iMacs: The gaming dilemma

August 8, 2007 6:08 AM

New iMac alert. Gimme, gimme, gimme! One question before I bust open my piggy bank: What's my best bet for a "secondary OS" -- Windows XP or Vista?

I've everything goes as planned, I'll buy one of the higher end iMacs with 2 ram, and enough space on the hard drive for a second operating system. I'm hoping I'll be able to buy a dual OS iMac from someplace like MacConnection (which has been selling these babies for a while now).

Don't get my wrong. I'm dragged into dual booting into a Windows partition kicking and screaming. My only -- yes, only -- use for the Windows partition is for games. I don't give a damn about the cool visuals and other features. Won't ever use Parallels, just Boot Camp. It's games I'm after.

Therein lies the problem. I've been hearing rumors about certain games, such as the sequel to Far Cry, requiring Vista and Direct X 10. So if I start off with an XP machine, I might be screwed a few months to a year from now, assuming that these games become de rigueur.

-Will most Windows games be switching over to Vista soon?
-Does the advent of Direct X 10 mean that everybody and their brother will have to switch to Vista for playing new games in Windows, like it or not?
-If I don't buy the iMac with a second, Windows OS, are there user-friendly tools to do the partitioning and install myself? (I partitioned my last dual OS box with fdisk, but I'd like to use a GUI based tool this time, thank you very much).
-Windows Vista critique. Any personal experiences? What do you like and hate?

posted by Gordion Knott to Computers & Internet (16 answers total)

For gaming purposes it's XP, no contest, for the next 18-24 months at least. While DirectX 10 has some big conceptual wins with the unified shader architecture, it offers developers very little in terms of 'things you couldn't do in DirectX 9'

Later on (~2 years) as developers switch to DirectX 10 out of 'hey this is a better conceptual model', Vista will actually become important to gamers.

The rest:
DirectX 10 intentionally uses a new, Vista-specific non-backwards-compatible graphics driver model. While some people have claimed to work around this to get DirectX 10 games running on XP (and I believe them), I wouldn't chance the likely stability issues this would introduce. In general, to play DirectX10-only games, you *will* have to upgrade to Vista. For games like Crysis, the latest EVE, etc. that just provide a few minor extra graphical enhancements for DX10, going XP-only wouldn't block your ability to have decent graphics.

I wouldn't call the tools available to partition and dual-boot user friendly by any stretch of the imagination, but that said there's plenty of reasonably straightforward walkthroughs out there. If you're fairly intelligent and can follow written instructions well I would do it myself. Worst-case happens and you can't suss it out, get a more technically inclined friend to do it for you in exchange for a 6-pack of beer.

General critique of Vista is that it is fucking obnoxious beyond all reason. I don't *hate* it like Windows ME, but I intensely dislike it. I understand the value of the major conceptual revisions Microsoft's been introducing with Vista, WinFX, and DirectX 10, but the implementation that is Vista is just constant hair-pulling aggravation.
posted by Ryvar at 6:27 AM on August 8, 2007 [1 favorite]

The bootcamp tools do the repartitioning for you, and tell you to reboot with the windows install disk, and then you are off to the races installing windows. It really is pretty easy to get windows on a mac, so don't worry about that part.
posted by cschneid at 6:54 AM on August 8, 2007

You want Windows XP. Vista isn't mature enough, stable enough, or generally usable enough to warrant using it at this time, especially if you care about your gaming experience. Worry about it in a year or two because it's not worth the driver headaches and stability problems today.

Installing yourself will involve Boot Camp, which is not difficult to use if you follow the directions and pay attention to what you're doing.
posted by majick at 6:59 AM on August 8, 2007

I would also say XP, if for no other reason than more people have done the XP / Boot Camp thing and so there's a far deeper and wider pool of answers to questions and problems that you may have. Drivers are also more mature for XP, which is a plus.
posted by Dipsomaniac at 7:03 AM on August 8, 2007

I have Vista running on Parallels (Vista, not Parallels, which has been great). It's a giant pain in my ass and I'm going to install XP via Bootcamp ASAP.
posted by yerfatma at 7:04 AM on August 8, 2007

If you want a computer that will still be able to play pretty games in 2 years (which is as the above have mentioned when people will really start taking advantage of DX10) then an iMac is a pretty poor choice, especially for the money. I fully understand your frustration with Windows as an OS, and those new Macs certainly look pretty shiny, but they not a good value as a game platform at all. If you want to play current high-end-ish games you will do fine with XP and the better quality iMac, that being said there a surprising number of games that also come out on the Mac itself, Blizzard and iD do a decent job supporting it.
posted by BobbyDigital at 7:11 AM on August 8, 2007

Use XP. No one needs Vista right now. Any game publisher who has designed a game for DX10 will IMO most likely port it back down to DS9 due to the lousy Vista uptake rate - no point in releasing a game when only 5-10% (at best) of your target market has the computer to run it - and if they don't, someone will figure out a way to run DX10 games using DX9.
posted by Meagan at 7:19 AM on August 8, 2007

What BobbyDigital said - any game with graphics requiring DX10 will most likely not run well on even a high-end iMac because of its graphics card. Much less so with future games in two years time, when DX10 will be common and might be required.
posted by uncle harold at 7:35 AM on August 8, 2007

Get XP. Vista has nothing you need.
posted by bshort at 7:42 AM on August 8, 2007

A quick note- Parallels can be set to use your Boot Camp partition. While I wouldn't recommend it for any kind of GFX-heavy action games, it's just fine for anything else, and saves you the trouble of rebooting. So, it is possible to have the best of both worlds.
posted by mkultra at 8:06 AM on August 8, 2007

Use Vista. It's better than XP by far. You wouldn't use OS9 on the Mac would you? Ignore the Vista haters. They are no different that Windows users that mock the OS X, not based on reason, but emotion. Use the current, recommended OS from both Apple and Microsoft and you'll be fine, happy, and well supported.

As for gaming, it will be fine to game on your iMac with Vista.

Any impact of Vista on gaming is only seen in high-end systems tuned for max performance. The simple fact that you are buying an iMac says that you are not on the elite fringe of PC gamers that worry about framerates being 85 fps on Vista when they could be 95 fps on XP.
posted by Argyle at 8:17 AM on August 8, 2007

XP.

That is, if you really need either.
posted by Kadin2048 at 9:26 AM on August 8, 2007

I hear ya, I was hoping to buy a new iMac when they were refreshed in order to replace my current XP gaming box, but their graphics cards just aren't good enough for my FPS future. It'll be XP on a new box for the foreseeable future.
posted by rhizome at 9:28 AM on August 8, 2007

Most game publishers will release games in both XP and Vista forms. Some will not. Shadowrun will probably be only Vista for a long time. This has more to do with the financial kickbacks MS has to offer than any technical reason.

You probably can just get away with XP for now. You know you have mature drivers for it and games will continue to come out for it for quite some time. Also, I dont think the video cards in those imacs are directx10 compatible anyway.

I dont see any real problems with vista, but when it comes to scenarios like yours I'd suggest the conservative approach of sticking with XP.
posted by damn dirty ape at 10:14 AM on August 8, 2007

The video cards are DX10 compatible, I am not 100% certain on the models, but I think the lesser of the two new macs has a Radeon 7800 which is a fairly muscular card and supports DX10.

The OP might do well to consider building a dedicated gaming machine from components as they are releasing some pretty good stuff for cheap right now, and the stars are aligning in a way that will give you pretty good longevity for your buck. That or just get an Xbox 360 and a compatible mouse and keyboard.
posted by BobbyDigital at 11:28 AM on August 8, 2007

I've done an XP install in Boot Camp and the fine print said that Vista wouldn't work in Boot Camp. Mind you, that was in April, using a copy of Boot Camp of uncertain age (the person I did this for assembled the hardware and software).

I'm typing this on a laptop that came with Windows XP that I upgraded to Windows 2000. If Vista is the future of computing, I'm going to get better at bookbinding and calligraphy.
posted by gum at 1:26 AM on August 9, 2007