Love Windows 7

The head of the firm behind games such as Demigod is encouraging PC gamers to upgrade to Windows 7. It’s a boost to Microsoft after game developers reacted underwhelmingly to the Vista market.

Brad Wardell of Stardock, who has previously criticized Vista’s compatibility problems, told the Gamasutra site, “it would be good if everybody switched to Windows 7 as quickly as possible.”

He bases this claim both on the positive general reports about Windows 7, and specifically a feature named Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform, or WARP. That’s a software solution which aims to replicate the latest Windows-based graphics capabilities in machines which don’t have special graphics hardware such as a dedicated video card.

It’s still disputable how well WARP compares to hardware solutions in practice, particularly with the strong demands of gaming, but at worst it would at least allow developers to use the modern Direct3D 10 system without having to worry about alienating would-be buyers, which was an issue with Vista.

Wardell explained how this would benefit developers such as his own firm: “We want the 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.”

As part of attempts to reach this balance, Wardell says developers need to take steps to avoid using new graphics technology (such as that introduced in Vista) unnecessarily given that many gamers are still on Windows XP. He notes that many of the effects which can be produced with the latest graphics packages can be reproduced with earlier editions, just without as much ease for the programmer.

Still, Wardell isn’t the most enthusiastic supporter of Windows 7 for gaming. That title may belong to writer Rob Enderle at Digital Trends who argues that there “is a reasonable chance we are on the forefront of the decline cycle for console games” and questions whether “consoles will survive the onset of their twilight years, when their performance drops off and PCs start kicking their butts all over the map.”

My colleagues at GAMER.BLORGE are better qualified than I to answer that question. But from my perspective it seems unlikely for the simple reason that if you buy an Xbox game for an Xbox, you know it’s going to work as designed, whereas predicting how well a PC title will work on a particular computer still feels too much of a lottery.