Windows Vista - Thumbs down from Carmack

[MD83 1]

"FSX - Well you have seen my complaints here, FSX stutters and has 10 second pauses! FSX in Vista right now is horific!"I can picture the forum messages in a month from now:"Yes, there are 10 second pauses in FSX, BUT the ten-second pauses are smoother than the pauses in FS9 ^_^":-xxrotflmao

[DescendDescend 25]

Thanks Mike.I think I'll get a new printer or graphics card instead:-)

[Guest Peter Wilding]

how's it going Mike, We haven't seen you around for ages.let me know if you want to chat on msnPeter

[W2DR 1,860]

:-lol :-beerchug

[Mike T 208]

Ron:A point on DRM. If you have WAV files that you have on your computer after you upgrade to Vista, you will find that Vista will take almost an hour to go through them to ensure that you are not violating any DRM drivel.I've got about 30 Wav files that I use to burn my quarterly dance music CD (DJ Mike T. :-lol ) and once I am finished mixing them down, Vista starts trying to go through them at 100% CPU and 100% mem utilization and the computer becomes useless until its done...this process takes more than an hour and sometimes it just locks up, AND, to make matters worse you MUST let Vista do it because if you access that folder again, it will start from scratch.I didn't know this was a DRM issue until I read up on it.

[Mike T 208]

Hey Pete, you old man! I'm back in Chicago *finally* I'll hopefully be online tomorrow.TTYS

[Guest SkyDrift]

Thanks for an informative couple of posts, Mike. Although my experience with FSX RTM + Vista RTM was not as bad as yours, My experience in many ways mirrors yours, and I have reverted back to XP to run FSX. Couple of observations on my part for fellow simmers:1. I had to disable most services and default tasks in Vista in order to run FSX. Vista has numerous background tasks that start up at the most inconvenient times. Often I found that when FSX was running fine & then suddenly came to a screeching halt, the culprit was a hidden task or service that kicked off in the backgound & consumed the majority of all available CPU power & significant memory. The new search functionality - one of the touted features of Vista - was a frequent culprit as it auto-indexed in the background.2. Vista appears not to support Game Ports. I have an old & trusted MS Sidewinder joystick that I use - I've never found a better one that I like - and even when I found Vista drivers for my sound card & game port, Vista simply refused to recognize the joystick attached to it, despite custom inf files that should have made it work. Yes, it's 10 years old & at some point I'm going to have to bite the bullet & buy a USB joystick, but vista not supporting my hardware makes it that more difficult for Microsoft to get me to upgrade or buy a new OS.FYI, for those thinking of purchasing one: I tried using one of the new MS USB-attached XBox/PC controllers to fly, & while OK for messing around with, it was simply hopeless for precision flying.As an aside, the new Vista security features were incredibly frustrating, as they more often than not prevented prefectly good drivers from being installed & loaded. It took me well over a week to figure out how to eventually get them to load. This, more than any other feature, made my decision to revert to XP. Frankly, I expect an OS to allow software to work with hardware, & in this respect Vista gets a failing grade from me. I simply have no need of all the software "fluff" that comes with Vista - and that one cannot uninstall. Another area with a failing grade, come to think of it.3. FSX disables Aero when it runs, so this much-touted feature provides no benefits with this particular application, as far as I could tell. Aero is undoubtably a very nice feature, but in & of itself not a reason for me to upgrade.4. In fact, I could not see any compelling functionality that Vista provides over XP today for running FSX. And, after running FSX RTM & Vista RTM for a month, I'm sceptical at this point that Vista+DX10 grahics cards will be compelling unless the good folks at MS solve the lack of multi-core support for FSX. If FSX is running at 100% CPU today, it does not leave a lot of room for DX10 enhancements, even assuming some reduction in CPU load due to the inherent better design of DX10.Perhaps in 2008 or 2009, there will be hardware that can run the Vista+FSX combo, but spending $2,500-$3,000 today for the lastest hardware & OS (vista) that only marginally runs a $70 application (FSX Deluxe) does not seem like a proposition that I'm willing to take.- SkyDrift

[Tabs 2,790]

Btw just for those who don't know, John Carmack is basically the father of 3D gaming and much of what we have today both in terms of the graphics engines and the video cards that run them are a DIRECT result of his pioneering work. There are still pieces of the Quake engine in modern games like Half-Life 2 (the original Half-Life was over 75% Quake code) and he's speaking from more experience than almost any game developer in the world. Do you really think he'd speak about something like Vista vs. XP or PS3 vs. 360 or whatever without actually having used them? He runs one of the most storied game development companies in the world - trust me, he's had all of that stuff WAY in advance and has probably torn them apart ten times over.If you actually read the interview (which I thought was very good) he does not "bash" anything, he just states his opinion. He does not hate MS, in fact he gives them immense credit for the 360 (which I agree with having just bought mine a couple weeks ago - Live rocks!) and did no one see the part where he actually said they're going to use DX10 for their next game engine? What he's saying is that he feels it was not necessary for MS to force the obsolescence of XP as far as gaming goes by making DX10 Vista exclusive. I think that's a valid point, there's no reason they couldn't do an XP version of it.

[Guest kingairvols]

TO: Mike T.AVSIM Staff ReviewerI wanted to thank you for you comments and your willingness to share you Beta (or whatever the verbage is for being a tester w/ MS), experince with us.Q 1. I am not the most computer savey person. Is it possible for you to give some basic expectations of what a realistic expectation is for the release of Vista, DX10 and the breath that seems to being held that the new Vista/DX10 will magically fix all the performance issues.Q 2. Being a real wimp in tearing in to my cfg files (agian not the best one around to be grabbinh a fix from here and one from there ect...) will there be a an allinclusive fix or patch offically or un offically, self extracting (like the bridge fix in FS 9) for folks like myself. Thank you.Mark.System:OS:MS Windows XP Professional, Ver 2002 Service Pack 2 Hardware:Intel Pentium® 4 CPU 2.802.84 GHz, 3.00 GB of RAM Radeon X1600 Pro 512MB running a 21/19.6 Sony Flat Screen Tubed Monitorand a 17/16 NEC/Mitsubishi Tubed MonitorGeForce FX 5200 128MB running a NEC/Mitsubishi 18 Flat Panel

[Guest iwantmydc3]

HEY! I'll say it again!PC World just ran an article stating that applicatons run slower under Vista than they do under XP. (While it breathlessly says you should upgrade of course, LOL).So, explain to me, again, WHY DO I NEED VISTA?Vista????Dont want it!Dont need it!Dont care!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Guest Peter Wilding]

yeah, you got out the loop for a while on some of the "stuff!" hahhSome new "Stuff!" going on now getting more exciting all the while.get on msn or skype and we can fill ya in!bye for now mate.Peter

[cat 2]

Because when most people buy a new computer, Vista will bealready installed on it.Peter Sydney Australia

[Guest Traffic]

I actually had a very similar experience to Mike's with both Vista and FSX.Initially I was beta testing Vista and FSX on separate machines all along. Had FSX beta (various builds) running in XP and didn't have a huge problem and am still quite in favour of FSX.With Vista, went through all the builds and tech preview releases. I've been running Vista RTM from MSDN since early December and to be honest, FSX aside and like Mike, I haven't had XP on my home machine and will not go back to XP. Here's why (these are all my own non-scientific observations and opinions, your mileage will definitely vary):The graphical user interface makes XP look archaic in comparison. It will take a little getting used to; after all you've been using XP for 5 years. But now I find it very intuitive.The User Account Control (UAC) was not as bad for me personally as many people make it out to be. My wife didn't mind it either as it was somewhat similar to Mac's OSX that she runs which has a similar security measure to Vista's UAC.I love how much better the Vista Standard User account is compared to the garbage that was XP's limited user account. You can now easily install programs and make system mods with the use of an admin password on the fly. Very handy.The Search feature, similar to OSX's Spotlight, is really useful. I can find any file, email, folder, picture, song, utility etc.... by just typing the first few letters of a word associated with it. This feature alone, after using it, was almost reason enough to migrate to Vista.For me, applications load faster and shutdown and start-up were also faster than how XP did on my machine, despite the fact that Vista had about 15 or so more running processes and using more than twice the system memory.On my computer, which is a 4 year old Dell that falls squarely in the POS category by today's standards, a complete clean Vista install including a low-level reformat of the HD takes under 30 mins. In comparison, XP took well over an hour and I had to sit there entering data at random times during install. Not so with Vista; it asks you everything up front and then you leave only to come back about 25 mins later seeing the first boot into desktop. Very impressive.I can go on and on but my point is that I have reason to believe that many people will like Vista. It's not for everyone, not right now, for a many reasons. But we went through the same thing when XP came out and now, for better or worse, we don't want to change it.Having said that, I still think that Vista will shine broadly only when hardware advance enough so that the system isn't pushed to its limits merely by the OS.Also, FSX ran like a dog in Vista. To the point that, at times, I was no longer measuring FPS but rather Seconds per Frame.I still hold out hope that with new hardware advances (quad core, DX10 cards etc..), more RAM becoming standard (2-4GB), and the eventual release of a DX10 patch for FSX then maybe we will be discussing which version of Vista is best for gaming. :-)

[Guest Jimbofly]

-retractedJames

[Guest Kev_Is_Soaked]

I really had no issues running FSX under Vista... none at all. In fact I swear it actually ran faster, even though I was using the very limited NVidia drivers at the time.That being said. Look at the wide array of performance reports across just Windows XP. Were seeing lots of people with performance issues, and lots of people who are at least happy that it isn't written off due to being at least 'playable'.Just because it sucked on a particular Vista setup doesn't mean that the problem is Vista itself. Lots of people ran it under Vista, some had good results as I did, some had really bad results like you did.Anyways, not going to beat an already severely beaten horsie here.... I think that many people form an opinion of a product based on only their own experience, even though they only tried it on one or two setups themselves. Yah gotta take a good look at the wider averages before nailing an OS to the wall.I'd like to add a note about the DRM problems that someone else mentioned. I have over 1500 of my CD's on this machine and never had an issue with CPU usage. If DRM was checking each of those files, it was a very fluid operation indeed. I have full CD's on here, as well as about 8 CD's that are being mastered, and are still in various forms, including WAV's. (each unmastered CD is over 6GB) No issues to report. Not saying that DRM works... but it worked okay for me.