14 DAY TRIAL // After the embarrassing performance delivered by Vista, Microsoft has been upping its game when it comes to operating system design and seems to be prepared to offer quite a competent platform with Windows 7, which is set to be released soon. But will the OS, which is seen as an evolution of Vista rather than being an evolution in itself, satisfy the most prickly of users, those who want perfect gaming performance on their systems?
Brad Wardell, who is the Chief Executive Officer at Stardock, a developer and publisher of videogames, told Gamasutra that “It would be good if everybody switched to Windows 7 as quickly as possible.”
He previously stated that Vista was a problem for gamers because it was released with limited driver support and limited code optimization and pointed to these as the reasons for the limited acceptance it got amongst gamers, even with Microsoft releasing DirectX 10 exclusively for the platform. Very few games are Vista exclusives.
One of the features in Windows 7 that Wardell is seeing as being very important for gaming is something called WARP, aka Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform, which is set to allow the processor of the system to take over some of the duties that are normally assigned to the graphics card. This is important because it ties into the credo at Stardock of aiming for a game “to look incredible on high-end systems, but I want people to be able to play this on their three-year-old laptop on the airplane.”
At the moment, Stardock is sticking with Windows XP and DirectX 9 as the main requirements for its games mainly because they don't really know how Windows 7 will perform once it goes on sales. If the new OS reaches critical mass, then the company says that the gaming world should embrace it.