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That DirectX 10.1 is incompatible with 10.0 (along with new WDDM interface) has been known for at least a year now. It's a bit late for people to be in shock about it.

Slashdot even covered it before.

Just because Microsoft officially announced it at a conference doesn't *exactly* make it new news, since they made it very clear on roadmaps and everything else exactly what was going to happen, and why it wasn't the best idea ever to adopt DirectX 10.0 hardware, rather than hardware capable of 10.1 (or 10.2) and whatever the new superset of OpenGL happened to be (3.0 as it turns out).

Also, the reason to bother with DirectX 10.1 isn't so much that it offers "brand new super features" to games, but the WDDM 2.1 bits, which would allow for far finer-grained context switching and task management. Being able to immediately switch from rendering one small bit, to starting to render something else, which would theorhetically make all of the compiz/Aero type stuff be able to run much more smoothly in conjunction with real 3D rendering (ie, games, CAD).

It all seems an exercise in futility to me, as far as the "DirectX 10" hardware goes. I like faster, I like more features, but there just seems no real reason to upgrade beyond my Geforce 6800 for the price point (which I got 18 months ago). Not to a 7800-series or comparable, and certainly not to an 8x00 or upcoming 9x00 Geforce, unless driver stability improves dramatically, and they can add more real-world-useful features, particularly without the need for Windows Vista. I'm back using WinXP "for a while" again, but I generally won't buy hardware anymore unless it's a notable and drastic improvement in Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.

I digress, but the point is, the news has already been covered before. If it apparently wasn't that attention-worthy a year ago, is it now? New DirectX versions *always* require brand new hardware, whereas most minor OpenGL revisions have almost always included new features that also work on old hardware (OpenGL 1.5's Vertex Buffer Objects humming along happily on a Geforce 256, for instance), and while full compliance is the best, all you really need to care about is if something implements certain clearly defined extensions, rather than wondering if Nvidia or ATI have 'misinterpreted' specifications over DirectX. Both have been panned in the past for 'creative' adoption of pixel shader standards and bizarre interpretations of DirectX 9.

I'd just hope that eventually, there's more actual competition again, and both companies (and new companies) actually respect and care about standards compliance and that both they and the standards bodies start to care about what customers actually doing with their hardware.

That DirectX 10.1 is incompatible with 10.0 (along with new WDDM interface) has been known for at least a year now. It's a bit late for people to be in shock about it.

Slashdot even covered it before.

Just because Microsoft officially announced it at a conference doesn't *exactly* make it new news, since they made it very clear on roadmaps and everything else exactly what was going to happen, and why it wasn't the best idea ever to adopt DirectX 10.0 hardware, rather than hardware capable of 10.1 (or 10.2) and whatever the new superset of OpenGL happened to be (3.0 as it turns out).

Also, the reason to bother with DirectX 10.1 isn't so much that it offers "brand new super features" to games, but the WDDM 2.1 bits, which would allow for far finer-grained context switching and task management. Being able to immediately switch from rendering one small bit, to starting to render something else, which would theorhetically make all of the compiz/Aero type stuff be able to run much more smoothly in conjunction with real 3D rendering (ie, games, CAD).

It all seems an exercise in futility to me, as far as the "DirectX 10" hardware goes. I like faster, I like more features, but there just seems no real reason to upgrade beyond my Geforce 6800 for the price point (which I got 18 months ago). Not to a 7800-series or comparable, and certainly not to an 8x00 or upcoming 9x00 Geforce, unless driver stability improves dramatically, and they can add more real-world-useful features, particularly without the need for Windows Vista. I'm back using WinXP "for a while" again, but I generally won't buy hardware anymore unless it's a notable and drastic improvement in Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.

I digress, but the point is, the news has already been covered before. If it apparently wasn't that attention-worthy a year ago, is it now? New DirectX versions *always* require brand new hardware, whereas most minor OpenGL revisions have almost always included new features that also work on old hardware (OpenGL 1.5's Vertex Buffer Objects humming along happily on a Geforce 256, for instance), and while full compliance is the best, all you really need to care about is if something implements certain clearly defined extensions, rather than wondering if Nvidia or ATI have 'misinterpreted' specifications over DirectX. Both have been panned in the past for 'creative' adoption of pixel shader standards and bizarre interpretations of DirectX 9.

I'd just hope that eventually, there's more actual competition again, and both companies (and new companies) actually respect and care about standards compliance and that both they and the standards bodies start to care about what customers actually doing with their hardware.

Kneejerk flamebait mods: Avert your eyes.

Let me start out by saying HotHardware itself is nothing better than a middle-of-the-pack hardware review site. If I remember correctly, they're a generic offshoot of one of the more major tech sites that tries (too hard) to appeal to enthusiasts but comes across as nothing more than stiff corporate whores desperately spewing cool lingo to draw hapless internet goers into viewing their adbortion (SPELLING INTENTIONAL) of a website. And I'm OK with that.

What I'm not OK with is their oh so blatant blogspam bullshit they send to slashdot. Wow guys, you reviewed a small form factor PC. If that's not front page worthy, I don't know what is! Even worse, the only link in their submission was to their own site.

In the spirit of sharing, I've decided to help out slashdotters who might be genuinely interested in the product beyond a "sweet flames, bro!" 10 pager (it's a fucking barebones system!) fluff review with some informative links. Let's start with a direct link to hothardware's printable version of the page.
http://www.hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?artic leid=986

That wasn't so hard, was it guys? Oh sure, it might cut into your ad revenue, but it would be disingenuous of me to accuse you guys of submitting this for the shallow purpose of bumping ad revenue, right? Right?!

In other news, I was looking for alternate reviews of this system. What did I find? HotHardware are apparently a bunch of linkwhoring board spamming bastards. Witness the evidence:
http://www.elitebastards.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t =19838
http://www.dvhardware.net/review/31338
http://forums.hardwarelogic.com/f68/shuttle-sdxi-b arebones-system-7831.html
http://www.mbreview.com/article.php?sid=11683
http://www.motherboards.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p =673332

Maybe the hardware review business is now just as inbred as most news blog sites. I don't know. What I do know is I spent way too much time writing this post. And this story is beyond worthless.

In the same vein, I've got a (constantly updated) list of over 25 Core 2 Duo reviews up on the front page of Elite Bastards.

"The Xbox's drive, for reference, is a 12x DVD so a 1x Blu-ray drive would take roughly three times as long to load data. Should Sony be able to launch with a 2x Blu-ray drive the comparison would be close enough to be moot. The problem, of course, is that 2x speed is expected to come at a cost premium, a premium that Sony might not be able to afford."

so from that, it appears that the DVD will be half again as quick os the blu-ray

thanks to this article

games based on Valve's game Engine look graphically more polished and have more realistic effects [...] is it a matter of DirectX vs. OpenGL?

No, it's more a matter of what they were aiming for. You can do pretty much the same with DX as you can with OGL. I admit that I have only played Doom3 for a bit, and that I do not know exactly what the engine is capable of. However it seems as though the main focus in Doom3 was highly detailed indoor hallways. This contrasts Half-Life 2 which features a largeish (albeit very restricted) city with mainly shabby concrete buildings.

Because of the distance to the light sources, shadows in Doom3 would be hard. In Half-Life 2 you'll want soft shadows. In Doom3 there's not THAT much to gain from HDR, while in Half-Life 2 you have a very bright sun which affects lighting a lot.

Because you only see about 5m ahead of you at any given time in Doom3, walls could be polygon rich, making for lots of details (lots of cables and ducts). In Half-Life 2, you could see several blocks down the street, and so walls in Half-Life 2 were relatively flat, using textures for detail.

Making a 3d engine always involves tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs will determine what you can and cannot do. As a recent example, look at Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. They opted for deferred rendering. This allows for complex shaders, but as "Chuck" from ATI put it: "[Anti-aliasing is] not 100% impossible, and I'm not giving up on the possibility, but there is no playable solution right now". So the result is nice looking surfaces and effects, but lose nice anti-aliased edges.

This has been discussed on Evil Avatar for awhile now. It seems that for Oblivion at least, that statement isn't entirely true

Gavin Carter: The game's code takes advantage of the multithreaded nature of the Xbox 360 and multithreaded PCs to improve just about every aspect of the game. The primary function is to improve framerates by off-loading some work from the main thread to the other processors. We do a variety of tasks on other threads depending on the situation - be it sound and music, renderer tasks, physics calculations, or anything else that could benefit. Loading also gets spread across hardware threads to aid in load times and provide a more seamless experience for the player.

That's not to say that writing software for multiple cores is easy. It's actually extremely hard to synchronize the various tasks that run on the different cores. I suspect that most early games will run slowly on a single core or somewhat inefficiently on multiple cores. It will be quite some time before developers can figure out how to use all of them efficiently enough.

The developer's dream is a single processor console that has a very fast CPU. Unfortunately that's hard to manufacture, so they're stuck with something less than ideal that can be made cheaply with today's technology.

It does appear to be able to encode to AC3/DolbyDigital in realtime, like the SoundStorm did, but its analog part doesn't seem to work too well according to this review. Soundstorm did set minimum standards for analog signal quality, and I can't imagine that they would have put up with intermodulation distortion and stereo crosstalk as bad as this.

PS 3.0 offers 32 bit precision and an "unlimited pipeline", vertex textures, etc.,. Here's a good article on the differences.

Let's put it this way, ATI pretty much just doubled the vertex and pixel pipelines and did not change much architecture wise beyond it's last version of cards the R350. NVIDIA's new card is much more innovative actually, but it's questionable whether its timing is right with the current lack of PS 3.0 capable games. Also, a bad omen for NVIDIA is the fact that ATI's PS 3.0 R500 architecture is nearing completion and they have already shown their PS 3.0 cards, if you will.

It's also, unfortunate that these R420 ATI cards still beat the NVIDIA 6800's in a lot of the current benchmarks, despite their superior tech.

I'm sticking with my second hand R350 ATI 9800Pro that O/C's to 9800XT speed now, personally and I'll skip this iteration of cards. The 9800 will do PS 2.0 plenty quick (at a slightly lower res.) for the latest games including Far Cry and Doom3 and HL2 when they come out.