copeknight

7th Legend-- Vista uses DirectX, but it should come with at least DirectX 9, I think. You can check for yourself. In your start menu, go to All Programs-->accessories-->command prompt. This will open up a DOS-like program. When it opens type dxdiag and hit enter. The screen that appears should give you lots of information about your computer including the version of DirectX. I would add that just because an integrated graphics card worked well on XP doesn't mean you should expect the same performance under Vista. As has already been mentioned, Vista is a bit slower than XP. You'll definitely want to turn off as many background tasks as possible. I do that even with a dedicated graphics card for any Maxis game. BTW, I've always had random crashes with SC4 under XP and Vista on several different computers. I've learned to save often.