June 26th, 2009
Windows is not my main home OS for some time. I’m satisfied with Ubuntu. I have only two reasons to log into Windows: Visual Studio.NET and computer games. VS.NET is the most important tool on my daily job. I’m always writing something at home too. Another reason to log into Windows are video games. Yes, there are games for Linux. Yes, you can play some games with WINE. But Windows is the OS for games on PC.
What surprises me is that Microsoft doesn’t bother much to emphasize this. There are some shy attempts to connect the gaming hobby with Windows platform like “Games for Windows” and XNA but that’s not what I have in mind. I think the future of gaming on PC is tied to Windows and both Microsoft and PC gaming as a whole should profit from this.
There are many marketing versions of Windows Vista and Windows 7. They are all more or less the same but crippled in one way and expanded in others. None of the versions is targeted at gamers. And that’s bad because first, gamers are pretty large group of Windows users, and second, gamers require OS to behave differently while playing games.
So, what are the features of this supposed “Gaming Edition”?
Multitasking is of course, very nice, but it brings some problems. Games don’t cooperate nicely with other applications. It’s not that they are bad by their nature, they are just not some normal computer program:
- Games operate at different display resolutions
- Games have their own loop, concurrent with windows message pump
- Games are the most CPU, memory and GPU hungry applications
So, how could Microsoft change the behavior of Windows to make it better to games:
- Remove or disable any unnecessary Windows services. That includes:
- Automatic Updates – steals network bandwidth
- Indexing services – steals CPU time and hard disk IO
- Network services
- … and any other service that could do it’s work at some other time
- Suspend or silence any notification like:
- Information about antivirus updates
- Offers to upgrade applications
- What else?
- I would like to play older games that do not support the native monitor resolution without blurring pixels. It could be done if game that supports 1280×960 resolution took only part of my 1280*1024 screen, leaving the rest in black, like wide screen movies on TV screen.
- Multimonitor support. Maybe game producers are to blame rather then Microsoft but there must be reason why multi monitor support is so rare.
It’s not much but Gaming Edition sounds nice. It would benefit both Microsoft and gamers.