> I like being able to run 20 year old games natively if I feel like it. (e.g. Diablo 1, released in 1996, can still run without virtualization on Windows 10. Sometimes.)

As I pointed out below, this isn't even 20 year old games. Name a release in the last year - if it's not a first-party Microsoft title, chances are it's Win32.

You mentioned Diablo 1, well with polaris Diablo III would need virtualization.

Fortnight? PUBG? Overwatch? All are Win32 games.

Excited for monster hunter in Q3? That'll be virtualized in polaris.

This is going nowhere.

Easy, Age of Empires remaster is UWP only, others owned by Microsoft Game Studios will certainly follow.

All Windows APIs relevant for game developers are available to UWP apps.

Hmmm. The only way I could get behind this is if there is a remaster of Close Combat 2: A Bridge Too Far. I think Slytherine owns the franchise now, but it was definitely a Microsoft game at the beginning.

> if it's not a first-party Microsoft title, chances are it's Win32.

64 bit games, and even 64bit _only_ games are increasingly common.

Turns out for many modern AAA games 3GB of RAM isn't enough.

64-bit games still use the win32 api.

It's a bit confusing that win32 is 64-bit savvy since, at least, its DEC Alpha release.

Can you explain what you understand will be going wrong when you imply that games needing virtualization will somehow "go nowhere"? Is there something about OS-managed virtualization (rather than application-managed virtualization) that you know that the rest of us don't? Why would a virtualized API even be noticable for modern games, which offload almost all the work to the GPU already anyway?

Only technical people have a clue what virtualization even means. Generally speaking, gamers haven't even heard of the word. Thus whatever virtualization soulution is used must be pretty much automatic. However if Windows already automatically handles this, then why mention that there's no Win32 support? Either people can keep launching their games on Steam or they can't. If they can't, then this new Windows won't win any fans among gamers. Even if there's automatic virtualization in place, as soon as you're losing fps, gamers won't be happy.

Security. I believe Centennial apps don't have the ability to actually modify the system - they just think they can via the container interface.

Worth noting: the Xbox One has used virtualization since day one for video games. Done right, gamers shouldn't even have to know that this is what's happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One_system_software#Syste...

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee, not working on Windows 10 (aka I have no idea how accurate this is).

Yeah, that sounds like it might preclude any modding (as is the case with current UWP games) which will be a hard pass from me and many other PC gamers (I don't even mod much, usually just fan patches).

The Xbox One has come up a couple times here, and I don't think the people bringing it up understand that the Xbox is the exact opposite of what PC gamers want their PC to be. It's closed down, controlled, and limited compared to a full PC. It may be more secure, but often the beneficiary of that security is not the user but the console manufacturer, game publishers, and game developers.

@jakebasile clearly a legitimate problem to be solved. The Xbox reference is merely to show that virtualized solutions can be very high performance. I've never had my Xbox drop frames or anything that would indicate it's not running with the full power of the machine.

Seamless virtualization is done on xbone, which is an Intel AMD64 chip emulating a PPC to play 360 games

Many games are still CPU bound. May applications are still CPU bound. Notice all the threads lately about how applications have so much more latency now than 20-30 years ago? Virtualization does have impact, and games still max out the hardware available to them.

If this is 100% seamless virtualization that doesn't make anything noticeably slower, it might be acceptable for business users. I doubt it's going to have zero impact though...

I highly doubt it's going to fly for power-users and gamers.

In this case gaming could be a lot better if they spawned a minimal VM for just the game and hibernated the rest of the OS.

It would solve a lot of the windows gaming bullshit like Cortana popping an alert or filesystem indexing kicking off in the middle of Battlefield 1.

I'm not sure Microsoft's patchwork of fueding PMs will actually allow for something like that to happen but I can always dream.

PS: Apple already has technology to migrate GPU frame buffers across processes so that you can render video in one sandbox and display it in another. I used to work on it. Microsoft could be doing something similar.

> if they spawned a minimal VM for just the game

They don’t even need a full-blown VM, windows 10 has pico processes. That’s how windows subsystem for Linux works: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/05/23/pico-process...

It's basically how the Xbox One already works.

WDDM is doing the same each application gets its own virtual memory address space.

> Yep, as a gamer there is no chance I would willingly upgrade to this.

It's not an upgrade for existing general-purpose (or any other) editions of Win 10, it's a new OS edition available only with new hardware; it's basically a successor to Win 10 S and Win 8 RT. And, while no doubt Microsoft thinks they've made the tweaks that will make it more attractive to some market this time (from other stories, they expect it to have enterprise and education market traction, which it's at least remotely plausible that virtualization for Windows API apps would provide a good enough solution for), it may suffer the same fate.

That's how it would start. But I don't believe for a moment that MS wouldn't jump at the opportunity to pull the plug on Win32 and decades of backwards compatibility if they could do so. In this case, Enterprise customers are the thing keeping Microsoft in-line for gamers and power users since they would have no tolerance for such a move.

> virtualization for Windows API apps

From a technical point of view I can understand their desire to ditch Win32 all too well. And in fact I have wondered years ago why they did not use virtualization to achieve backwards compatibility by letting legacy apps run in their own special VMs with all the right drivers, libraries, etc.

However, if that does not work very reliably and seamlessly large corporate and government customers are going to skip that one.

I can’t imagine that running games which are very old would be much more painful in a virtualized environment given the computational requirements are minimal compared to today’s modern applications.

In fact, it could even be a better experience. For example you wouldn’t need to patch it up to the latest version, just run the image with the latest code. Finished? Delete the image. No registry bloat.

So I feel you but it’s hapenning and you should probably get used to it because you’ll need the security patches unless you have an air gapped gaming machine.

> you wouldn’t need to patch it up to the latest version, just run the image with the latest code

.. what? You have to get this image from somewhere, and given the size of modern games that's going to be an awfully large image.

> it’s hapenning and you should probably get used to it

Words that start customer rebellions everywhere.

But a move like in TFA wouldn't be just old games. It would be literally every game I own except Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4 (the only UWP games I own). New games still max out hardware - that's what I buy the hardware for.

I own over 600 games on Steam and many others on Origin/UPlay/GOG. I would rather use an unsupported, unpatched OS to access those games than simply lose access to them because MS wants to "modernize" something that doesn't need changing.

>I wish Microsoft was content with just keeping Windows working. I'd buy a special "we will only issue security and compatibility updates" version if I could.

Windows Enterprise LTSB is something like that. Without UWP/Store and security updates for 10 years.

Too bad they wont sell it.

It's funny how for many people who make this argument, they'll happily drop $500 for a top of the line gfx card to keep up with gaming, but <$200 for VMWare Workstation is somehow too much money to keep up "being able to play everything older than a few years" on the PC.

(That might not be you, but wanting an OS from 2018 to play games from 1998 or before natively sure makes it sound like it)

I went the other way: if I want to play my old games, I fire up a fullscreened VM, because I don't care what OS I'm hiding when I'm enjoying a nice bit of classic gaming, running in what it thinks is the OS it should be running in. Whatever atrocity the next windows is going to be, as long as VM makers release an update for their software, as far as gaming goes: I have no reason to care.

Yes, but would VMWare Workstation run under Windows 10 Polaris?

Once it's out? Pretty sure VMWare's entire business is about making sure their products work on "current operating systems"? Why would you think that VMWare won't update in lock-step?

In a virtualization container perhaps?

The article mentions remote virtualisation, run your win32 apps in Azure I would guess.