this is a really, really retarded business decision.
23/02/2010 at 21:08 Urthman says:
42% of Steam gamers still use XP, but how many of those XP machines meet the hardware requirements for this game? That narrows the lost-sale pie quite a bit, I suspect.
But on the other hand, those system requirements are insane for a game that can run on the Xbox 360.
I swear these developers just got no business sense. Remember when Valve first released Half-Life 2 and it supported machines that didn’t exist yet and also degraded in a playable-if-ugly manner to DX7 cards (and equivalent processors)? That game did pretty well, I hear.
23/02/2010 at 21:10 kai says:
I am *not* going to spend 100 pounds on a new OS just so I can play one game. No siree.
23/02/2010 at 21:16 Ed from Brazil says:
You should spend 100 pounds for all the other great things Win7 does, though. Money well spent.
23/02/2010 at 21:18 RogB says:
jesus, i have to use it at work and it annoys the shit out of me. (skipped vista)
24/02/2010 at 15:05 kai says:
I’m quite satisfied with XP, thank you.
23/02/2010 at 21:11 Duck says:
“At 42.15%, Windows XP is still by far the most common operating system. That’s a crazy amount of potential customers to leave in the cold.”
And if you look even more closely, you’ll see that 48.94% of the total are DX10 systems. Of course XP is the most popular, but that’s only because DX10 users are split between Vista and Win 7, thus obscuring the total, and leading to false statements like the one above.
23/02/2010 at 21:13 Alec Meer says:
So it’s cool to ignore over 50% of the audience? Goddit.
23/02/2010 at 21:18 Ed from Brazil says:
I bet 75% of those 50% couldn’t run the game anyway because their machines suck.
And, by your logic, all devs should only make games compatible with Intel GMA 950 graphics, because that’s what most current PCs have in the world today.
23/02/2010 at 22:04 Springy says:
Would otherwise make sense were this not a Steam survey Alec is citing. These are people who play video games on their systems.
23/02/2010 at 22:10 Carra says:
Someone without a graphics card isn’t their audience. Or do you think that 50% of all steam gamers just used it to buy peggle?
40% of those who played a game on steam in the last few months use XP. You’d better support it if you want their money.
Don’t forget that quite a few gamers skipped vista because “it’s too slow for gaming”.
23/02/2010 at 22:22 AlexW says:
56.44% of Steam users have systems with any version of Vista or 7. Logically, more of these will be equipped with decent GPUs than the 42.78% on XP – according to Steam, in fact, 48.94% of the users have DX10-capable machines on Vista/7, and 27.21% just need to get off their butts and upgrade (meaning it’s only unkind to about 18.19%, who would have varying degrees of low performance in the game anyway).
Serious question to the 27.21%: how is it that you can afford a new DX10-capable video card in the past three years, but cannot afford to save up considerably less than £100 over the same three years since those were launched to buy an upgrade copy of 7 Home? Honestly, it’s about as painless as an OS installation can get, and you get the fun of learning all the new little nooks and crannies.
23/02/2010 at 22:34 Vinraith says:
@AlexW
As a member of that 27.21% I can tell you, the cost is not the problem. I have a quad core system with a GTX 260, I’m not hurting for hardware, but why would I upgrade to Win 7? It’s incompatible with many games I enjoy and pieces of software I use, it carries more hardware overhead than my current OS, it offers no features of interest to me, what would be the point? When there’s a critical mass of games that require it, I’ll have a look at it, but right now Win 7 is less functional for my purposes than XP. Why would I pay money and spend at least a weekend reinstalling half the world to REDUCE my computers functionality?
23/02/2010 at 22:53 Kadayi says:
@Vinraith
Such as?
23/02/2010 at 22:58 AlexW says:
@Vinraith: Thanks for the good response. I can see why you wouldn’t want the hassle of reinstalling software, although personally I only found Chaos Theory (retail, got it on Steam during the sales to avoid this happening again) impossible to get running on it, as by and large the compatibility routine is pretty good. The overhead is not nearly as much of a jump from XP as Vista was (and should be essentially negligible for a good system like yours), it’s much easier on the eyes, there are actually quite a lot of subtle improvements from XP, and apparently it allows you to play JC2. (I would have included Shattered Horizons there too, but when I actually tried to have a go at that over the weekend the servers would literally vanish as I examined them, except for a few with half-second latency, to which I responded “Kindly sod off.”)
Have you considered a dual-booting arrangement to mitigate your compatibility woes?
23/02/2010 at 23:17 Vinraith says:
@AlexW
I keep XP running in “classic” view, so don’t find it hard on the eyes. As to a dual boot setup, I’m hesitant to go that route. On my laptop I’m already dual booting XP and Linux, and on my desktop I prefer to stick to one OS. I’ve had problems in the past, both hardware and software, that exploded into much bigger hassles than were necessary due to running dual boot configurations. It’s certainly not worth it in this case because, as of yet, Win 7 doesn’t seem to have anything to offer.
23/02/2010 at 23:29 Kadayi says:
@Vinraith
Such as?
23/02/2010 at 23:55 Dean says:
Such as Saints Row 2, one of the RPS games of the year, which I was halfway through playing when I upgraded, so now can’t finish.
Just one game I know, but if you ever want to play that one game at some point… JC2 is just one game too.
24/02/2010 at 00:08 Starky says:
I’d bet a £100 that the problems with Saints row 2 with windows 7 are more to do with it being a hacky botch job of a port than windows 7 itself.
It’s a great game on the Xbox… on the PC it is a mess, makes the GTA4 port look like a lovingly crafted masterpiece.
Still, not as bad as Red Faction: Guerilla, which required using Cheat Engine to speed hack the game (slowing it down to 0.68 if I recall) to get it running at the correct speed.
24/02/2010 at 00:26 Ed from Brazil says:
What he said. SR2 is NOT a XP game… It’s a terrible port. It runs fine on the RC version of Win7, so I be Volition or whatever company they hired just did a shitty job.
24/02/2010 at 08:01 Dean says:
Not blaming Windows 7. SR2 is a bad port. But the point remains that if you want to play it, you can’t upgrade. Gutted to hear RFG doesn’t work either as that’s on my to-play list. I’d rather play both of them than JC2…
23/02/2010 at 21:11 SirKicksalot says:
Considering it’s a DX10 only title, the requirements aren’t outrageous at all. It’s more than 3 years old tech…
24/02/2010 at 16:04 Urthman says:
The ridiculous part is requiring that much hardware for a game that can run on the Xbox 360.
23/02/2010 at 21:12 Blain says:
I’m kind of relieved. All the good press for the game was making me sad because every great feature that I couldn’t share with a buddy in co-op felt like a waste. But now that it won’t even run on my system, I can safely stop paying attention to it completely.
23/02/2010 at 21:15 Shnyker says:
FEEEEEEEEEEEEETTTTHHHHHHHHHHHH
I knew this would happen at some point, this actually fuels my arguement to buy win7 whereas the admin of this computer totally disagrees.
Cheap bastard.
23/02/2010 at 21:15 Doctor Doc says:
While almost an indie game when judged by amount of content and price, Shattered Horizon is also DX10 only and this is what they have to say on their FAQ:
The game doesn’t start and I have Windows XP
Sorry, Shattered Horizon requires DirectX 10 and Microsoft offers DirectX 10 only on Windows Vista and Windows 7. There is no way to get DirectX 10 for XP, so Shattered Horizon cannot be played on Windows XP (or older Windows operating systems). Lack of DX10 support also prevents running Shattered Horizon on Linux using Wine.
But I heard you can download this thing from the internet to get DX10 for XP…
Nope, won’t work. All “DX10 for XP” downloads are hoaxes, and could contain malware. There is absolutely no way to get DX10 to run on XP – to do so would require major changes to the kernel of the operating system.
Please, make Shattered Horizon work on XP!
Sorry, it just isn’t feasible. The game engine is fully designed around DirectX 10 and it would require a complete engine re-write to make the game to use DirectX 9. Additionally, no DirectX 9 level video card would have the needed performance to run the visuals acceptably even at low settings, so chances are that if you are using a PC that was purchased back when Vista wasn’t available, it doesn’t have the hardware to run the game anyway. OS upgrade (or a computer upgrade) is the only option. Sorry.
23/02/2010 at 22:12 Carra says:
Steam does have “Vista/Windows 7 only” in mile high letters though ;)
23/02/2010 at 21:19 Huggster says:
Reminds me of the DX10 “exclusive” features in Crysis like sun rays which I managed to get working anyway. Though I doubt this will be the case this time. pfff
23/02/2010 at 21:34 J C says:
DX10 Exclusive features could be enabled in DX9 because Crytek explicitely coded those same effects in DX9 and disabled them in the engine.
There is no magical switch or hack that can allow pure DX10 to run on the antequated drive model present in DX9. The completely overhauled driver model present in Vista and Win7 is the primary reason why DX10 will never be supported on XP.
23/02/2010 at 22:40 Starky says:
That is the core of it, you can take any native feature of DX10 and hack it into a DX9 game – but that takes additional development time and money.
With DX10 you know that it will work on every DX10 capable card – with the DX9 hack, it might, it might not, depending on the card, which of the optional features that card has hardware support for, so on so forth.
23/02/2010 at 21:20 Dain says:
You can prise my XP from my cold dead fingers. I have no intention of having to deal with “Are you sure you want to do what you just wanted to do?” dialogues that the newer OS have.
23/02/2010 at 21:25 elyscape says:
Which you can disable now.
23/02/2010 at 21:31 J C says:
Not only can you disable them now, you could easily disable them more than 3 years ago when Vista was first released
23/02/2010 at 21:23 RogB says:
NOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooo!!!!
you are making a product, do you:
a) make a product that will reach 100% of potential buyers
b) make a product that will reach 20% of buyers.
daft, daft, daft. Its like making a DSi specific game. ‘i’ll target the 5% of people that have a DSi and ignore the other 95%’ who make up a potential market of millions’.
‘just upgrade’.. no, i dont -want- to have to upgrade. no matter how many things you tell me are better in win7, i use it daily at work and i’d rather be using XP. I certainly wouldnt pay the going rate for win7.
23/02/2010 at 21:30 J C says:
c) Reduce your development costs so much that it will offset the lost sales from 50% of gamers still clinging to an 8-year-old OS
23/02/2010 at 22:01 Alaric says:
23/02/2010 at 23:25 Krondonian says:
If you don’t mind me answering:
1) Why do you prefer XP to Seven?
- I’ve never used 7, but have no problems with XP. People constantly mention that XP is 10 years old, but so what? I have a sleek custom skin, run media with VLC and Foobar very efficiently, can use Office and Firefox quickly and efficiently, and can play games faster than I would on Vista/7. It’s old, but if ain’t broke, why fix it? I’m not seeing major reason to upgrade considering the high price.
2) Did you pay for XP?
-With the PC, yes.
3) if 2 = true { Did you pay the going rate? }
-Yes, choosing it over Vista. Heard too many negative things about Vista, and the overhead would have left me with less bang for my hardware’s buck. I’ll take a big FPS boost over DX10, thanks. This may be changing now, but I’m not going to upgrade until I’m truly missing out on DX10 things. Just Cause 2, Halo 2 and Shattered Horizon I can live without. As Vinraith said, with new hardware, fine, the game will be cheap then anyway. But otherwise, no thanks.
24/02/2010 at 09:21 RogB says:
i was in a grumpy mood yesterday when i posted this and regretted it as i was expecting far more of a slagging. but nevertheless I still stand by it and will answer the above
1) i prefer XP – Obviously because of familiarity, win7 has a stack of niggling irritations with no decent reason for them. My classic start menu is gone and replaced with an ugly list (with no option to revert back). I cant right click to search a specific directory anymore, i have to go INTO it to use the stupid additional searchbar at the top. why?
once you get over the initial 5 minute ‘oooh pretty’ novelty, it seems to be a series of shufflings and modifications that serve no purpose other than to annoy. Its like photoshop cs4 compared to cs3. theres nothing NEW, theyve just shuffled things around and changed shortcuts to make it appear as a worthy upgrade and only served to annoy people that have been confortable with it for years.
2) I got XP with my PC. at the time, VIsta was the default option but I requested to have XP instead.
3) If I had a pc without XP and had to pay for it as an off the shelf product, I’d buy it, but obviously thats based on what I know now and how long its served me. Otherwise i’d have waited to see if it was a worthwhile upgrade or not and whether people would just decide to ‘skip’ it (ie vista)
im sure the majority of win7 love is from people that got burned by vista, and now its workable its suddenly great. Coming from XP (and completely bypassing vista) I dont find it any easier to use, and not much faster.
For reference, im sitting in front of my 2 work PC’s. one has xp, one has win7 64 bit. apart from a shinier interface, I dont see ANY compelling reason to shell out 150 quid for an upgrade my home pc other than ‘because i’ll have to eventually’. Im not a hater by any means, there just isnt any reason to change other than 2 games so far (1 im interested in). So i’ll probably buy that on PS3 instead.
23/02/2010 at 21:26 disperse says:
I’ll just throw a link up to Wolfire games’ piece on DirectX vs OpenGL. Just because.
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX
23/02/2010 at 21:38 jarvoll says:
THANK YOU.
23/02/2010 at 21:56 Alaric says:
Umm… yea. We should also all use Netscape Navigator.
23/02/2010 at 22:02 jsutcliffe says:
@Alaric
I really don’t understand what you’re saying.
23/02/2010 at 22:21 The Dark One says:
That’s a pretty terrible example to use, Alaric, since Netscape gave birth to Firefox, the browser that singlehandedly forced Microsoft to update IE past version 6.
23/02/2010 at 22:21 JKjoker says:
nice article
“If you’re a gamer who uses Windows XP, Mac, or Linux, I hope you can see that DirectX only exists in order to keep new games from reaching your platform”
best line ive read in this topic
25/02/2010 at 13:03 Pod says:
@disperse That wolfire article is nothing but lies and FUD.
My thoughts are here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/amzov/why_you_should_use_opengl_and_not_directx/c0if34s
But most other cats on reddit agreed with me.
23/02/2010 at 21:27 litrock says:
Just getting into PC gaming, I see all these people clutching to XP and just wonder when you all became a bunch of old men hanging onto your radios and wood stoves. Yeah, I said it. <_<
Then again, I'll admit the most expensive part of the PC I just built was 7. That said, totally gonna get this on PC. Once it hits a Steam sale or something. Yeah, I'm that guy who built a PC for over a grand and won't buy games for more than $40…
23/02/2010 at 21:36 Sobric says:
That’s what being a PC gamer is all about mate. Pay through your ears for the Hardware then wait for the sales. It’s how you recoup your losses.
24/02/2010 at 13:37 Rich says:
Or maybe I just can’t afford an entirely new system, which would be necessary to move on to Vista or 7. Actually the only bit of my system that I absolutely have to change is my motherboard, but that would mean I also have to get a new processor, newer RAM (faster than DDR1), another new graphics card having only just upgraded it to an £80 Radeon HD4670 ‘cos it’s a (shock, horror) AGP card. Also, because I bought an OEM version of XP when I originally built the thing, I’d need a full price copy of Win7, rather than an upgrade. All in all, I’d need an entirely new system, and I don’t have £400 lying around right now.
23/02/2010 at 21:28 J C says:
It sucks for the gamers still running XP, but if it makes financial sense, it makes financial sense.
People look at marketshare alone, but ignore development costs. DX10 is exponentially easier and cheaper to develop for since it’s far more standardized, with far more standardized hardware, and far more straightforward API implementation.
Eidos probably didn’t expect Just Cause 2 to be a huge seller on PC in the first place, so if they can drastically reduce development costs by supporting a much more robust, easier API, they probably think it can offset lost sales from people still running XP/DX9.
23/02/2010 at 21:30 Risingson says:
I certainly DON’T believe in the necessity for windows7 for the graphics update, comparing it to xbox360. So I will not play this either.
23/02/2010 at 23:22 Lilliput King says:
Mmm. Thing is, though, things clearly run better on my PC than they do on my PS3 or 360, while looking better.
One of the things that really bugs me about consoles (older models included, the PS2 was often particularly bad) is the fairly frequent bouts of sub-60 FPS. I can understand how this wouldn’t bother everyone, but it seems to me this generation is starting to show its age.
23/02/2010 at 21:42 Jesse says:
I’m sure all developers would love to be able to sell to all customers. Few are blowing us off purposely because of meanness or stupidity. Tech creep never stops, and we reach a medium-size bump like this every two or three years. Time to upgrade again.
When you hit the bump, you miss a few games until you can afford to dedicate another chunk of income on our painfully expensive hobby. On the upside, like Vinraith said, every game eventually seems to become ridiculously cheap one or two years later. These days, anyway.
Personally, I rarely play anything larger than 50 MB on my computer. For everything else I turn to the console. I miss the mods and a few exclusives, but what’s the damage, really? I also play harmonica. It’s pretty cool…they basically have the tech figured out at this point. Once you figure out how to not spit in it too much, you’re golden.
23/02/2010 at 21:43 Eggy says:
If you have issues with DirectX 10 and can’t fix this you could try an in place upgrade of the OS (Vista or Windows 7). It basicly reinstalls the Windows files without messing up your applications. You need a Vista/7 DVD for this.
23/02/2010 at 21:45 jon_hill987 says:
Surely everyone who plays new games on a computer has bought a new computer in the last three years? Why wouldn’t you have upgraded to Vista or 7 then?
24/02/2010 at 00:57 John Rambo says:
“Surely everyone who plays new games on a computer has bought a new computer in the last three years? Why wouldn’t you have upgraded to Vista or 7 then?” Actually, I’m playing new releases on a 6 year old Dell XPS 400.
24/02/2010 at 15:57 drewski says:
I’ve upgraded, sure, but the hard disk, optical drive and software in this box date to Feb 2001.
23/02/2010 at 21:50 Sean Beanland says:
This is a good thing as far as I’m concerned. I’ve felt for a while now that the current generation of consoles have been holding back PC graphics. If we’re FINALLY seeing developers taking advantage of DX10 at the expense of XP users, then I don’t mind. That operating system needs to die anyway.
23/02/2010 at 21:50 Alaric says:
Oh please. Did we complain in 2007 that nobody was making games for Windows 98 anymore? ;-)
On a more serious note, XP wasn’t too bad, but it is almost 10 years old now. In my opinion it is time to move on to Windows 7 and DirectX 11. Most of us skipped Vista / Dx10, but now is really the time. I’m glad that some developers are taking steps to propel this conversion forward.
23/02/2010 at 23:58 luminosity says:
Funnily enough, I remember a lot of screaming and shouting when DX:IW announced it wouldn’t be working on 98. And then more when it wouldn’t work on Geforce 4 MX’s. I figure every time tech jumps up a level and people get locked out people will complain. Sooner or later they’ll get used to it.
23/02/2010 at 21:53 Poltergeist says:
Maybe it’s a good thing that I finally have a reason to upgrade my PC…
23/02/2010 at 21:58 ZIGS says:
The pirate version will be playable on XP, just like Halo 2 and other DX10 games. Shame Avalanche doesn’t want my money but it was their choice
23/02/2010 at 22:30 Grape Flavor says:
lol, no. No, it won’t. Not unless you recode the whole renderer. DX10 and the new driver model isn’t just some arbitrary lockout to switch in an .ini file. And Halo 2 doesn’t even use DirectX 10. You are laughably uninformed.
And piracy is always your choice. An individual is responsible for his/her own behavior. Just because you feel a developer slighted you in some way, doesn’t suddenly remove your free will and ability to make conscious decisions. Although you’ve already proven that your mental abilities aren’t very good to begin with.
23/02/2010 at 21:59 suibhne says:
Nutty thought, but I wonder if this is also connected to the bugbear of piracy – like, up-to-date customers with higher-end, more recent machines are less likely to be pirates.
23/02/2010 at 23:59 Dean says:
I’m fairly sure it’d work the other way around. People that upgrade their machines a lot tend to be geekier and know where to get pirated stuff.
That said, I looked in to yarring Windows 7 and it was so convoluted and messy I decided to buy it instead.
23/02/2010 at 22:01 VHATI says:
dx9 is legacy support. the longer developers use it, the longer it will take for dx10 and 11 to get the support they deserve.
I am a complete supporter of dropping dx 9 for upcoming games. If a game is designed for dx9, it means that dx 10 and 11 are not giving the development time they deserve.
If people are expected to upgrade thier processors and video cards to play newer games, there is no reason to expect them to not need to upgrade the operating system to also stay with the times. If people cant afford to do such, they can buy a console.
There is no arguing with that last line.
23/02/2010 at 22:24 pkt-zer0 says:
Considering that the consoles the game is also coming out on don’t support DX10, you’re effectively calling the PC version a crappy port. Just sayin’.
24/02/2010 at 15:58 drewski says:
A (theoretically) superior port, surely.
23/02/2010 at 22:03 Tusque d'Ivoire says:
This was bad, back when there was only vista, as in the case of HALO2, but now, it is a little sad, but nothing to go on the barricades for…
23/02/2010 at 22:07 Starky says:
As has been said but is worth repeating of those 45% still on XP chances are that the vast majority of them either a, dual boot, or b, don’t have a rig capable of running the game anyway.
Sorry folks but it is time to upgrade, vista was skippable – even though after SP1 (by which time 3rd parties had sorted out their drivers) it was just as good as XP, and no where near as bad as most rabid idiots were shouting around the internet. Still it was resource heavy (though that had almost no impact on games – 1-2fps maybe on the same rig with the same settings).
Windows 7 on the other hand is basically Vista SP2, and is vastly superior to XP – in almost every aspect.
If you have a gaming rig you really should be thinking about upgrading – to 64bit Win7.
23/02/2010 at 22:26 Vinraith says:
@Starky
So far there are two games of which I’m aware that require Win 7. Neither of them are essential, by any stretch. Browsing through the Win 7 compatibility page, I see any number of games I still play that have problems under Win 7 (as well as several other programs of value).
So, setting aside the cost, setting aside the considerable hassle of an upgrade, Win 7 doesn’t run the software I want it to run, and doesn’t give me access to enough new software I care about to remotely compensate. Is it really so hard to understand why a large number of gamers haven’t upgraded?
23/02/2010 at 23:10 Starky says:
Vin what software?
I’ve had no problem with anything running on windows 7 that I used to run on XP (some of them need to be in compatibility mode, but that is fine, compatibility mode works) and more so some really old stuff for win 95/98 that I could never get working on XP (like AvP the first one, tomb raider final fantasy 7 PC and Diablo) all work under windows 7 in compatibility mode.
Though for some of the direct draw games I get colour issues which I can fix by end tasking explorer.exe – a pain, but better than having to run them in virtualbox as I used to do.
I had vastly more issues with software in the move from windows 98 > XP than I’ve had with XP > Win7.
23/02/2010 at 23:19 Vinraith says:
@Starky
I’m pleased to hear that compatibility mode is not only functional, but can actually revive games that wouldn’t run under XP in some cases. That makes me feel better about upgrading down that road.
I don’t remember the complete list of losses, but I do recall that both Rise of Nations and Fallout 3 (!?) were listed as incompatible with Win 7 on MS’s site.
23/02/2010 at 23:34 Starky says:
FO3 works fine, It’s one of my favourite games that I even do the odd mod for, so yeah it works fine.
I think the only problem was with people installing it into the program files directory, which Fo3 was trying to write too and tripping over permissions (Windows 7 rightfully tries to limit program access to program files directory) – easily fixed by running it in admin mode, or simply installing the game some-place else (which is always good practice for any game you wish to mod).
I actually noticed a improvement in performance under windows 7 also, not a large one, but a noticeable one – though that was probably more due to moving from XP32 to Win7 64.
23/02/2010 at 22:14 Navagon says:
The OS is almost a decade old. We’ve got Windows 7 now. So there’s no excuse. It’s like complaining that games aren’t Windows 3.1 compatible months after XP’s release. Time to let go, guys.
23/02/2010 at 22:20 Skusey says:
Is this the first piece of Just Cause 2 news that wasn’t written by John? Maybe he’s just ignoring all the bad things about the game because you can tie people to planes and make the world ok again. Understandable really.
23/02/2010 at 22:22 Martin Coxall says:
Windows XP was released in 2001. Nearly a decade ago.
Just Cause 2 welcomes you to the second decade of the twenty first century.
23/02/2010 at 22:32 Duck says:
“So it’s cool to ignore over 50% of the audience? Goddit.”
Well, besides my previous point, there’s also the fact that quite a large percentage of XP gamers don’t even meet the minimum requirements. I mean, it’s Steam we’re talking about, not something like a “Futuremark hardware survey”. So, it’s actually quite less than 50%.
Even besides that, With XP being, you know, 9 years old and all, I think it’s far, far more egregious to ignore the 50% who’ve invested quite a bit of money into their systems. If every company was to keep making games for old systems just because a few customers might not be able to play the new games if they didn’t, where is the progress? Is the new 5970 I bought without value because developers [i]just have to[/i] continue being compatible with ancient systems? That’s not how technology works, my friend.
I have much more respect for companies like Futuremark who specifically chose to make Shattered Horizon DX10 only. Sales are not measured by how many customers you didn’t have, they are measured by how many customers you do have. Developers shouldn’t have to hold back on their software capability simply because there is a large group of gamers who are resisting change with all of their might.
And all of this is beside my original point which was that this line:
“Incidentally, before anyone takes the “get with the times, granddad” line and suggests most people have Vista or 7 now, take another look at January’s Steam PC survey.”
is totally false. As I showed in my previous comment, Vista and Windows 7 combined are more popular than XP. Of course XP is the “most popular” of the three, because DX10 users are split between Vista and 7. But Vista and 7 together are more popular, disproving that statement.
As Ed from Brazil said, “by your logic all devs should make games compatible with GMA 950 graphics.”
One cannot simply misread statistics and claim that the Just Cause 2 devs are screwing over half of the gaming world. Oh wait, Alec just did that. Never mind.
P.S. No offense to Alec, but I just heartily disagree with him. I hope that didn’t come across as offensive.
23/02/2010 at 22:44 Patrick says:
“Is the new 5970 I bought without value because developers [i]just have to[/i] continue being compatible with ancient systems? That’s not how technology works, my friend.”
I’m not sure how this is applicable. DX10 can easily be made to work on XP, as leet haxors have done. MS chooses not to allow it in order to make an incentive to buy their new products. If Microsoft had [i]chosen[/i] to put DX10 on WinXP, then you would have been playing DX10 games for several years now.
23/02/2010 at 22:57 Duck says:
@Patrick
Your critique of Microsoft’s business strategies really doesn’t have anything to do with my point about how technology is always supposed to progress forward. Microsoft has simply put in a (somewhat dubious, I agree) incentive for the latest technology. However, that’s not what my point was about at all, really.
23/02/2010 at 22:58 Starky says:
There is a vast difference between DX10 hacked to work on XP and DX10 integrated into the OS.
It’s a similar difference between emulating hardware, compared to actually having hardware. There are some damn good emulators for various platforms out there, but none of them compare to owning the proper hardware.
23/02/2010 at 22:34 boredgamer says:
Throw the old, bring the new…this happens anywhere, and it’s very visible when it comes to computer hardware/software.
I know some people won’t like it, but it has to happen. I can see it being the norm for the next couple years, in an attemp to phase out XP.
23/02/2010 at 22:37 Tei says:
XP is working great for me, I have not reason at all for upgrade (downgrade in the case of vista or windows 7)
If Microsoft has paid these guys to make this a “DX 10 exclusive”, I have only one thing to say: Good riddance.
23/02/2010 at 22:45 Starky says:
I utterly disagree.
Windows XP (sp2+) >>> Vista RC = Downgrade.
Windows XP (sp2+) >>> Vista SP1 = Sidegrade
Windows XP (sp2+) >>> Windows 7 RC = Upgrade (one which will only get better over time).
23/02/2010 at 22:38 Patrick says:
I still have no reason to move to Win7, sorry. This sure as hell isn’t one. If Win3.1 did everything I needed it to I definitely would still be using it; it didn’t. XP does. I’ll move on if it becomes unsecure because MS stops updating it; if there is some feature that I actually care about in a new OS; or I get it for free on a new computer (I build mine, so probably a laptop).
That second one still hasn’t happened. Video card makers and MS are having a hard time getting me to care about new DX versions. The jump to a programmable pipeline/3.0 shaders was game-changing, paradigm-shifting stuff. The jump to slightly higher resolution textures? Not so much. Certainly not worth buying a new OS for.
23/02/2010 at 22:45 Anthony Damiani says:
Man, about freaking time we had /somebody/ make a PC title that actually pushed system specs forward. I mean, DX10 came out in 2006. Dx11 is out.. We’re still developing for DX9, which came out in 2002 (OK, 9.0c). Microsoft hurt us pretty bad when they made it ‘vista only’ and then gave us an OS nobody wanted to upgrade to.
If we want PC gaming to take its rightful place as home to the prettiest games, we really need to have some that work natively on software (and hardware) with features the consoles can’t support. That’s got to mean DX10+
No, I can’t run it.
23/02/2010 at 22:48 Sean says:
I recently upgraded to Windows 7 from Vista. It is light years better than Vista or XP. I love being able to boot up within 20 seconds compared to the 4 minutes it took to start up my Vista. Windows XP was good but I didn’t enjoy having to reinstall it every six months. Neither XP or Vista will be missed.
23/02/2010 at 22:49 fulis says:
I’m on XP but I’m not going to complain
It’s an old OS and I can understand developers leaving it behind. It’s for the greater good
23/02/2010 at 22:57 VHATI says:
no, if it was a crappy port, it would run on dx9 and not support dx10 or 11. Like MW2.
23/02/2010 at 22:57 Harlander says:
Huh… 7 is looking all right as part of an upgrade, but I’m going to try and see if I can scrape a fourth year out of this rig.
23/02/2010 at 23:05 Fianoko says:
It remains a very bizarre marketing idea to immediately remove apparently 40% of your potential customers for a product before release and in the same time expect great sales on PC.
23/02/2010 at 23:21 Gritz says:
You’re assuming that the entire Windows XP userbase is interested in buying new games?
23/02/2010 at 23:37 JuJuCam says:
@Gritz considering the 40% figure was taken from Steam’s userbase statistics, I think that’s a reasonable assumption.
@Fianoko I don’t think removing 40% of the PC gamer userbase is such a big deal when the title is being released on PS3 and X360 at the same time. Assuming everyone only owns one gaming device and there’s an even split (both of which are hugely generous assumptions for the PC gamer section of this venn diagram, but I don’t have any reliable statistics otherwise so…) it’s only 40% of 33% or about 13% of the total potential customer base.
23/02/2010 at 23:42 JuJuCam says:
Also cutting out support for XP means one less vector for problems to crop up and makes QA and ongoing support that much easier to deal with.
24/02/2010 at 01:20 hoff says:
Then they will act all surprised and blame the lost sales on TEH PIRATES instead of their crappy Windows marketing deal with Microsoft.
24/02/2010 at 05:44 Gritz says:
Juju, it’s not at all reasonable to think that 100% of XP users on Steam would be considering purchasing Just Cause 2 if it were available to them.
Over 14% of total Steam users are running SM 2.0 video cards. 18% have a 1gb or less of RAM. I’m guessing most of them aren’t running the latest version of Windows and aren’t interested in buying the latest shiny graphics intensive games. The people who got steam accounts for Peggle or HL2 several years ago aren’t necessarily the people who are going to buy the latest and greatest.
23/02/2010 at 23:12 Bhazor says:
I bet it doesn’t even support Windows 3.1.
23/02/2010 at 23:13 Wulf says:
7 is the most painless OS-related thing I’ve done in a long time.
Linux: I love Linux, it’s almost perfect in every way, but things do tend to go wrong due to how many elements are mixed, and sometimes a distro upgrade can be a nightmare. It’s still stable though, orderly, and pleasant to use.
XP: XP was unstable by its very build, it didn’t suffer with bluescreens every 10 seconds like the 9x OS’s, it just found different ways to be a shambles, an utter mess.
Vista: It stole some things from Linux, it was more orderly and stable than XP, but it was so ugly and such an unbelievably unoptimised mess that it wasn’t worth using.
7: And this is what I’m with now. Thus far, the only problem I’ve had was due to a bad nVidia driver (apparently implementing DX 11 is giving them headaches). Everything on my system worked from the very first beta, webcam, card reader, everything, this was quite amazing. Total stability, clean, optimised, pretty, and reliable. I say reliable because I’ve been upgrading beta versions since the first beta, and I upgraded from RC to RTM (yes, I actually upgraded from Windows 7 Ultimate RC to Winodws 7 Home Premium Genuine, funny stuff), and despite this I haven’t seen a single error, glitch, or crash.
Microsoft had to get it right this time or Linux would’ve taken over (with ease). The only thing is is that I’m not sure whether I’m disappointed about that or not, 7 is a thing of beauty, sure, but a Linux-dominated market would’ve made me a very happy puppy. Due to 7 actually being a not-utterly-shit OS, I’m going to have a love-hate relationship with it because everyone’s probably going to forget about Linux again now, it’s a crying shame.
But yes, anyone still stuck with XP? It’s seriously their loss. They have no idea.
Footnote: There is one thing that bugs me about 7 I’ll admit, and it’s a minor thing. It’s just that Microsoft absolutely cannot write a filesystem worth shit, I wish they’d found a way to use ext4, XFS, or something similar. NTFS is as utterly horrible to work with as ever, and it’s one of the few hang-ons of the old, outdated era. Perhaps Windows 8 will finally leave that bad idea behind, too. Or Windows 8 might be another Vista, with MS getting complacent. We shall see!
24/02/2010 at 04:44 drewski says:
I hate to break it to you mate, but Windows 7 could have been Vista with a different logo and Linux still wouldn’t have gone near taking over.
My friends are pretty tech savvy and the only serious competitior with us for OS love is nefarious Apple softwares. Linux remains a fringe OS.
23/02/2010 at 23:15 Stabby says:
I jumped all over the Windows 7 preorder, for $65 I would’ve been stupid not to. I like it! After a bit of customization everything is running exactly how I want it to.
Stop living in the stone ages and upgrade :D
Oh god I sound like a commercial..
24/02/2010 at 01:21 hoff says:
Maybe you want to organize a Windows 7 party for us?
23/02/2010 at 23:15 Spork says:
I’m actually glad to put my pc through its paces for once, upgraded it for DX10 when vista came out (like a complete sucker) and for about a year after the only game which used said tech was Flight Sim X (admittedly very pretty). Certainly won’t be making the same mistake with 11 (as DX may be on the way out anyway).
Knew the bee suit was a good idea.
23/02/2010 at 23:17 Ben L. says:
XP is dead. This is official, and anyone still running it should be already aware of this. Every additional significantly different Windows version supported adds a ton of QA time, so I see no problem with dropping XP support.
23/02/2010 at 23:19 qrter says:
I always love how something like this turns a part of the PC gaming crowd into creepy computer-darwinists.. “You’re running XP? Pfah! Stop holding us back! Go off and die already, grandad!”
Warms the cockles of your PC gaming heart, it does.
23/02/2010 at 23:29 Vinraith says:
@qrter
Early adopters are annoying, sure, but they’re such useful lab rats. A couple of years from now, when I get around to upgrading, I’ll have a well-tested OS with a relative minimum of bugs and compatibility issues and a boatload of low-cost software thanks to their enthusiastic masochism.
23/02/2010 at 23:41 Starky says:
To be fair there is nothing early adopter about windows 7 – It is a continuation of Vista, and was in beta for a very long time.
Windows 7 is by far the most stable RC/Gold OS Microsoft have ever released – mainly because after vista they knew they needed to get it right, and from day 1.
Windows 7 feels more like a SP2 of past OS’s than a new release. Given that it is basically an optimized and improved Vista SP2.
Meh, coming off a bit of a fanboy in this thread, but so be it – Windows 7 is a good OS, I went into it with scepticism (after Vista, I think everyone did) – but it really is that good.
I even installed it on my mothers PC, and she’s finding it much easier to use than she ever found XP, and I’m dealing with a lot less issues (it’s just much, much harder for a non-savvy user to bugger up the OS).
23/02/2010 at 23:51 Wulf says:
@Vin
For me it’s a case of “My computer is my shrine.”
XP was always a horrible OS, in my eyes. Despite me having a more clean, orderly, and functional XP install than anyone else I knew, RL or online, it managed to annoy me in ways that Linux didn’t. So much so that I went Linux purist for a while, and if something didn’t have native Linux support or didn’t run in wine? Eh, well, too bad, I wouldn’t be going back to XP.
I suppose this is how some people feel about 7, but the situation is inverted because these people are too afraid to let go of the familiar and try something new, whereas I’m always on the lookout for the OS that’ll give me the most enjoyment, and at the same time allow me to upkeep my PC to the level I desire. 7 is an amazing thing in that it allows both. Six months down the road, and a possibly failed service pack or two and this might not be the case, but right now… right now, it is.
As a person who cares about the state of my PC, I always despised XP as an OS, I despised it less than, say, Me, but even more than 98SE. Plus, it was a very wooden OS, it didn’t really encourage the user to make it theirs in the way that Linux and 7 do. Yes, it’s possible, but not encouraged, and the further one moves away from XP default, the more of a mess the system becomes, hence those bi-yearly installs someone else mentioned.
So those early adopters, at least some of them, might have a good reason for going out on a limb and trying new things. Though I admit, had it not been for the FREE beta, I might not have tried, and I might still be using Linux at this point. 7 is Linux enough to make me happy, stable, friendly, and everything that XP could never be. I won’t even bother talking about Vista due to how unoptimised it was.
Really, the only two OSes worth consideration today, in my opinion, are 7 and Linux.
Both of them have made both myself and my PC happy.
Disclaimer: I do realise that not everyone is as OCD about the stability and general well-being of their computer as I am, to the point where it’s probably unhealthy.
Disclaimer II: I might have gone a little too much to the extreme side of things here in order to play devil’s advocate, to counterbalance Vin’s portrayal of early adopters. Everyone’s an idiot for what they do, and everyone’s brilliantly intelligent for what they do, just not to the same people.
23/02/2010 at 23:53 qrter says:
I’m sure it’s a good OS, perhaps it’s better than XP, I wouldn’t know (not yet, anyway).
I was more talking about the fightin’ words some of our PC-loving brethren seem to want to spew when a subject like this is discussed. It has a kind of murdrous, mouthbreathing zeal to it that makes my eyes water.
24/02/2010 at 00:03 invisiblejesus says:
“So those early adopters, at least some of them, might have a good reason for going out on a limb and trying new things. Though I admit, had it not been for the FREE beta, I might not have tried, and I might still be using Linux at this point. 7 is Linux enough to make me happy, stable, friendly, and everything that XP could never be.”
Yeah, that was pretty much me too. Though I would quibble a little regarding Vista; after the first service pack it was a pretty good OS. Not in Windows 7′s league, and not indisputably better than XP (it was better for me, but my system is/was powerful enough that I didn’t care about the higher memory use), but much better than it’s reputation suggested. Granted, given Vista’s horrible launch it’s tough to blame people for writing it off; I’d have skipped it myself, but I got a copy extremely cheap.
24/02/2010 at 01:57 Stabby says:
hehe. Cockles.
24/02/2010 at 04:03 Vinraith says:
@Wulf
XP was always a horrible OS, in my eyes.
And therein lies the difference. XP has always been rock solid for me, it’s never given me a bit of trouble. I had a single XP install for 4 years on my old machine, and had no issues until the power supply went south. When I got the new system, there was no question in my mind that XP was the safest bet. If I’d had your experience and had your priorities, I’m sure I’d already have moved on to 7 as well.
For me, though, 7 has nothing to offer. XP does everything I want it to do, does it with relatively low system overhead, and is completely solid. The only incentive to upgrade will be when there is more software I want to run that requires 7 than there is software I want to run that may have issues under 7. We’re nowhere close to that point yet.
24/02/2010 at 05:21 Aemony says:
@Vin
XP has always been rock solid for me, it’s never given me a bit of trouble.
Then you are quite lucky. I always had problems with XP, either it was random BSODs due to ugly drivers or weird system stuff. Not to mention that XP had a way of deteriorating really quickly after a fresh install. I remember my peek uptime with XP couldn’t be longer than a day or two, playing all those games and running all kinds of different applications slowed down the computer pretty much. So in the end I had to restart it to gain the normal performance.
Now with 7 on the other hand. What a marvelous piece of software. Since running the first public beta all the way up to the RTM I have only experienced ONE BSOD, and it was all the way up in the RTM. This BSOD was due to AVG conflicting with something (guess it was the new Flash 10.1 beta) just minutes after installing the AV. I uninstalled it at once and have never gotten another BSOD.
With 7 it a thing of the past to restart or shutdown my computer. Vista tried to do this too but failed miserably. The longest uptime I’ve had must be a month without any considerable slowdowns.
24/02/2010 at 20:10 Vinraith says:
@Aemony
Then you are quite lucky.
I wouldn’t know. I didn’t switch to XP until 2006, so I wouldn’t know anything about problems before that point. At this point, I’ve had it on 3 machines (2 desktops and a laptop) and its given me exactly no trouble. I can’t recall a single BSOD that wasn’t a direct result of a hardware failure, and there have been no other problems. If it’s been so bad to you folks, I can understand why you were eager to switch to something else, but across the three systems I’ve used it on its been the best Windows OS I’ve ever encountered. I’m a little loathe to risk changing from something that works well and suits all my needs to something new just for the sake of having something new, even discounting the expense and time/trouble involved.
25/02/2010 at 12:33 Kadayi says:
@Vinraith
“It’s incompatible with many games I enjoy and pieces of software I use, it carries more hardware overhead than my current OS, it offers no features of interest to me, what would be the point?”
Such as?
23/02/2010 at 23:20 PHeMoX says:
“Probably, anyway – there’ve been several DirectX-10-on-XP projects, and though I confess I’ve not followed them closely, I’d be surprised if no-one comes up with a way to make this work. Anyone know where that stuff’s at now?”
The reason you haven’t heard anything about that is mostly because they’ve failed miserably. Anything more but rendering a single polygon using DirectX 10 was all they’ve really managed to do.
The more Direct X 10 specific stuff, the less possible it seems to be to run that on XP.
23/02/2010 at 23:21 invisiblejesus says:
It’s a drag the the game won’t run on XP, sure, but seriously. Windows 7 blows the doors off of XP or Vista. It’s so much better it isn’t even funny. Faster, more stable, less of a memory hog than Vista and only slightly hungrier for it than XP, supports DX10 and 11 (sure, most games don’t require them, but a lot of games sure look nicer in DX10 mode), and besides all that the odds are pretty good if you’re on XP that you’d benefit from moving up to a 64 bit OS anyway so an upgrade helps you there, too. I don’t own many games that it’s supposed to have problems with, but the old stuff I do own runs fine (I’ve heard Beyond Good and Evil and Deus Ex mentioned as having problems; both run fine for me). If you can afford the upgrade, it’s well worth it.
24/02/2010 at 01:57 Bonedwarf says:
Funny, given I’ve seen two games come out TODAY that flat out won’t work on 64bit Win7.
It’s called WIndows 7 because it’s only 70% the OS that OS 10 is.
Using XP. Not sure where people get this “horrible” and all that crap from. Rock solid for me. Uses minimal resources. Everything just WORKS. And I’ve used used BSD, Linux etc… For over a decade.
Was getting this on the Xbox anyway.
I’m pretty much done with Windows gaming if I’m forced to go to an OS I truly see no benefits of.
XP is to Win 7 what DVD is to Blu Ray. A perfect upgrade for anal retentive types to bang on about how superior it is.
24/02/2010 at 06:24 invisiblejesus says:
What games, specifically?
24/02/2010 at 11:16 The7Seas says:
Good lord you’re a tool, Bonedwarf
23/02/2010 at 23:24 Red Avatar says:
Folks that still use WinXp on a high end system: seriously, get with the times you dinosaurs. +80% of all gamers use a DX10 graphics card so it’s not like you got an excuse not to upgrade. Sjeesh – when Windows XP was released, you had these folks who complained day and night when games started to drop support for Windows 2000 as well. W2000 was never even a gaming OS!
24/02/2010 at 01:30 hoff says:
Windows 2000 was an excellent OS for gaming. I got Age of Empires 3 for Christmas and it needed XP to play. That’s why I ultimately “upgraded.”
Now here’s the thing: AoE3 ran FINE in Windows 2000. It just checked on start-up and said: No, you’re not using XP, I don’t let you play. You could bypass that with a command line or something and it ran great. Only updating was again using some completely unnecessary XP functionality, so I gave up. This was a Microsoft published game! The only reason it required XP was to push the OS for Microsoft. NO other game I threw at W2000 had ANY problems whatsoever. None.
Same thing about Crysis and the “DX10 exclusive” effects. Turned out, most of them could be enabled in DX9 with a config file and they ran just fine or even faster! But, of course, many many people upgraded to Vista for Crysis. Right? No… no, they weren’t that desperate…
24/02/2010 at 01:59 Bonedwarf says:
Why? Give me THREE GOOD REASONS to install Windows 7. I have very few games that support DX10. Those I do, I really don’t give a shit as the differences graphical in an actual moving image are minimal.
So DX10 is NOT a valid reason as MS are leveraging that. 64bit isn’t a valid reason either as I have multiple titles that are known to not work on it.
So come on genius, give it your best shot.
24/02/2010 at 04:53 drewski says:
I STILL use Win2K as my primary gaming OS. I’m only just now starting to run into game compatibility problems (apart from the whole DX10 thing) and most of those can be solved be tricking games not to look for 360 gamepad support (which for some reason certain coders *cough Audiosurf* have started implementing automatically, whether you have a gamepad or not, and which the underlying default software for Win2K doesn’t support. But that can be turned off with some quick hex editing.)
I’m not complaining about this decision, mind – if they want to prevent people playing their games, good for them. I’m just pointing out that just because people think something is obsolete, don’t mean it actually is. I plan on running this system until I can no longer get parts for it – it’s my baby. I’m going to get a new rig soon too, with Windows 7, but this is a perfect retro gaming maching and has no need for compatibility modes…
23/02/2010 at 23:29 Hippo says:
I don’t think anyone are arguing that it’s a bad idea to upgrade to Windows 7. The fact is simply that many of us (almost 50% according to the Steam survey) haven’t done it, and probably aren’t planning to do so in the near future either (no matter how much the creepy computer darwinists (thanks qrter!) moan about it). So they’re losing out on a pretty substantial amount of customers here.
And that’s a bad idea, considering the PC market is already fairly small. Just ask Futuremark.
23/02/2010 at 23:30 Rhygadon says:
Does it not cause even a momentary twinge of self-consciousness when you find yourself rushing to post the exact comment that was predicted in the main entry?
23/02/2010 at 23:58 Starky says:
Why should it, that statistic is meaningless without supporting data, that only 27% of people have a DX10 capable card in Windows XP.
So really you’re talking a market of 50% DX10 users, vs 27% DX9 users (and then more XP users who’d not be up to spec on the game anyway with DX9 or below cards). Given a lot of those Xp users with DX10 cards will probably be on integrated or sub-par budget DX10 GPU’s. (such as say a 9200
Or that the number of XP users is dropping rapidly, while Win7 is gaining market share very quickly – and in 4-5 months will probably have 50% marketshare, while XP will drop to around 25%.
So yeah there might be a good chunk of people (I’d wager around 30%) who are running decent systems on XP 32bit. Capable or funning the game. But of those I’d wager again that 60% of those or more will be upgrading in the coming months.
In 6 months times that 30% will be reduced to 5-10%. The only gamers left on XP will be die-hard windows 7 haters, and casual gamers who don’t need or care to upgrade to play their games.
In the end though it is all just guesses, the Valve survey just doesn’t give us the breakdowns of information we need.
23/02/2010 at 23:39 fishoil says:
40% of steam users
24/02/2010 at 03:26 Nick says:
Yeah, you are right, its probably much higher non steam users, good point!
23/02/2010 at 23:45 Max says:
Hmmm I’ve been using 7 since the RTM and I wouldnt go back to XP.
Meh, you guys wont understand the significance of that… I used to be the XP ultra-turbo-fanboy.
23/02/2010 at 23:48 Vhati says:
16% of steam users dont even have enough ram to play this game. guess what operating system they are probably using.
18% of steam users dont have enough cpu cores. guess what operationg system they are probably using.
Atleast 30% of steam users dont have a good enough video card to play the game.
im not the best guy at math. but according to steam 48.94 % are dx10 systems. That means that more than likely the 16% of users without enough ram, 18% that dont have enough cores, and 30% that dont have a good enough video card are coming out of the other 51% of users.
so lets take 30% as the most that cant play, that leaves xp with 21%, and 49% for vista/win7
Seems like they are targetting the correct audience to me.
Now these #s are not 100% pecent correct, but are more than correct enough to show that xp users more than likely cant play the game anyway if it was dx9.
23/02/2010 at 23:49 Sagan says:
I also use Windows XP.
As many people have already said: This doesn’t make sense from a DirectX 10 standpoint. They have to use OpenGL for the Playstation 3, and probably DirectX 9 for the Xbox 360, and they could run either of those on Windows XP with little modifications.
They either get money from Microsoft for doing this, or they decided that quality assurance and customer support would cost them too much when supporting Windows XP.
24/02/2010 at 08:35 Vinraith says:
@Sagan
It’s being released under the Games for Windows label, I’d be very surprised if MS didn’t kick in some extra “development money” in exchange for pushing their new OS.
24/02/2010 at 00:09 potat0man says:
Count me as one of the 42% of steam users running XP. It’s been running my stable gaming rig for three years and I’ve never had a reason to upgrade. It’s a dedicated gaming box and all games have run well on it.
Why would I spend an afternoon upgrading the OS when I could spend it gaming?
There hasn’t been a compelling reason to upgrade a pure gaming box, until now. I won’t do it for Just Cause 2, probably just pickup the ps3 version (more of a couch game anyway, right? ;-)). But as more games pull this maybe I’ll finally take an afternoon to upgrade the damn thing.
24/02/2010 at 00:12 Vhati says:
you can always dual boot, have xp and windows 7 at the same time.
i would ask you this potat0man, you have a gaming rig, what are the details, and when, and how often do you upgrade?
24/02/2010 at 07:09 Mike says:
Built a nice system 3 years ago that held up until Empire: Total War which prompted me last spring to go from 2 gigs of RAM to 4 and an upgrade of the video card to an nvidia geforce gtx 260. The processor is some dual core AMD 3 GHz thing I put in when I assembled the box, I forget exactly what it is at this point it’s been so long and windows’ system properties just tells me it’s an AMD processor model unknown. Its held up great, I play Empire on excellent settings, Fallout 3 runs great.
Basically I just throw a good/great system together and let it go for 3-4 years while just upgrading the RAM and video card periodically until it’s time for a new MoBo and Processor.
I’ve got such a backlog of games from the past 2-3 years that I’ll probably just play through those for the next year (Far Cry 2, Mount and Blade, Trine, The final Brothers in Arms game (need to finish off the series) the old STALKERs, maybe one last month of Civ IV before Civ V comes out) and get around to building a new rig sometime next summer. Then it will be Windows 7 time and time to catch up on the new releases from this year and next spring ;-). It’s a wonderful cycle of discounted, patched games and cheap upgrades.
24/02/2010 at 00:18 Mr Chug says:
The full range of steam users is not going to represent the JC2 Market- my girlfriend downloaded steam just for plants vs zombies and world of goo, and I’ve had bowel movements with more processing power than her xp laptop.
24/02/2010 at 00:31 tapanister says:
Man, Microsoft created but one decent OS and now they’re fighting so hard to stop people from using it, makes me laugh. I’m sticking with my good ole XPs, no need to change.
24/02/2010 at 00:39 Ketch says:
does seem a bit weird, as if they’re going “SORRY, DONT NEED THOSE SALES!” specially with a non-DX10 version available on console.
even more suprising to me is that they’re actually making the pc version properly instead of just a crappy port! hurray for them if it turns out well! and also my own personal thumbs up.
24/02/2010 at 01:04 Stromko says:
I’m no more concerned that Just Cause 2 doesn’t support XP, as I was that Shadowrun FPS didn’t support XP. It’s a console game, I’ll give it a rental if it’s good.
I call it a console game because it’s very shiny and spiffy but will have no longevity, I’ll play it like mad for a few days then be done with it forever, just like Prototype, GTA 4, Fable I & II, Dead Rising, numerous others.
When a great MMO or Dwarf Fortress or Half-Life Episode 3 (and that’s only if it’s required for new mods) require Windows 7, then I’ll hurry up and upgrade. Right now I don’t see any need to hurry. Everything that I care about works flawlessly right now.
Now, if it had a Windows 98 compatibility mode so I could play HeavyGear 2 at all or Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri flawlessly, I’d think about it.
24/02/2010 at 02:13 Caleb says:
Windows 7 does have a Windows 98 compatitibility mode, but I’m not sure if it will run those games flawlessly.
24/02/2010 at 07:14 ManaTree says:
My W7 runs Alpha Centauri flawlessly, at least to my knowledge. I’ve gotten quite far into two separate games with my buddies without error.
24/02/2010 at 11:24 James G says:
I had Alpha Centuri running flawlessly under Vista 64bit. I haven’t tried it under Windows 7 yet, but in my experience Windows 7′s compatibility it generally a touch better than Vista’s.
24/02/2010 at 01:13 Jambe says:
I doubt even half those 40% of Steam users on XP would get this game. The plural of anecdote isn’t evidence, I realize, but I know eight people who use the service strictly for casual games. Regardless, Squeenix doesn’t care; they’ll make most of their money on the console versions, anyway (or that’s how they’ll assess the situation).
This OS Luddite movement amuses me. XP is eight years old. I’ll admit it’s a helluva good OS — I still have a system running it — but I’m not so silly as to expect developers to keep spending monies to support end-of-life products.
24/02/2010 at 01:16 malkav11 says:
XP came out in, what, 2001? C’mon, guys. I can understand wanting to stick with what you know (I was on Win 2K for a long time after XP came out), but at this point XP is legacy software. It’s no more realistic to -expect- XP support than it is to expect games to continue to run on the sexy hot GeForce 3 that you may have gotten around the same time. It’s nice that games have supported XP to date, but that’s not going to last that much longer, I suspect.
24/02/2010 at 03:01 bhlaab says:
I don’t understand why everyone is complaining, I mean I have Windows 7 so I can play it. I also have an Xbox 360 and a Playstation 3 I can play it on. So why is anyone complaining, I have several contingency plans available and if I can play it there’s no issue!
GOOD FOR YOU
24/02/2010 at 03:01 bhlaab says:
this wasnt meant to be a reply >:(
24/02/2010 at 01:17 Lucas says:
JC2 is a single player multi-platform console game, so it won’t matter much what system you play it on. Being on a DX10 PC is not going to make it magically great. I’m not going to buy a new OS for a 4.5 year old PC that can otherwise run anything just to play this. It has cover-based combat, and the grapple and parachute will work just as well on my PS3.
If JC2 were a proper PC game, I might care more. If it gets great mods or multiplayer I could see picking up the port when I eventually build a new box, but this is hardly worth crying about. SQUARE-ENIX isn’t going to suddenly be the best PC supporter ever just because they’re publishing some western multi-platform titles now.
24/02/2010 at 01:42 wcaypahwat says:
Hmmm….. I have win7, but only have a 7900gtx and a 8600gt.
I supose it could almost be time for an upgrade.
24/02/2010 at 03:22 Diogo Ribeiro says:
Hmm.
I’m fine with the OS and DirectX, plus the ample space in my HDD. It’s late in the day but I think my current dinosaur box has an Intel Core Duo 2.3 Ghz, a GeForce 8600 GT and 2GBs of RAM – not sure if these will help me any. Maybe in minimum but nowadays, Recommended tends to be the new Minimum :/
Also, sucks for XP users.
24/02/2010 at 03:39 Nick says:
Its quite sad even RPS is plagued by these people.
The reason most people haven’t upgraded is that their OS still works, still runs the latest games perfectly (unless they are artificially prevented from doing so). There is no reason to spend the money to upgrade when what you have works perfectly for what you want to do. It doesn’t matter how old it is, only when it ceases to function in the manner in which you require it to does an upgrade become worthwhile. Its not like needing to get a new GFX card because you can’t run the latest games (plural..) anymore, they would be perfectly capable of running this game were it not artificially restricted, its a console port as has been pointed out many times, it was built on dx9 or opengl anyway.
Basically, a lot of people here are reminding me of the ‘tech experts’ on MMO forums advising people they need 8 GB of RAM to properly run Warhammer Online or something.
24/02/2010 at 06:17 malkav11 says:
If it works for what you want it to do, great. I’m just saying that companies will stop supporting old tech. It happens. The testing and support burden goes down substantially when you lower the range of configurations you have to deal with. In this case, Microsoft deciding DX10 was going to be limited to Vista and up was pretty arbitrary, but it’s the case.
24/02/2010 at 07:15 Fatrat says:
It doesn’t really work as you want it to if it’s beginning to lose all support from devs, is it. And come on, £50 for a new OS, i bet most people on this site spent more than that on new mice in the past 7 or so years that XP has served them for.
24/02/2010 at 04:36 Deuteronomy says:
Bonedwarf you sure you’re not a closet mactard? You sure sound like one.
24/02/2010 at 04:49 Anthony says:
Alec, be honest – more telling is how many of the people in the latest Steam survey have already switched to 7. It’s quite a few, given how new the OS is in relation.
And I’m willing to bet a large proportion of those XP users don’t have machines capable of playing something like Just Cause 2 anyway.
There’s practically no reason to not upgrade to 7 next time you can get OEM pricing. Seriously, we’re talking about supporting a seven year old OS that was never designed for this sort of longevity.
24/02/2010 at 07:13 Fatrat says:
Windows 7 is worth the hop, imo. And from what i see in that Steam survey, it says that people with DX10 systems make up about 75% of people? (The top right chart)
In which case, no time to upgrade like the present! Buying DX10 capable hardware and not the OS that supports it is a tad pointless… unless we’re talking Vista.
But then again, locking out XP users is pointless too, imo.
24/02/2010 at 07:24 Janxer says:
In the past, this would cause me to roar with fury over developers pushing me to a worse OS.
After windows 7, I couldn’t care less.
24/02/2010 at 08:05 GT3000 says:
This is why we can’t have nice things.
24/02/2010 at 09:08 Jamesworkshop says:
No XP support is fine Since HDD are so cheap nowadays I run both XP and win7 on the same system
24/02/2010 at 09:31 l1ddl3monkey says:
I 7′d last month. It’s good.
24/02/2010 at 09:36 RogB says:
question to people with windows 7 – how many have payed the full RRP.
and of those that got it at a cheap pre-order price – would you be happy paying the full RRP now?
(im assuming that win7 PRO is the only one with xp compatability mode? if not, ignore)
24/02/2010 at 13:24 l1ddl3monkey says:
I OEM’d (there are still copies about if you look) and it’s the first OS I’ve bought since XP64 (which was not great, but it was still better than Vista IMHO). Think I paid about £70 for the Home version (I don’t do any of the things that’d need ultimate and I don’t use MS software for media functionality).
Yes I’d pay full price for it; it’s great finally having a 64bit OS for which there are proper working drivers for things like my Audigy 7.1 card and my wireless connection is massively improved.
24/02/2010 at 09:38 Sarlix says:
For the record I still use XP and I have a decent system.
The reason I have stuck with XP until now is because the performance gain I get from using a bare-bones stripped down version of XP is equivalent to what a lot of people pay for an upgrade to give them the same performance gain.
I can’t speak for win 7 because I have not tried it, but with vista I would get 5-10 fps less than if I used my XP version, people will spend £100+ for a similar gain.
So yeah that’s why I use it still and will continue to do so for as long as possible. Of course I have to duel boot Linux to make up for what I’m missing from my XP install, it’s there to play games and that’s it!!!
24/02/2010 at 10:02 Ranneko says:
RFG works fine on WIn7 for me. Great game.
24/02/2010 at 10:05 phuzz says:
@ everyone saying “but XP does everything I want!”
Not if you want to play new games it doesn’t.
(it’s not like I moan that games are released on my Amiga any more)
24/02/2010 at 10:37 Triangulon says:
This is pretty annoying tbh. I’m still using XP and have a good graphics card (but not dx 10). I simply don’t have the spare cash to up and upgrade (at least OS and graphics card) just to play the odd game that decides it must be DX10 only. Seriously, how many since Crysis have not supported DX 9?
24/02/2010 at 10:37 Risingson says:
Now you people talking about moving forward and such.
1 .- Do you ever play any game more than 5 years old? I mean, does someone have proof that games like The Hive or Outcast will run in Windows7? Is it that mad to ask for retrocompatibility, or do you throw games out of your window when they are older than 2 years?
2.- What do you say to console people that complain about the need to update ciompletely a PC every 2 years?
It’s reasonable to think that dx10 is necessary for a complete graphic overhaul and better performance. But for the time being I see that only as empty words. Yes, Windows7 is pretty, amazing, fast, but the retrocompatibility stuff?
24/02/2010 at 11:18 The7Seas says:
Let me introduce you to the Google.
http://elvesbane.wordpress.com/2007/12/13/old-games/
(after the huge bitching about Vista)
“I have Windows 7 pro 32 bit. Not any of the RC’s but the actual release. I installed outcast and played it with ZERO issues. It worked perfectly. AMD Athlon64 5800+, 2 GB Ram, Radeon HD3650 video card, 22″ monitor.”
24/02/2010 at 18:56 Risingson says:
Ok, now try with The Hive, you kindest of the kindest kind.
24/02/2010 at 11:28 Tei says:
With Microsoft it seems normal to lose perfomance after OS upgrades. Windows XP slower than Windows NT 4.0. Windows Vista slower than Windows XP.
Windows 7 is a bit change, becuase seems faster than Vista, but is still slower than Windows XP. It seems Vista was a awnfull version doing in the application level lots of things sould have been programmed on the OS level. Windows 7 still have this poor programming inside, since has ben built on Vista, with a kernel upgrade. Almost everything that is Very Wrong[tm] on Vista is still wrong in Windows 7. I know because I have Windows 7 on my netbook.
This would normally not be a factor. Choose freely the OS, who cares. But Microsoft attach the Direct-X to the OS version, and force people to buy the new version of the OS to get the next version of Direct-X. This is a marketing artifact, a item of “lock-in force upgrade”, and IS EVIL. Users are careless about this evillness, and will buy the next version of windows, because users don’t know better.
Nowdays ( feb. 2010 ) most games are made for DX9 anyway. And almost all DX10 titles are DX10 for no reason at all, or because Microsoft brive the game devs to make it a “DX10 exclusive” to sell more Vista and Windows 8 licenses.
But is not working, because all these “DX10 exclusives” are unimportant, and is easy to ignore these titles.
“Upgrading” to Vista or Windows 7 from XP will result on a lost of perfomance, will cost good money and is not needed.
Other OS companys are better, and use upgrades to actually upgrade the OS, make it faster. But the Microsoft “engineers” are not that type of people. Microsoft is not a engineering company (like Google) but one controlled by the “suits” so the whole machine work to extract as much money from the users as possible, and give out crap. And it works. We don’t live in a “good world” but one where evil people (like Microsoft) get the hot chicks, and the good people gets nothing.
Also IE6.
…IE6, man, IE6. /quadfacepalm
24/02/2010 at 11:45 ElChu says:
@qrter, @Vinraith well said.
I reinstalled XP only once because my hdd failed. In 9 years my BSOD sources were: a faulty RAM (changed > problem solved), a very strange incompatibility between NetLimiter and eMule (goodbye NL > problem solved) and crappy Nvidia drivers (found a stable version, kept it > problem solved). Thats it. My XP install ran for 24+ weeks without a problem. In 9 years I never had a virus or malware/spyware (using common sense helps). Its solid, it works and I feel no need to change something that works.
My brother’s computer is at least 2 times more powerfull than mine. He has Win7. Because of this I had the opportunity to have them side by side and do a small comparision. I can tell you that to my naked eye there is a very, very small difference between these two OS in the day to day use. Once again, I couldn’t find any reason to upgrade. I’m not against progress, not at all and while Win7 is better than XP it is only by a small margin. It didn’t bring any significant new, innovative, OMG I WANTz technology. There is no magic, its just a polished VistaXP.
Now, the only reason Just Cause 2 won’t play under XP is “the people”, the herd. Microsoft imposed an artificial limit on XP by denying it of DX10+. Again, there is no magic, no reason why DX10 wouldn’t work on XP. Its just that “the herd” bought Vista by thinking “its new, it must be better!!!1 it will solve all my problems!!1″ and by doing so practically told Microsoft that it is ok to do crap like this. But then again people bought games with imbecilistic DRM for years, why am I surprised…
Bottom line is: you, as a PC user, as a PC Gamer should be pissed about this not freaking complacent. What is really sad is that some people even defend such decisions.
24/02/2010 at 16:08 drewski says:
Thanks for telling us what we should think. Would you like some more arrogance? I hear they have a special on telling people what’s good for them at the US Treasury.
24/02/2010 at 16:27 jalf says:
No. Bottom line is that they’re going to sell fewer copies than they would otherwise, so *they* should be unhappy… Unless they save so much on development costs through this decision that it makes up for the loss of income.
I don’t see why PC gamers should be pissed about this. They make games for money, not for your sake. it’s a silly decision, but that’s their own problem more than anything.
24/02/2010 at 11:51 Baboonanza says:
It seems to me that a lot of people are very happy to forget all of the horrible things that are broken in XP. I upgraded from XP to 7 on release, I have it both on my gaming PC and my HTPC and I now wouldn’t got back. And what are you going to do when you need more than 3gb RAM? You certainly aren’t going to be on XP 64 since that barely works at all.
This is PC gaming, it’s always been like this and it probably always will be. If you want to play the latest games you need to upgrade once in a while. So either get a console or quit bitching about it.
24/02/2010 at 12:05 Gareth says:
XP was actually very stable as it was based on 2000 and had nothing to do with the 9X OSes. Everyone I know – apart from one guy – prefers XP to Vista, though Windows 7 is winning most people over slowly but surely with its uber-user-friendly interface and out-of-the-box support for most hardware configurations.
Secondly, to think that Linux would take over the market if Windows 7 was bad is just ridiculous to be honest. Sure, maybe you and your UKLinux-reading friends would all have moved over to Linux lock, stock and barrel, but I’m afraid that you represent a tiny fraction of the global market and as such are not significant enough to have any impact on the market as a whole. Businesses and average consumers the world over would have carried on buying Windows 7 OEM machines just as they bought Vista and XP machines before, and the Windows machine would have continued to dominate.
Whenever I have used Linux (Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu), the thing that strikes me that Linux fanboys seem to totally miss is the interface and its lack of consistency. Sure, having open source versions of everything is great if you want free software, but nothing is consistent. One application will use one layout, one set of icons and one colour scheme, another application will use something totally different. While technically the applications work fine, the average user doesn’t care about that (as far as they’re concerned, all computer software works the same – after all, it’s all software and it all runs on computers, right?) and the distinguishing factors come down to ease of use and slickness of interface. Linux, on the whole, is in last place here and this is why the OS will continue to be a fringe OS.
Don’t believe me? Look at the iPhone – apart from the screen, technically this phone is pretty poor. No hardware GPS, the first one wasn’t even 3G and the camera is beyond turd, yet everyone wants one. Why? The interface. The OS. The ease of use. All things Linux sucks at. I don’t even have to mention how Linux fails to work with anything but generic hardware out of the box and needs to be configured (sometimes manually with a text editor) in order to work with more specialist hardware. You really think the average consumer is going to do that when even Vista will set itself up on pretty much any hardware? You’re dreaming.
24/02/2010 at 12:14 Tom says:
Get with the times people! Win7 isn’t bad, I actually prefer it know over XP. And Vista wasn’t half as bad as the interwebs suggested, once you had done some tweaking that is… (although a Windows-update that actually disabled my wireless does argues against Vista…)
24/02/2010 at 12:14 roryok says:
on another note, does anyone give a flying, grappling-parachuting toss about just cause 2? The first one was worse than awful, not to mention an affront to common sense, and a fuck you to the laws of gravity.
Playing it made me feel like someone was taking the piss out of gamers
24/02/2010 at 12:41 archonsod says:
XP is a mess these days. The kernel has been pretty much hacked to pieces in order to add in stuff like multi-core support, SATA compatability and the like which was never even envisioned back when it was designed. Chuck in the fact that Microsoft has transitioned it to EoL status. For a support / business license Microsoft contracts are like wine, the older they are the more they cost. Not surprising developers are starting to drop it.
24/02/2010 at 13:07 Hunam says:
I run XP still but I can see the point in this. It’s gonna be a pretty heavy game in terms of specs an XP whilst is made of win is obvioulsy mostly used as a 32 bit program and thus has it’s limitations. If more games are DX10/11 only then maybe they’ll finally be able to push the system properly and make DX10/11 the software it really needs to be.
24/02/2010 at 13:08 PeterTechGuy says:
What? Still using XP? Quit being a PC gamer because you’re not!
24/02/2010 at 13:19 Tei says:
“What? Still using XP? Quit being a PC gamer because you’re not!”
Care to elaborate why?, almost all games nowdays are created and tested on XP, so have problems on any other OS or OS version. Wen you buy a game, you are sure it will run better on XP, not soo good in Vista, not soo good in Windows 7 and not soo good in Linux. Why would you use any other OS? If you choose to use Windows 7, you will need to fight the intrusive firewall windows that open wen your game is fullscreen, forcing a modal window on top a fullscreen application, clearly not designed for games in mind.
WINDOWS7 NOT OPTIMIZED FOR GAMING.
24/02/2010 at 13:24 RogB says:
maybe peter was being sarcastic, I hope so.
24/02/2010 at 13:41 Tei says:
Sorry, my sacasm detector is broken today. Anywya on the internet no one can reads sarcasm, the standard way to use sacasm is with the sarcasm tag </sarcasm>
24/02/2010 at 13:41 Bean says:
Games are developed on a variety of OSs and they are tested on a variety of OSs. Windows 7 is smoother, faster, and scales better with newer parts like multi-core CPUs and larger RAM sizes. I’m not sure where you heard the BS about Windows 7 not running games well. It has been a LONG LONG time since I’ve had any incompatibility issues with 7.
As for the firewall, do you even know what a firewall is? What is a “modal window”? I think you’re making up words here. Windows 7 almost never opens the UAC window like Vista did; it’s pretty much transparent to the user. And vista never opened it on top of a fullscreen application to begin with; just before the application executed if it needed admin rights.
Windows 7 is faster than XP and more stable. It’s ok to go get it, I have no clue why people are still using XP outside of business and IT.
24/02/2010 at 15:31 Tei says:
“Games are developed on a variety of OSs and they are tested on a variety of OSs. ”
This is a lie. Most games are developped on a Windows, and tested on a Windows version.
“Windows 7 is smoother, faster, and scales better with newer parts like multi-core CPUs and larger RAM sizes.”
This could be true. If my 4GB XP grown another 4GB magically I would upgrade.
” I’m not sure where you heard the BS about Windows 7 not running games well. It has been a LONG LONG time since I’ve had any incompatibility issues with 7.”
My eyes. The default beavior for Windows 7 firewall wen detect a attemp to create connexions is to create a popup asking for pemissions. To do that ,you are “force-extracted” from fullscreen in a bad way. All other firewalls seems to use notification windows, but since the firewall of windows is not designed for games in mind, or was never tested with a wide range of games, it use this horrible beavior.
“As for the firewall, do you even know what a firewall is?”
Yes. A program that able/unable conexions on ports based on rules.
“What is a “modal window”? I think you’re making up words here.”
You don’t seems to know windows enough.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms536759(VS.85).aspx
“Windows 7 almost never opens the UAC window like Vista did; it’s pretty much transparent to the user.”
I will not fall for that again, but please, where is the sarcasm tag?
“Windows 7 is faster than XP and more stable.”
Where is the sarcasm tag, sir?
” It’s ok to go get it, I have no clue why people are still using XP outside of business and IT.”
Maybe because Vista is bloatware, and Windows 7 is built on top of Vista. No one need Vista or Windows7.
24/02/2010 at 16:21 jalf says:
A modal window is something like a dialog box, which blocks the application it’s part of. Now, could we please turn down the fanboyism and the condescension a bit?
I’ve got one excellent reason why a lot of people run XP:
they have an XP license, but not a Win7 license.
I run Win7, and on the whole, I think it’s a solid OS. It has some significant flaws, but so does XP.
But the reason I run Win7 is simply that I got a free license. I don’t think I’d have bothered upgrading if I’d had to pay for it.
Yes, XP is old, and yes, DirectX9 is old. But few businesses wilingly ditch over 40% of their potential customers.
And Tei, you’re being just as silly. XP does not run games better than Win7. It doesn’t perform better and until I see a game that Win7 is unable to run, I find it hard to imagine it has better compatibility either.
Windows XP has a firewall too, you know. In both OS’es it can be disabled. But just as importantly, it pops up *behind* fullscreen apps in every game I’ve seen. And it pops up *once* when you first launch the game. Then you set its permissions, and it doesn’t bother you again. Just like a firewall is supposed to. But if you find it too annoying, you can disable it.
Now can we please act like we’re more than 3 years old? XP and Win7 are probably the two best gaming OS’es that exist. Deal with it. Yes, to the XP users out there, Win7 *also* runs games just fine. And to Win7/Vista users, no, apart from Just Cause 2, there are so far virtually no games that can’t run perfectly well on XP.
Both OS’es work just fine for games. Is it really so hard to accept that your OS might not be the **only** one that’s able to run your games? Good grief, grow up…
24/02/2010 at 17:10 invisiblejesus says:
@Tei
“If my 4GB XP grown another 4GB magically I would upgrade. ”
Actually, the 4gb limit on 32 bit OSes includes your video memory. So if you have 4gb of system ram and a gig of ram on your video card, as I do, your system isn’t using all of that ram. That may not be a factor for you, I don’t know what you have for video ram after all, but it’s a worthwhile factor to consider.
25/02/2010 at 18:42 Wisq says:
Ironically, for me, Windows 7 does sometimes pops up the firewall dialog when I run games, but it goes behind the game, and it doesn’t actually stop the game from working. It’s the weirdest thing to exit some game like a Source mod, having just played a long game online, and see it asking me if I want to allow the app to talk to the Internet.
I should probably look at it more closely — it may be asking if I also want to let it access from less secure situations than a private LAN network or something funny. I normally just say “no” / “cancel” because if the game worked, I don’t need a firewall exception for it, obviously.
24/02/2010 at 13:45 zaglos says:
Man. This totally ruined my day. Stalker, dirt 2, avp and many more are dx9/10(+11) games so theres really NO excuse to make it DX10 only. Also, Crysis. NO EXCUSE.
24/02/2010 at 18:21 TotalBiscuit says:
Other than the fact that DX9 is outdated technology and is holding developers back?
Why waste development time on stick-in-the-muds, there is literally no reason not to use Windows 7, it is better in every possible respect, they even fixed the damn soundstack problems that plagued audio editors in Windows Vista.
24/02/2010 at 13:58 bonjovi says:
to me it all boils down to :
cost vs gain
and for window 7 cost hugely outweighs the gains.
at this point that is.
On the side note, got to hand it to MS for giving everyone broken system no one needs for horrendous prices, and after 2 years fixing it and selling it a bit cheaper, people love them for it :D
it’s like they had to compete with themselves to make this work :-) brilliant.
24/02/2010 at 14:13 mrrobsa says:
I am wearing XP trousers, so no Just Cause for me. I can understand people feeling XP has had its time, but as has been mentioned, its never been anything other than solid for me so I’m not going to upgrade if everything works. What’s more likely is that when I build a new rig it will be 7, but that won’t be for at least a year. Plus I’m not a fan of the Mac-lite appearance/features of 7 and Vista.
This is mainly annoying because you know the console versions would totally work on XP, it’d be more understandable if they were just doing DX10, but it sorta feels like they’re cutting off their noses.
WHAT A HARD SURFACE.
24/02/2010 at 14:53 Singularity2030 says:
DX9 is ancient. It’s long surpassed the lifespan of a video game console. The PC has to eventually move forward. By designing the game around DX10, it will assure higher quality production values. The PC has been slow to make progress in the graphics department lately. It’s about time people start taking this step.
24/02/2010 at 15:34 Nick says:
Yeah, better shinies are the most important thing in gaming.
24/02/2010 at 14:54 MataDor says:
They will finish like devs of Shatterd Horrizon, which sales are really low. This is good example what you SHOULD not do if you want to earn some money.
Anyway, money are saved , and I can spend it on C&C4 or Settlers 7 which are coming next month.
24/02/2010 at 15:35 Nick says:
Not Settlers 7, that would be giving money to Ubisoft =(
24/02/2010 at 15:10 Dominic White says:
A year or two ago, this would have bugged me. Now? It makes sense. While XP is a good OS (I keep it around on a dual-boot partition, although seldom have need for it), Windows 7 really has superceded it. It’s about time we moved forward to DX10 and 64-bit.
And without games like this nudging people into upgrading, most people never will.
24/02/2010 at 15:36 Nick says:
“And without games like this nudging people into upgrading, most people never will”
Doesn’t that just suggest there is no real reason beyond being forced to (or wanting to make use of more ram..)?
24/02/2010 at 16:46 Blackberries says:
If developers keep bending over backwards to support people with legacy systems, how will tech push forward? It’s been this way for two decades. There are problems with that, but human technology is in its infancy. It is both unsurprising and wonderful that it advances so quickly.
25/02/2010 at 21:34 Devan says:
Developing games for XP is not holding technology back. The newer directX versions _can_ run on it; except Microsoft wants to push users to buy the new software. So it’s their decision, rather than any technical limitation, that is holding anything back. As for the point about RAM which has been mentioned a few times in this thread, the only way you can use more than 4GB of RAM is with a 64-bit OS, which both XP and Vista/7 have versions of.
Aside from that, all of these arguments about XP being behind the times fail to address the fact that SP3 is much more up to date than the current console generation. Yet I don’t see anyone complaining that the Xbox 360′s graphical capabilities are impeding progress. I’m not comparing apples and oranges here; any vaunted technological advantages of Win7 over XP will also be advantages over the PS3 and Xbox. Do you really think that eliminating XP will improve the tech of games that have to support the consoles anyway?
24/02/2010 at 15:16 oceanclub says:
XP is nearly 9 years old and now 2 OS generations behind _and_ two versions of DirectX behind, so while I sympathise, you can kinda see their point. Maybe it’s just because I really like Windows 7.
(Let’s all pause for a suitable moment to remember the late unlamented Vista. OK, 13 nanoseconds, that was long enough.)
I was lucky enough to get it cheap in one of the pre-sales. I’m keeping my PC dual-boot-capable into my old XP installation, but come to think of it, I haven’t booted into it in weeks, and am slowly uninstalling my games from it and re-installing them on Windows 7.
(PS: Even if you don’t like the Start menu in Windows 7 – well, between a combination of its nifty task bar and using something like KeyBreeze to add shortcut words for all your programs, I rarely go near the menu)
P.
24/02/2010 at 15:38 bill says:
Us web developers get shouted at if we suggest saving time and money by avoiding olders browsers (ie6) or ones with a tiny share (opera, safari, etc…). sigh.
I wish we could just forget 48% of our potential customers, but i think the clients might get angry…
24/02/2010 at 16:13 drewski says:
To be honest, if people want to keep their XP installations, that’s fine. What bugs me is the sense of entitlement – the idea that because they want to run legacy software, companies should bend over backwards to serve them.
If you want to run legacy software, that’s your choice. It’s the developers’ choice not to support your software…get over it.
24/02/2010 at 18:59 Risingson says:
“Legacy” meaning more than 1, 2 or 3 years? I though Pc Gaming was about other things…
25/02/2010 at 00:25 malkav11 says:
XP is 9 years old. That’s legacy.
25/02/2010 at 04:16 drewski says:
“PC gaming” isn’t about anything other than “playing video games on your personal computer”.
If you want to play this video game on your personal computer, you need to have the correct software and hardware. Simples.
24/02/2010 at 16:13 Gbroderix says:
Thats just great. i asked my dad to preorder it a week ago… what am i going to do? im really upset right now :<
24/02/2010 at 16:17 Baboonanza says:
@PeterTechGuy
I assume the sarcasm was directed at me :)
I’m not saying anybody isn’t a PC gamer, I just find the lack of perspective people are showing quite amazing. PC gaming has always required upgrades and you know that if you want to play the new AAA releases you have to have a reasonably modern system.
Bitching about having to upgrade your operating system ONCE IN EIGHT YEARS is pretty fucking ridiculous. It’s like complaining that your Radeon 9700 Pro doesn’t play Modern Warfare 2. Besides, I remember the exact same commotion happened when XP was released, with people saying they didn’t want to upgrade from Windows 98 and that Xp was shit for games.
Upgrade or don’t upgrade, it’s your choice but be realistic about the consequences. As a PC gamer complaining about the march of progress is a bit stupid, and you know what the alternative is: Console gaming.
24/02/2010 at 16:21 Hug_dealer says:
i wish alec had done a little more homework on this. just stating that they are ignoring 42% of customers is extremely misleading when atleast 30% of the steam survey doesnt have the minimum requirements.
everyone just seems to be reading the OP post, but not looking into and crying that they are ignoring half thier fanbase, when it is more like 15ish.
24/02/2010 at 16:34 Blackberries says:
Very, very good point. Many Steam users are going to be running old PCs, playing old games, with neither the capability nor desire to run this new-fangled shiny stuff.
As for those of us who consider ourselves tech-savvy gamers.. Well, it’s been pointed out how many current-gen games still manage to provide DX9 support. It does smack a little of laziness not to have bothered with that. But on the other hand, developers need to move things along eventually. In software terms, even for operating systems, XP is ancient. It’s over eight years old. Two generations of the software have been released since then. Microsoft themselves are no longer supporting it.. like drewski was saying: this sense of entitlement is on very shaky ground.
I’m afraid I just have to say: get with the times. This is computing. Moreover, it is gaming. If you’ve managed not to upgrade your operating system in the three years since Vista was released, then that’s your problem, just like it would be if you were still chugging along on an X1600 or Pentium 4.
24/02/2010 at 19:10 bookwormat says:
Not meeting the (now announced) system requirements does not mean that your are not interested in playing the game.
I’m interested in Just cause, but I would prefer this with lesser system requirements and lesser grafics.
I think the fact that 30% do not meet the recommended system requirements only indicates that the recommended system requirements are too high.
24/02/2010 at 16:22 Baboonanza says:
And even then if people are interested in the game thay can pick it up at some future time after they upgrade.
24/02/2010 at 17:01 drewski says:
Excellent point. You can just imagine a similar holothread in ten years time with people complaining that Windows Vision doesn’t have legacy support for Direct X 10 games.
24/02/2010 at 16:26 Hug_dealer says:
for the love of god. its not 40% of the potential customers. 30% dont even meet the minimum requirements. I am willing to believe that atleast 25% of that 30% are running xp. who upgrades to a new Operating system, but keeps thier old crap video cards.
24/02/2010 at 17:12 Blackberries says:
He’s right: Steam has a really wide userbase. 43% of Steam users without XP does not equate to 43% of “gamers” (i.e., people who keep up with and play modern releases, such as Just Cause 2).
For some rough stats on who doesn’t meet Just Cause 2′s other system requirements.. (these won’t be exact as I was only adding roughly, in my head)
17% do not meet the minimum requirement for RAM (47% do not meet the recommended)
23% do not meet the min. req. for CPU clock speed (58% do not meet the recommended)
20% do not meet the min. req. for CPU cores
27% do not have DX10 GPUs.
Even among those who do have a DX10 GPU, 35% do not have one that meets the min. req. (55% do not meet the recommended).
So a solid quarter of Steam users don’t have hardware that would run the game at all, with anywhere up to half not meeting the recommended system requirements for smoothly running the game.
Draw from that what you will. Complain if you like about games having specs that are too demanding, but the response is simply: t’was ever thus. Such are games. To be honest, I doubt that most of those not meeting the minimum hardware requirements, and perhaps a fair chunk of those not meeting the recommended specs even care all that much that they might not be able to play Just Cause 2. Gaming, including PC Gaming and Steam, encompasses a wide spectrum of users.
The number of people wanting to play Just Cause 2 but not meeting the hardware requirements is not going to be fantastically high. Granted, ruling out XP will still hike this number (not as high as the 43% of users figure suggests – see above), but one can only again point out that wanting your legacy, eight year old and unsupported-by-manufacturer piece of software to be compatible with a modern game is being quite demanding. You wouldn’t be pissed off if you couldn’t play Just Cause 2 on a Pentium 4.
24/02/2010 at 18:09 Nick says:
I fail to see how it is quite demanding when pretty much every single other recent game supports XP.
24/02/2010 at 19:27 Blackberries says:
It’s demanding of those games too, to some extent, but things have to/will change eventually.
Had they done this even 18 months ago, I’d have agreed it was a bit wonky, but I think it’s now just about justifiable. Not that I think they’re totally in the right either – if they’d really wanted to it can’t have been that hard to add XP support (I doubt they’re saving more money than they’re losing in sales). It’s not as though it’s a bleeding-edge tech game. I was just pointing out that it’s not completely unreasonable or stupid of them, and that XP really should be on the way out now.
24/02/2010 at 16:49 Uhm says:
Would it make any sense for MS to give away a basic version of Win 7 to increase the size of the potential market for its 64 bit and new Office applications and also help out software and hardware devs involved in the industry so they don’t have to cater to so many different people… Or is that just stupid?
24/02/2010 at 19:38 Blackberries says:
Well, as far as they’re concerned the ratio of XP users to Vista/7 users has been dropping since 2007, and will continue to do so: most computers sold since Vista was released will have been sold with Vista, just like now most PCs are coming with Windows 7. Your average, moderately affluent (that is, enough to have purchased a new desktop or laptop since 2006/will do so in the near future) person is not going to be running XP. To shamelessly use some anecdotal evidence, I haven’t yet met a person at my university running XP, nor do I know anyone else still doing so. I don’t think Microsoft need to strain themselves with any initiatives on this front.
People still using XP (in the west, I should point out – the picture I know is different elsewhere) are either people unconcerned enough about their computer’s capabilities to not bother with upgrading it (who thus probably aren’t huge gamers), or vaguely techy people like us who have made a conscious effort to avoid either Vista or Windows 7 since they were released.I can’t believe there’s anyone wanting to play Just Cause 2 who meets the hardware reqs but is still using XP who didn’t have an opportunity to upgrade their OS in the last three and a half years, either getting a new computer or majorly upgrading it.
24/02/2010 at 17:10 Schmung says:
It’s a lot of flap over nothing and a good excuse for people who enjoy shouting on the internet to exercise their keyboards. If you’ve got a system capable of playing it then likely you have the OS as well. Who runs around with 4gb or RAM and a quad core and sticks with XP?
24/02/2010 at 17:12 Nick says:
Eh, the min specs are considerably lower than that.
24/02/2010 at 18:16 Schmung says:
I was making the point that some of the people who are moaning are ones throwing large amounts of cash at hardware who somehow won’t splash out the cash to get the software to take advantage of it.
Besides which, if you’re anywhere near the mnimum specs then you may well be better off getting it on a console, but that’s hardly the point here.
24/02/2010 at 17:37 TiredDeveloper says:
Agreed.
Please bugger off with your 8 year old OS. Upgrade or fucking suffer.
24/02/2010 at 17:50 unclebulgaria says:
TiredDeveloper, get real. I also develop electronics on this machine and many development systems do not support later versions of Windows (particularly when USB debuggers are involved with custom drivers).
24/02/2010 at 17:48 unclebulgaria says:
Ah well. Q6600, 6GB RAM, 8800GTX, X-Fi, WinXP.
Guess I need to cancel my preorder :(
24/02/2010 at 19:44 Blackberries says:
What on earth are you doing running XP on that thing! I imagine you know that, unless you have a 64-bit edition of XP (in which case, I pity you), you’re only going to be using about two thirds of your total system RAM, as well as denying yourself DX10? And more pertinently, you must have purchased that system, or parts of it in the last two years – why did you not take the opportunity to get rid of your old software as well as your old hardware?
Well, ok, granted, at the time, XP might have “done the job”, while your old hardware was holding back your gaming abilities. But in that case, the time is fast approaching when your software will be holding you back, so it’s time to upgrade that, just like you would any other hardware. W7 is only about £75 – a fair bit less than mid-high range graphics cards, RAM or processors.
24/02/2010 at 18:15 UK_John says:
Sims and WoW are the biggest selling PC titles, someone in the bunch is Civilization, all sold in their millions because they run on most PC’s. STALKER SoC outsold Bioshock on PC? Why? Because it ran on many many more PC’s, so wanted a Bioshock type game? Could run Bioshock on your PC? Get STALKER instead!
Why PC developers don’t get it is beyond me, why the media don’t get it is even more beyond me, and why STALKER CoP is STILL being marked down for lack of graphical quality (especially when Dragon Age wasn’t marked down for having worse graphics than Mass Effect 2) is totally beyond me!
But then it was beyond me that the media supported the industry move from big boxes to DVD cases, and it was totally beyond me why the media accepted games going from 35-40 hours gameplay to 12-20 hours gameplay for the same price, so I am surprised that I am surprised any more!!!
24/02/2010 at 18:18 Schmung says:
Because Bioshock was designed for consoles and getting UE3 based things to run on a PC requires plenty of grunt? Because the cost/return of making it run on a lower end PC isn’t worth it?
24/02/2010 at 20:31 ManaTree says:
Oh, no no no. Developers definitely get it. But if we’re stuck in the past like consoles, we’re not much better than them. It would, literally, be the example of exploitation.
I wouldn’t compare Bioshock and SoC either. As Schmung said, these two games had vastly different releases. One was multiplatform and the other was not.
And to quantify games as in terms of hours…wow, that’s just terribly stupid. I would take a solid brilliant 12 hours over a mediocre 35 hours. Not to mention that that is a shitload of hours. I have other games to play, damnit.
And saying that Sims and WoW are the biggest sellers is also a bit idiotic. They cater to much bigger audiences.
25/02/2010 at 00:30 malkav11 says:
Really? People get upset over the weirdest things. DVD cases are a huge improvement over vast, empty boxes with flimsy paper sleeves around CDs, which is what we got for years beforehand.
Also, this sort of reaction must have been why games continued coming out on 5 or 7 or 82 CDs for years after DVDs became widely viable.
25/02/2010 at 04:21 drewski says:
I picked up a cheap copy of Fable for PC. Released in 2005 (!)…four CDs.
I have neither enough faces, nor palms.
24/02/2010 at 18:36 Hug_dealer says:
that might have been a good arguement if the ability to have multiple dual boot systems, so you can have xp and win 7 and pick which to launch, not to mention that win7 has virtualization version of xp in it.
24/02/2010 at 19:48 Hug_dealer says:
it is tons of work to make a dx9 render path with all the bells and whistles. There is a reason dx10 doesnt work on xp.
basically they are doubling or even tripling thier work by designing a game with dx9 and dx10/11. with the release of dx11, which is both an upgrade from dx10 and an upgrade to dx10. So games designed around dx10 and dx11 with the improvements to multi threading and such actually outperform dx9 when compared to dx10 and 11.
24/02/2010 at 20:02 BillsterJ says:
I try not to give money to the Microsoft Windows division.
Not to be that guy, but they are fairly evil. Like tying ladies to train tracks evil.
Is Windows 7 better? Sure. But XP works, I still have the same copy I had 8 years ago, and I’d rather not give money to a company beleaguered by antitrust allegations.
24/02/2010 at 20:13 Vinraith says:
@Billster J
It’s funny, I actually used to be that guy, but Apple’s empire of proprietary bullshit has actually convinced me that MS is the lesser of the two evils.
24/02/2010 at 20:25 ManaTree says:
Likewise, I feel the same way. No corporation is free from greed of some degree, no one. Not even Valve. But there are many shades of gray. And really, it’s almost futile to resist against Windows 7 as it’s what publishers and developers are choosing to go with.
24/02/2010 at 20:29 Vinraith says:
@ManaTree
I don’t think anyone is really talking about “resisting” in the sense of never switching OS’s. Some of us just don’t see any particular reason to be in such a hurry about it.
24/02/2010 at 21:58 BillsterJ says:
That’s exactly how I feel Vinraith. Someday I will end up getting another version of the “evil” Windows, but not today. I’m not in a hurry, XP works for me.
This is what we like to call being “moderate.” It is a new idea to the internet.
24/02/2010 at 21:45 Risingson says:
At the end it’s just a matter of nostalgia. I missed all those far days where I could play 10-year old games without any problem :’(
And the concept “Legacy” didn’t quite exist. What existed was “Compatible”.
Let me cry just a little more.
Now.
P.S. and what is worse, Just Cause 2 is a game that didn’t interest me that much to begin with.
24/02/2010 at 22:13 jsutcliffe says:
I don’t really understand all this fuss. You should expect to be needing newish technology in order to play the latest games. How is requiring a recent operating system different from requiring a recent video card? You wouldn’t try to play a new game on eight-year-old hardware, so why would you expect eight-year-old software to be up to the task?
Addressing the issue of the developers cutting out ~50% of their potential market, there are advantages to keeping a game DX10+ only that might make it worth it. 1) Not having to support an older graphics API reduces coding and testing time, and lets them concentrate on shiny new features. 2) There is significant community kudos given to games that are considered to push the technology envelope, for example Crysis’ near-mythic status as a beautiful graphical showcase continuing years after its release. A reputation like that is valuable to a studio.
25/02/2010 at 01:07 Vamp says:
I give it a week and some hacker/coder will release a patch to get it working on XP, just like Halo 2, and every other game that claims to “need” Windows Vista/7 DX10 capabilities.
25/02/2010 at 13:04 Baboonanza says:
@Vinraith
“It’s incompatible with many games I enjoy and pieces of software I use, it carries more hardware overhead than my current OS, it offers no features of interest to me, what would be the point?”
You’d be able to play Just Cause 2, duh!
25/02/2010 at 14:36 Kadayi says:
@Baboonanza
Ignore him, he’s a troll. I asked him a few times in this thread already to come up with this list of ‘incompatible titles’ that are so so important that he couldn’t possibly consider moving to Win7, yet so far he’s come up with nothing.
25/02/2010 at 22:18 Hug_dealer says:
back that talk up, because i see a ton of shit that can be done in dx10 and dx11 that cannot be accomplished using dx9. Not to mention using dx9 takes time away from giving dx10 and 11 the support they deserve, or cost the company addition money to take the time to code in legacy support. yes the xbox and ps3 are holding pc graphics back, it has been easily proven, check out fallout 3, there are tons of high rez addons that the consoles cannot handle, but are easily handled by a decent computer.
Not a single supporter of dx9 on xp has made a decent point yet.
hardware incompatibility= solved by a dual boot system.
Losing a large player base= disproven already by the steam survey. The majority of xp users are on low end hardware that dont meet the requirements of games from this year.
25/02/2010 at 22:32 invisiblejesus says:
Two other points worth noting:
1) If it was so trivial for Microsoft to make DX10 work on XP someone would have managed to crack it successfully by now. The fact that that hasn’t happened makes me very skeptical of the claim that it could easily be done.
2) It’s true that XP, VIsta and Win7 all have 64 bit versions. However, XP 64 is shit. Anyone running it on a gaming machine is in far greater need of an OS upgrade than someone running XP 32 bit.
26/02/2010 at 14:07 Kadayi says:
@invisiblejesus
Seconded.
26/02/2010 at 10:47 Major Disaster says:
Decent sounding demo is out on the 4th March.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/just-cause-2-demo-detailed
26/02/2010 at 18:07 EvaUnit02 says:
Do your research properly. Halo 2 (and Shadowrun) was a DX9 only game, so of course a XP hack would be easy. But if a game only uses a DX10 renderering path, what you’re suggesting would be impossible.
Guys, the supposed hacks to get DX10 working on XP were all rubbish that never worked, because it’s not possible.
Look at the source code. Last I knew, there are a few OpenGL calls in the library for extremely basic 3D operations. No shaders, no multitexturing, no vertex buffer, no index buffer, etc. You might get it to software render a custom coded “Hello World”-style basic 3D app using only a few rudimentary Direct3D calls.
The instructions are relying upon a Microsoft SDK that contains D3D binary libraries. However, the Direct3D 10 portion of DirectX 10 implements a new API approach and relies upon a driver model (WDDM) not even offered by the WinXP HAL. You can install the libraries, and perhaps even get them to return a version string if called. It is something else to actually run any appreciable level of code, especially with hardware acceleration.
(source)
04/03/2010 at 18:48 D. Gates says:
Nick: DX10 does enable better graphics, but more importantly it’s a cleaner and easier system to develop in. Even if it didn’t have new graphics capabilities, DX10 would still benefit gamers by making development more efficient: developers can spend more time on gameplay, or they can get the same game out in less time and on a lower budget. Of course, we lose all those benefits if companies take the time to write a DX9 version too . . .
Lost Cause 2 isn’t an example of this, since the 360 version is written in DX9. There are some significant graphical and physics-related enhancements to the PC version, though. See http://www.gametrailers.com/video/nvidia-mini-doc-just-cause-2/62589 for more.
08/03/2010 at 22:36 R. Upton says:
demanding DirectX10+ or extremely high hardware requirements is not an example of ‘advancing technology’ but is simply a demonstration of lazy programming, if it’s possible to make a First Person Shooter in under .1mb then it must be possible for developers to make games like this work with far lower requirement.
They just want things like special chipsets and DirectX10 to do the work they should be doing, this is why games are taking up so much space now AND why they have so many bugs.
08/03/2010 at 22:40 jalf says:
Err…. Yes, the reason why games have so many bugs is that developers try to avoid rewriting the same code over and over, instead relying on single, *correct* implementations.
Yes, I’m sure, if we all stopped relying on DirectX or OpenGL, and wrote our rendering code and GPU drives *from scratch*, all bugs would just *disappear*.
No, the reason games have bugs is that they’re complex as hell. The reason they *work*, and the reason they can be developed in less than 15 years, is that developers offload as much work as possible to the OS and various helper libraries… Such as, for example, DX10.
09/03/2010 at 11:59 R. Upton says:
The only problem with that being that they’re effectively building a program upon a base that’s riddled with bugs, then adding their own bugs with their game and if they’re using a previous engine (this one being just an altered version of the old Just Cause engine) they’ve also inherited the bugs from that.
In other words bugs upon bugs upon bugs and the ultimate result is that people have to buy new OS’s and new hardware to cope with the amount of memory being used for the bux fix coding and to cope with the graphical demands required due to various highly inefficient coding routines that are inherent in the system they’re working with.
09/03/2010 at 12:52 Baboonanza says:
You really have no understanding of software development do you? It makes you look foolish when you debate about things in such total ignorance.
Christ. I thought this thread had died!
09/03/2010 at 14:29 R. Upton says:
“You really have no understanding of software development do you?”
Well I have spent the last 12 years working as a beta tester on various games and I’ve had the luxury of advising programmers directly on how & where they can streamline their code (sometimes even a simple placeholder system or error trap completely eludes them… I guess programmers must suffer from coders block).
Of course anything I say about games and coding is purely conjecture as no-one has any way to actually prove anything online.
But if an FPS can be made in under .1 megabyte with graphics that rival UT2004 and require only half the system specs, I think I can safely say that todays games requirements in terms of both OS and Hardware are the result of lazy or unimaginitive coders.
09/03/2010 at 12:53 Baboonanza says:
And in other news:
The Just Cause demo is super awesome. It’s going to my first pre-order game in a long, long time. It’s like Red Faction: Guerilla, only 10 times more fun.
09/03/2010 at 15:07 oceanclub says:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8557144.stm
More bad news for those who don’t want to upgrade from XP.
29/04/2010 at 18:36 SparcMan says:
Everyone should always update to the latest M$ operating virus system. Why?? JUST CAUSE!
30/05/2010 at 15:58 waynem says:
with regards to xp i use it for my home media and file server as it works everytime on a p4 system and there are many many programs that work on it for free to download.
with regards to vista, it was a good upgrade to xp and had it working on 4 or more different systems but it always seemed patched or unstable on a couple.
win7 is thee winner out of the bunch as it has been installed successfully on every system i own, including a y2k laptop that shipped with win98 preinstalled!! win7 work and i run it with NO antivirus just the OS firewall and there have been zero issues for almost a year now.
with xp you were required to run a firewall and antivirus or else any online activity would quickly be exploited and affect your system.
for anyone worried about their xp system and up and coming titles, just think to yourself… the machine that houses all your current files has already been used up like that coffee you bought 10 years ago and forgot you drank but still have the stained cup sitting there… go out and get yourself a fresh new cup of coffee and sip it slow and enjoy the million flavours you taste from it… forget that old cup, you already drank it and got its full value from it… now the old cup is a pencil holder or some other simplified task… the new one is a freakin delicious cup of joe that is worth 3.95 or whatever they charge for a delicious coffee these days
there is also the see for yourself attitude, just head over the the nearest computer store and use one of their cheap a$$ systems with windows 7 and compare that with yours… get them to install a demo of a game you want real bad and see how it runs. guaranteed sale with warranty and future gaming is yours!
everyone is trying to hold onto what they’ve once invested and defend that investment with emotion and attitude… the fact is there is a life cycle to everything and when you buy your new pc with win7 you will understand that is too will end as your xp system has come and gone
but fyi my p4 overclocked to 3.6ghz with 2gb ddr and 500gb sata hdd with 3850 agp card is completely perfect for anything OTHER than todays gaming… and it is very quick responsive compared to even my dual core 4770 pci-e system… however the new system runs particular programs like games 2-10x faster than the old one and cost 20% as much as the p4 system did
28/06/2010 at 20:28 Di3hard says:
The Creators of just cause 2 need to understand that Theres WAAAAAAAAAY more people with windows xp. And windows xp is the best gaming platform so the creators of just cause 2 Screwed up…
15/08/2010 at 18:24 Jimbo8098 says:
I must say I got windows 7 Free from my work cos they had licenses so i took it grudginly. My main reason is that XP was screwed (took far too long between boot to using programs at all , it wasnt the hd , tried a format , nope) So i grudginly installed windows 7 home premium 64 bit but my system runs it VERY well (Core 2 Quad Q8400,ATI 5670 are the main specs youll be interested in im sure :)) well I must say i like it , boot time is 20 seconds (from windows is starting to actually using a program) , thats reduced from 2 minutes (seriously i timed it). And add to that the better memory handling and you have a pretty nice system. XP is going. It WILL go. just like windows 95 , 98 and so on. It WILL die. There are too many benifits of windows 7 over XP now. I suggest you try and get it from somewhere. Ive noticed huge increases in gaming performance (30 fps increase most of the time) not to menition the FULL support for my Quad core processor. You dont need ultimate either , with XP they really tried to force you to buy pro cos it had more memory support so try and get it quick…