Is there a list somewhere of games that do or do not work with Vista? I’m thinking about going ahead and making the jump on my current computer but I want to make sure I don’t isolated myself from my backlog of games yet to be played.
If you google up “vista compatible games” (or similar) and you’ll find a few lists floating around. I came up with this one and this one after a quick look.
Dual boot guarantees compatibility. :) Throw in a new drive (or break out Partition Magic) and just install Vista on its own happy partition.
Yep, it’s what I did (dual-boot). Thing is, I rarely leave the prettiness that is Vista, but perhaps that’s just because I’m playing GalCivII right now and it works fine in Vista. I can’t bring myself to go back to XP for TQ and transferring all my TQ characters over to Vista seems to be a headache (if you want to get all the caravan stuff, too) so I’ve avoided doing it.
So, looks like I might be sticking with new games instead of moving too many others over anyway. We’ll see.
Vista runs more or less anything, but you may need to specifically set their executables to run in Windows XP compatibility mode if they are cranky.
Overall, more games run without problems than say using Windows 2000 to play Windows 95 games.
It was my understanding that Vista only supported DX9 & DX10, so earlier DirectX games won’t run on it. Is that true?
I heard that DX8 and earlier DLLs were not all there. I havent tried to load any really old games yet, so I dont know. When did DX9 come out?
I’m pretty sure I at least briefly tried out Deus Ex under Vista, and it’s a DX7 game.
DX9 was introduced somewhere around 2003, I think.
Compatibility at Wikipedia. Above it is the release schedule, if you’re interested. Since DX9 is backwards compatible and DX9 is included with Vista, then all DX games should run fine (well, fine in the sense that lack of specific DX-earlier-than-9 support isn’t a factor).