What? Vista is the reason for the PC gaming downfall? That's retarded. Games run better on Vista / Windows 7 if your PC is new (not some old p.o.s.). Besides, it's the only working x64 windows so far and Windows 7 is going to replace it. It's about damn time for devs to start using the 64-bit code ffs! It's 2009!
Well, as a counter-example (and hey, Unreal Engine related!) when
The Nameless Mod came out I had zero problems running it in
Wine, but my roommate who runs a Vista machine had constant crashes like nobody's business. Non-UE, Crysis (though not Warhead, weirdly) has a really annoying flickering-foliage bug on his computer; it doesn't do that on my other big PC-gaming friend's 3-year-old XP Pro machine (it was built to last!) nor my own computer (back when I last booted into Windows, back in the time period when Crysis first came out heh...still waiting for that Linux client for UT3, Epic
).
I definitely agree though about 64bit; I was running a 64-bit OS on my main computer a year before Microsoft even
had a 64-bit version of Windows (non-Itanium, I mean, as in for me to actually run on a home computer). At first there was some weirdness, but pretty soon I was living happily in 64-bit land. But ever since then, about every half-year I peer out from my little rock and gasp in astonishment that the majority of people
still aren't running 64-bit OSes, and not only is so much (mainly in the corporate world) not ported yet, but some things are even still being written for 32-bit!
Obviously Intel's backtracking with the original Core Duos didn't help, though; they obviously wanted to stall adoption of AMD's x86-64 extention until they could catch up, and I remember groaning at the time when hearing that Microsoft was backing down from all the limitations they had been planning for the 32-bit versions of Vista under pressure from Intel trying to save their then-current Core Duo line. Once again something that directly affected the entire computer ecosystem (by forstalling wider 64-bit adoption) and it was far more from political bull**** than technological limitations. If anything
is killing PC gaming (which I somewhat doubt, at worst it's just scaling back and changing somewhat), it's the corporate politics.
Addendum: a more current example of the Microsoft biting into PC gaming is their
specs for Windows 7 Starter Edition, which pretty much end up determining what specs netbooks are going to be made with...which includes, among other things, the provision that the graphics chip be "less than or equal to DX9". Considering no major manufacturer makes non-DX10-capable chips these days AFAIK, that basically means that no one can make a cheap disposable laptop with a modern graphics chip, no matter how cheap the chip might be itself since you'll still have to spring for a full-priced copy of Windows then.
As we've seen with the XP-on-netbooks bit, manufacturers of netbooks
will gimp these machines just to lower them to Microsoft's requirements, which is especially problematic since many of Intel's Atom boards have the RAM soldered on. That means even the final-stage manufacturers and sellers that have versions without Windows won't have the options since they'll be an entirely secondary market. Sure, you can choose to have Ubuntu or FreeDos or nothing installed on your new Dell, but no one is manufacturing the hardware for you to buy something even just a smidgen beyond the limitations anyways...
Of course a lot of people think of useless excuses for DirectX10 not being on WinXP. Like, vista has a different driver model, but that's completely bull****. The reason why DirectX10 isn't on XP is because Microsoft wanted to use that as argument to move people to Vista.
I remember at the time after Vista came out, while I was still playing a few games (like Supreme Commander) that didn't work yet in Wine or natively in Linux, that several different disgruntled hackers had found ways to hack DirectX10 into running on Windows XP. The hacks themselves, if I remember, didn't actually do that much more than tricking DirectX10 into thinking it was installing onto a legitimate target version of Windows. Wikipedia links to this mention of things:
http://www.techmixer.com/download-directx-10-for-windows-xp/ although it's more of a "get it!" than any in depth explanation of what's going on.
At the time Halo 2 PC came out I remmember laughing at the fact that the Xbox1 game, clearly with nothing that couldn't be supported by DirectX9-era cards (and indeed, the port added nothing that wasn't) was Vista only. Microsoft really couldn't have been more obvious about it. Plus with UT3 on the horizon later that year I knew I wouldn't have to deal with any of that Microsoft nonsense anyways, there'd be a far better and shinier game that I could run on the powerful new PC I had bought primarily for that very game (which I'm typing from right now). Oh well...
