The chaps over at ExtremeTech loaded up 25 popular games on Vista to see if they work or not. Did Vista make the grade?

The final version of Vista is an A- gaming platform, dragged down to a B- by rough drivers-assuming the driver situation is improved in the coming weeks and months, Vista will be a great gaming OS. Even though I installed and tested a lot more games this time around, nearly all of them worked quite well, and only a handful needed just a minor tweak or two, like running the game as Administrator. Steam is hit-or-miss: the app and all its games seem to work fine, but the way it interacts with the Games Explorer is erratic.

Vista is a big boon for people running integrated audio solutions. By taking most of the audio stack out of the hands of audio drivers and folding it into the OS's audio system, Microsoft has really done a lot to improve compatibility and performance of integrated audio. If you have an Audigy 2 or X-Fi sound card, you lose hardware acceleration and higher-level EAX support (EAX3 and EAX4, for example) in many games. Creative is working on a solution called the ALchemy project. It's a simple app that scans your game directories and puts a new directsound3d.dll and .ini file in there that basically interrupts DirectSound calls and translates them to OpenAL, which bypasses the Vista audio stack and allows for full hardware 3D sound acceleration. It's still early, but I tried it out and it works great. Creative's audio drivers for Vista for the Audigy and X-Fi lines of cards are still labeled "beta" but in my experience they're in fine shape. So overall, no big worries on the audio side, though I'd like to see that ALchemy thing come along faster and officially support Audigy and Audigy 2 cards.

Another issue you may encounter is the driver for your favorite game controller. Drivers for Logitech's line of game controllers aren't yet available. So you may want to hold off on that upgrade until Logitech releases its Wingman Profiler for Windows Vista. If the controller uses a fairly standard set of inputs, such as a typical joystick with four buttons, you won't encounter any major problems. But programmable controllers may be a problem. Some companies are on the ball, though. For example owners of the high-end X52 Pro flight stick from Saitek can download drivers from Saitek. It goes without saying that Microsoft products, such as the Xbox 360 Controller for Windows, work fine out of the box.

How about graphics? Well, Nvidia's has 97.46 drivers for Vista on all cards up to the GeForce 8800 series, and 100.59 drivers for those GeForce 8800 cards, which support DirectX 10. It supports SLI only on those 8800 cards, and only on DirectX 9 titles. Performance on Vista isn't quite where it needs to be on Nvidia's drivers, with some games running very close to WinXP speed and others falling way too far behind. Still, I found some irksome driver problems in a couple games (the Gothic 3 example above comes to mind). OpenGL performance isn't where it needs to be yet, either.

ATI just released the WHQL certified Catalyst 7.1 drivers for Vista, with support for their whole modern lineup of cards. It also supports every current CrossFire dual-card configuration that is supported in Windows XP, and will soon support the "alternate frame rendering default in all games" feature that was just added to the Windows XP driver. ATI's OpenGL driver in Vista is totally rewritten from the ground up, and only promises stability; performance improvements are coming in future drivers. I don't like the sound of that, and I don't like the way CrossFire is not supported in OpenGL. ATI's Direct3D performance under Vista is quite good: Many games appear to run around 5% slower than XP, some are more like 10% slower, some are even a little bit faster.