Windows Vistas Worth

[Ancient]

I use Windows Vista: Home Premium.

For the most part, Windows vista is more than proficient with apps like Finale 2008, IE, FireFox, MS Office, Dreamweaver, Zend and such.

However, what about the games?
Did Microsoft ignore the games?
It seems that only some games can be played, the games have to be really old or come out within the last 2 years.
Perfect Example: Doom I works just fine, however, Brothers in Arms Series seems to not work, if it even installs.

Is Vista the Next Generation Game Killer? or a big stop sign for gamers?
I've read that Direct X 10 only works on Vista computers. Why torture half of the market with such a product? Besides having to annoy gamers and users to use compatablity mode and Admin permissions on all games, why make it so difficult to even play a Third Party Solitare game???

Don't get me wrong, Windows Vista is great, but it seem awfully inconvienient for gamers. Maybe instead of making 15 versions of one product, just make 2 versions. 1 Home use (Gaming, Apps and Media), 2nd for Business (Apps and Media etc..) Besides making millions of even possibly billions for the simple ideas, make life easier and make our computers chewy and fun instead of making them more complicated even to some of the more computer career oriented users.

[Whistler]

it seemed the Quake 3 Team Arena just crashed under Vista, and the original Q3A also runs _much_ slower here than Debian GNU/Linux. And I also have trouble running HL in OpenGL mode (again it's not even as good as running under Wine).

but I am using a VIA Unichrome chip which sucks, and who knows if newer games will use DX10...

[mirv]

Most games should work - I've not had any serious problems so far, but I have had to manually set compatibility modes sometimes.
The main problems used to be maturity of video card drivers, and the extra resources (typically cpu & memory) that vista requires. Video card drivers are better now (for ati & nvidia anyway), though additional resources depends on your computer. Extra ram and 64bit vista is generally an improvement over xp for more recent games (64bit vista handles larger memory better, e.g 4GB or more) but it's not that useful for older games.
Not many people are using dx10 - most developers simply said there's no need for it, and by supporting dx9 only they avoid having multiple code bases.
Of course, I generally prefer the environment of linux anyway, so I'm hoping that there's going to be a shift towards supporting games under linux more (for which reason it would be nice if the ut3 client actually got released).

[Ancient]

I know some games like Assassin's Creed and Crysis are using Direct X 10.
To me having to set a compatability mode is a downer. Vista is supposed to be a good upgrade. Not an upgrade that requries you to use older versions to run certain apps. Many games like Half-Life 2 look fantastic reguardless that their DX version is older.

[mirv]

True, setting compatibility modes can be a pain, and mostly not required - but for this I'll actually give microsoft credit in that it works fairly well when required. Changes to the OS will break some older apps - but those changes should be worth it (for security, stability, etc etc etc).
UT3 has directx10 support as well I think - though epic most definitely put just as much work into dx9 as well.