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> To top it off providers like Exxon Mobile in particular structure their sales

That's one way to put it.
http://www.ucan.org/blog/gasoline_autos/gas_prices/gas_hogwash_it_all_about_supply_and_demand (how it works)

> If I were that guy I would make the gas prices as low as I possibly could, even if it butted up against Exxon's bottom line and forced me into $0.09 a gallon profit just to drag everyone else's prices down.

Do you remember the Los Angeles owner who's supplier cut him off for doing just that? (I can't find a link to the old story, but it was a featured report on NBC in Los Angeles a few years back) - I believe the current strategy is that a retailer is attacked legally, then disciplined by suppliers, then undercut. Big Oil always wins.

Any links you can find regarding oil companies running out the owners who attempt to subvert their price fixing, tend to disappear. This is real conspiracy theater stuff. Most link you will come up with are fringe/kook sites, but I think you would be able to dig up real evidence using some facts gathered from them (filtering the noise is the problem). Now here are some links, annotated as accurately as possible from a once-over. These few pieces took entirely too long to find as it is.

http://www.nuwireinvestor.com/articles/rural-gas-station-forced-to-close-due-to-rising-prices-57051.aspx (editorial?,no substantiation that I could see)
http://www.firingsquad.com/news/siteseeingarticle.asp?searchid=576&up=2&filterLevel=1&page=1 (no substantiation)
http://www.rickross.com/reference/rama_behera/rama_behera42.html (kook, no substantiation)

This isn't my bag, it's just something I accepted a long time ago. There are more important issues to focus on imo.

You have an AOpen AX4B-533?

http://www.firingsquad.com/media/gallery_index.asp/244

You could've spent 10 seconds to search for it in google. It would've been quicker than posting your comment.

This depends a lot by the graphic load - one has examples of linear performance increase with memory bandwidth, and in some cases the increase is hardly there. Some games benefit from more memory bandwidth, some don't (see http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/nvidiageforce/page10.asp, going from GeForce 256 to GeForce 256 DDR doubles bandwidth but do nothing for performance in Quake2 or Quake3)

The Voodoo 3 was bitching for its time. The GMA 950, however was not. Not to mention that the Voodoo 3 can play Doom 3 (well it's a Voodoo 2, but can a GMA950 play Doom 3?). And it doesn't require any "flashlight mod".

For a while, the purpose of a sound card was to "accelerate" Direct Sound3D-- and the better the sound card, the more voices could be mixed in real time, and the more precise the placement in 3D space. A good sound card could really take the pressure off the CPU. CPUs have improved since then, and Microsoft changed DirectX, so perhaps they're pointless now.

Uhh, yes it will...

This is a benchmark of ATI's Eyefinity solution, on a single 5870 running upto 6088x2276

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_radeon_5870_eyefinity_6_edition/page2.asp

It runs at around 40-30fps with current high end games.

3 GTX 480s which are each faster then a 5870 and have more VRAM will easily be able to push 60fps at such a resolution.

You should realize these cards are capable of pushing 1920x1200 with 8x Super Sampling Anti Aliasing @ 60fps... Which is effectively the same thing as running at a higher resolution.

So this will bring back the text and reduce the size of the icons.

You've either never read my comment or are incredibly stupid.

The complete lack of text on the task bar means I have to learn what each icon represents and then have to mouse over it or open the item to figure out what it actually is. In XP or Vista I can just look at the task bar and figure out which server's I've RDP's and SSH'd into, what page my browser is on, any IM's demanding my attention and who they are from. I'm going to lose a crap load of productivity from this alone and probably some hair as well. There are good reasons we favour text based language over a pictogram or hieroglyphic language, complex text is far easier to read.

There are your words exactly as you typed them. You mention the lack of text and when I point out your incompetence, you try to sneak in the icon size bit in your response. Nice try, but you lose.

You really didnt read my comment. I have no idea how you reached this conclusion. This is something the OS does not need my interaction for. Secondly those are two different idea's, one the OS is not following my commands (deciding for itself how I want my network set up) the second is an unnecessary interruption (annoyance).

Then I suggest that you learn to use English correctly. Paragraphs are used to combine like ideas and information. If they were supposed to be two completely separate ideas, then you should have written it differently.

In addition, it's "ideas" not "idea's" because it is not being used as a possessive in your statement.

Because that's a really unbiased sample there.

The vast majority of people do not care about altering the Windows start up sound. They are quiet happy with right clicking a picture and selecting "make this picture my background". You don't work with regular end users do you, most do not even care about the background hence the default rolling hills XP picture is so prevalent.

All samples are going to be biased and I can only speak from my experience if I am to remain honest. I do, however, like how you magically have this unbiased insight into the minds of "the vast majority of people" so that you are able to know exactly what they want and are able to speak for them all.

Like most AC's you lack a clue. Both of these statements are not true.

Translation: You have no real argument so you attack the credibility of the statement based solely upon the name it was posted under.

So tell me, is mjwx your true birth name? Or perhaps you had it legally changed to that? Wait, what's that? Your alias is makes you just as anonymous as I am? Well there is a revelation!

By the way, you might want to take a look at this and this. So where is that supreme lead on gaming performance that you said XP had?

Microsoft could just implement it properly, like Sudo under Ubuntu. There is no reason that any program ever should pop up in front of what I am doing, let alone dim the whole screen to completely kill my train of thought. UAC should wait in the background until dealt with, it can draw attention to itself in the task bar, in the same way an MSN chat window would.

Sorry but no. If I am doing something that warrants a UAC popup, then I am going to fully expect it and it is not annoying. If something else is doing something to trigger a UAC then it's a possible security breach and I WANT an annoying popup that will get my attention no matter what I am doing.

Crysis is not representative of most Windows games. Why didn't you post one of the other pages of this article?

World in Conflict has XP as the slowest operating system. Far Cry 2 shows mixed fortunes for XP compared to Vista, but Windows 7 beats it every time. XP is ahead at the low end for Fallout 3, but Vista wins the rest.

And so it goes on. XP has wins and losses. You cannot judge an operating system's performance by just one game.

And the your suggested article's conclusion says:

Right now, Windows 7 is kind of a mixed bag. While it was able to beat both Vista and XP in certain applications, it also got beat in others. 3DMark06 gave a clear advantage to XP on both of our test beds, while Vantage favored Vista by about 10%. However, real world performance brought our numbers to a much narrower margin, with Windows 7 performing admirably in both DX9 and DX10 modes.

Crysis is not representative of most Windows games. Why didn't you post one of the other pages of this article?

World in Conflict has XP as the slowest operating system. Far Cry 2 shows mixed fortunes for XP compared to Vista, but Windows 7 beats it every time. XP is ahead at the low end for Fallout 3, but Vista wins the rest.

And so it goes on. XP has wins and losses. You cannot judge an operating system's performance by just one game.

And the your suggested article's conclusion says:

Right now, Windows 7 is kind of a mixed bag. While it was able to beat both Vista and XP in certain applications, it also got beat in others. 3DMark06 gave a clear advantage to XP on both of our test beds, while Vantage favored Vista by about 10%. However, real world performance brought our numbers to a much narrower margin, with Windows 7 performing admirably in both DX9 and DX10 modes.

Crysis is not representative of most Windows games. Why didn't you post one of the other pages of this article?

World in Conflict has XP as the slowest operating system. Far Cry 2 shows mixed fortunes for XP compared to Vista, but Windows 7 beats it every time. XP is ahead at the low end for Fallout 3, but Vista wins the rest.

And so it goes on. XP has wins and losses. You cannot judge an operating system's performance by just one game.

And the your suggested article's conclusion says:

Right now, Windows 7 is kind of a mixed bag. While it was able to beat both Vista and XP in certain applications, it also got beat in others. 3DMark06 gave a clear advantage to XP on both of our test beds, while Vantage favored Vista by about 10%. However, real world performance brought our numbers to a much narrower margin, with Windows 7 performing admirably in both DX9 and DX10 modes.

Crysis is not representative of most Windows games. Why didn't you post one of the other pages of this article?

World in Conflict has XP as the slowest operating system. Far Cry 2 shows mixed fortunes for XP compared to Vista, but Windows 7 beats it every time. XP is ahead at the low end for Fallout 3, but Vista wins the rest.

And so it goes on. XP has wins and losses. You cannot judge an operating system's performance by just one game.

And the your suggested article's conclusion says:

Right now, Windows 7 is kind of a mixed bag. While it was able to beat both Vista and XP in certain applications, it also got beat in others. 3DMark06 gave a clear advantage to XP on both of our test beds, while Vantage favored Vista by about 10%. However, real world performance brought our numbers to a much narrower margin, with Windows 7 performing admirably in both DX9 and DX10 modes.

Exactly. a P4 will NOT struggle browsing. in fact my 3.5ghz single core (no HT enabled) P4 Kicks the crap out of all dualcore gaming rigs. Dualcore and Quadcore is useless for gaming.. raw Ghz is what is needed and my really old computer kicks the crap out of the new stuff in gaming.

No. Take a look at this review here. The EE 965 is 3.73 GHz dual-core, and the Core 2 Duo E6700 is 2.66 GHz. If you extrapolate the results to account for the 1.4 difference in clock speed, the Core 2 Duo E6700 is %65 to %75 faster than the P4, clock-for-clock.

And just in case you don't believe me, you can check the gaming performance, which is single-threaded. When not GPU-limited, the Core 2 is up to %110 faster than the P4 at the same clock speed.

For general use, you would need a 4.4 GHz Pentium 4 to match a Core 2 Duo at 2.66 GHz (not all that fast today).

For gaming, you would need a 5.6 GHz Pentium 4 to match a Core 2 Duo at 2.66 GHz.

For reference, you can get a 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo (even faster!) here for just over $100. Not a lot of dough for blistering performance, eh?

P.S. if you are disabling HT on your P4, you are doing yourself a disservice. The I/O latency on the P4 is high, and the branch mispredict penalty is huge. Every time this happens, the P4 HT can switch threads in a single clock tick, while it will otherwise waste dozens of clocks purging the pipeline / waiting on I/O. This is exceptionally good for multitasking, but is also good for newer games that actually use 2 or more threads. Sure, it took a hit in older single-threaded games, but newer games should show a perforance increase with HT enabled.

Exactly. a P4 will NOT struggle browsing. in fact my 3.5ghz single core (no HT enabled) P4 Kicks the crap out of all dualcore gaming rigs. Dualcore and Quadcore is useless for gaming.. raw Ghz is what is needed and my really old computer kicks the crap out of the new stuff in gaming.

No. Take a look at this review here. The EE 965 is 3.73 GHz dual-core, and the Core 2 Duo E6700 is 2.66 GHz. If you extrapolate the results to account for the 1.4 difference in clock speed, the Core 2 Duo E6700 is %65 to %75 faster than the P4, clock-for-clock.

And just in case you don't believe me, you can check the gaming performance, which is single-threaded. When not GPU-limited, the Core 2 is up to %110 faster than the P4 at the same clock speed.

For general use, you would need a 4.4 GHz Pentium 4 to match a Core 2 Duo at 2.66 GHz (not all that fast today).

For gaming, you would need a 5.6 GHz Pentium 4 to match a Core 2 Duo at 2.66 GHz.

For reference, you can get a 2.8 Ghz Core 2 Duo (even faster!) here for just over $100. Not a lot of dough for blistering performance, eh?

P.S. if you are disabling HT on your P4, you are doing yourself a disservice. The I/O latency on the P4 is high, and the branch mispredict penalty is huge. Every time this happens, the P4 HT can switch threads in a single clock tick, while it will otherwise waste dozens of clocks purging the pipeline / waiting on I/O. This is exceptionally good for multitasking, but is also good for newer games that actually use 2 or more threads. Sure, it took a hit in older single-threaded games, but newer games should show a perforance increase with HT enabled.

The Voodoo 2 can also run Doom 3!! That's a long shelf life for a graphics card.

In the past 10 years, the most notable patent lawsuits were:

SCO vs. Linux - After hundreds of millions of dollars were blown away in lawyers legal fees, the judge rules that Linux didn't infringe on SCO's intellectual property. Best site for news here is Groklaw

3Dfx vs. Nvidia - 3dfx lost and merged into Nvidia

Rambus vs. Hynix vs Micron Technology vs. Infineon Technologies vs. Siemens AG. vs. Samsung

Rambus seemed to be suing just about everyone, and everyone else was countersuing Rambus and each other. Legal letters seem to be flying around like chairs in a Saturday night bar fight.

Hynix to pay Rambus $379 million in patent dispute

A complete list of legal updates provided by Rambus

Micron vs. Rambus

Although it does seem better to settle all patent disputes with cross-licensing as soon as possible, rather than slogging it out into bankruptcy

Rambus and Infineon settle patent dispute

You don't remember the full-page magazine ads for Daikatana which said, "John Romero wants to make you his bitch. Suck it down!"?

http://www.firingsquad.com/games/daikatana/

God damn Nvidia and their stupid naming schemes. I thought it was a 9600GSO.

Which 9600GSO were you thinking of - the original one that was a renamed 8800 GS and had 96 stream processors, or the newer one with just 48 stream processors? (Yes, Nvidia really did that. Sneaky, huh?)

Yes, you're right. What he probably meant was the overclocking of Coppermine cores, which only required a bus increase from 100 to 133 MHz. A 600 or 650 MHz core was almost a guaranteed overclock to 133 Mhz bus, and hence they werre always sold-out.

Other great Intel overclockers of the time:

Deschutes core (.25 micron) Pentium II at 300 MHz. Since the first "official" Deschutes core release was at 333 MHz, it was a surprise when 300 Mhz versions of the core started appearing. Apparently, a lot of the new Deschutes 300 Mhz cores were marked-down 450 Mhz cores, and evev had the same 225 MHz L2 cache chips!

Celermine 533 or 566 overclocked to 800 or 850 Mhz. Sure, it wasn't as fast as a Pentium III at the same clock speed, but with the chip costing just $100, how could you say no?

OK, FFS can we stop linking to the BULLSHIT 16 paragraph=16 page articles that are meant to maximize web traffic? PLEASE?

Jesus, please: just copy the damn printable link and get it all on one page.

Slashdot is a fairly heavy-traffic site. You have the throw weight discourage this HORRIBLE style of web page design.

If the print-summary page isn't available then link the CONCLUSIONS page...readers who are smart enough to parse what WinMark scores are can *probably* figure out how to get back to the detail pages.

Here's the damn link: http://www.firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?current_section=Hardware&fs_article_id=2404

http://www.firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?current_section=Hardware&fs_article_id=2404

One page, no adds.

That's a good point, but in order to really force me to upgrade they should add a new version of DirectX that will arbitrarily only run on $NEW_VERSION and introduces some $NEW_VERSION only effects."

You know what confused me about the Sega Saturn history is that I remember the Diamond brought out the EDGE cards which I swear came before the ATI Rage cards, but i would have to look that up for truth... Anyways I remember that Diamond advertised the Edge with Virtual Fighter from Sega. The Diamond Edge was the first Nvidia chip. Thats where i got mixed up... But it turns out SEGA did have a partnership with Nvidia during that period and Nv1 chips ended up in Sega's arcade boards.

Thats where my confusion is... I found an interesting article on the whole situation at :

http://www.firingsquad.com/features/nv2/

After the Matrox Millenia (which was a great card) but a terrible 3D card at the time.... I pretty much gave up on Matrox for 3D and jumped on the voodoo bandwagon. Then i ended up with dev kit of the TNT2 and I've pretty much relied on Nvidia since, although i've owned some of the ATI cards and still own a fairly new one in one of my pcs. Nvidia does OpenGL much better, and I need OpenGL.

Anyways... that arcticle was an interesting refresher.

Yes: NVIDIA drivers responsible for nearly 30% of Vista crashes in 2007.

And most of these happened during what phase of the drivers? And how many were hardware specific errors? Additionally, how many of these were from NVidia XPDM drivers being run on Vista, which a lot of gamers 'thought' was a better idea out of pure ignorance?

Also your link proves my point. Out of over 100 million installations, there were 1.5 million crashes in Vista. So a 99% non-fail rate is bad? Hardware itself has a higher fail rate. Hell even Apple hardware has a higher fail rate.

Performance can be measured. I've seen such measurements, none of them show Vista appreciably outperforming XP. If it's so much better, demonstrate it, don't just call me an idiot, cite something.

(Keep in mind that even when Vista was peforming behind XP it was like 2-4fps in games running 60fps.)

OK, so you missed most of the Vista reviews, here are some links I have in my history. I'll let you actually google and read more for yourself:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2302499,00.asp

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/2070

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero_glass_performance/page3.asp

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/1/2/6453

http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/pretty-vista.ars/3

Yes, Vista has some very impressive aspects, it's very advanced in some areas, but I'll buy it when it actually provides a reasonable amount of benefit to me, thanks, not before.

Use it for a couple of days and you would be surprised how painful going back to XP can be from a 'usability' standpoint especially, let alone watching everything from games to photoshop launch 10x or more faster on Vista than they do on XP.

I do have the feeling though that no matter what I throw out here, you are going to just hate Vista, and that is fine, just don't state your beliefs are based on fact...

Why don't you ask Carmack? Back in 2000 he talked about how, although voxels are interesting, hardware support for polys is just too good to ignore. In fact, the hardware support is so good that even voxel engines usually go through the rather expensive process of converting their voxels into polys in real-time because they'll make up that speed penalty by leveraging the poly drawing power of todays graphics cards.

Although everybody focuses on how easy it is to get correct shadows, reflections, and refractions with a ray tracer, another interesting fact is that ray tracers don't really care how much geometry is in your scene. That means that once you get to a certain level of detail, ray tracers can become more efficient than rasterizers!

There's one big flaw, though. Ray tracers need a fast way to intersect each ray with the world geometry. This is a problem, because creating some way to index all your geometry is really expensive, especially if you have to do it in real-time. We need some clever data structures and algorithms to solve this problem.

So, how is Carmack solving it? Well, you'll be happy to hear that he's bringing back voxels!

Let me, for a moment, talk about the famous Aeron chair, made by Herman Miller. They cost about $900. This is about $800 more than a cheap office chair from OfficeDepot or Staples.

They are much more comfortable than cheap chairs. If you get the right size and adjust it properly, most people can sit in them all day long without feeling uncomfortable. The back and seat are made out of a kind of mesh that lets air flow so you don't get sweaty. The ergonomics, especially of the newer models with lumbar support, are excellent.

They last longer than cheap chairs. We've been in business for six years and every Aeron is literally in mint condition: I challenge anyone to see the difference between the chairs we bought in 2000 and the chairs we bought three months ago. They easily last for ten years. The cheap chairs literally start falling apart after a matter of months. You'll need at least four $100 chairs to last as long as an Aeron.

So the bottom line is that an Aeron only really costs $500 more over ten years, or $50 a year. One dollar per week per programmer.

A nice roll of toilet paper runs about a buck. Your programmers are probably using about one roll a week, each.

So upgrading them to an Aeron chair literally costs the same amount as you're spending on their toilet paper, and I assure you that if you tried to bring up toilet paper in the budget committee you would be sternly told not to mess around, there were important things to discuss.

The Aeron chair has, sadly, been tarnished with a reputation of being extravagant, especially for startups. It somehow came to stand for the symbol of all the VC money that was wasted in the dotcom boom, which is a shame, because it's not very expensive when you consider how long it lasts; indeed when you think of the eight hours a day you spend sitting in it, even the top of the line model, with the lumbar support and the friggin' tailfins is so dang cheap you practically make money by buying them.

Notice his comment: The Aeron chair has, sadly, been tarnished with a reputation of being extravagant, especially for startups. The Aeron isn't extravagant -- it's wonderful, and people who sit in chairs for most of their lives ought to have a good one. I don't get the people who spend $30K on a car and $100 on a chair and $200 on a bed, when allocating a very small amount of capital from the first to the second two could lead to a dramatically improved quality of life, given how much time one spends wrapped in each. I use similar reasoning when I justify an amazing $70 Customizer over a typical $20 mushy keyboard.

Joel's not the only one with Aeron love, by the way. Check this review from game nerds:

With that said, there is no doubt in our mind that when you sit in an Aeron, you will honestly feel like you are sitting in a thousand-dollar chair. It exudes quality and comfort. While it may not be to everyone's taste, there's no denying that it's of the absolute highest quality-and given its price, that's something you would expect.

Here's one that not only comes in lefty models, but you can choose from different sizes, too:

http://www.contourdesign.com/pmo/

I bought it because "normal" mice caused me pain, and because I must have a three button mouse (I'm guessing that I'm not the only one here).

I have the righty version, and it is pretty comfortable, much better than anything else currently on the market that resembles a standard mouse.

The most comfortable mouse of all time, bar none:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/wingmanmouse/

It was just amazing. I'd kill to get one in new condition - I never had any pain with it. Shame that Logitech killed it.

"Game framerates are ~10-20% slower"

This is plain wrong. It applied with early drivers but has been resolved for quite a while now.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/page9.asp

Tell you what, Microsoft: You come up with an OS that outperforms XP Pro SP2, has some useful new features, is efficient, compatible, maybe even costs less, and then blow me, and I'll give your new OS a try. How's that sound?

Networking (Pre SP1)
http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/2070

Raw CPU Use
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/xp-vs-vista-uk,review-2067-5.html

Gaming Performance (Especially after the Beta Driver Releases in Jan - Check out reviews from June to now - Drivers are faster than XP 99.9% of the time)
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/page9.asp

Even Early Drivers (Beta Even) put Vista at only a few FPS behind XP, and this is pure RTM code, no optimizations:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page11.html

DirectX10 REALLY does need Vista
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/14/7060
The GPU scheduler and GPU RAM Virtualization are just two major aspects of what DirectX10 expects to be present, and if you run the DX10 libraries on XP, you will never get these features.

Vista is faster than Mac on own Hardware
(Didn't have link in my folder, but do a search, especially with Leopard and Boot Camp. From casual user reviews of Vista loading faster and being snappier than Leopard and Tiger to reviews that take native compiled applications or games for both Intel based codesets, Vista easily out performs OS X in raw application performance and ESPECIALLY gaming like Quake or WoW or other native apps that run under both OSes.)

Beware of Idiot Reviews
-Most Online and 'tech' reviews are conducted by iditors or people that don't have a clue what they are doing.

The main things you will find is that they use a first day installation of Vista, where Superfetch has had no time nor performed any optimizations on the system to increase applications load times, Vista itself has ran no optimization for prefetch, file placement as there is no data to base it on for the applications or games yet, and especially the intelligent SuperFetch optimiations make a massive difference in gaming where you have a tons of textures and levels being queued into the game.

Another signs of a bad test - They turn of Aero, which on modern Video cards is faster than turned off. They also go out of their way to turn of Search Indexing and other performance assisting tools like Superfetch. (In fact with Aero on and WDDM's scheduling handling the GPU in Vista, even a single game will usually run faster 'inside' a Window instead of Full Screen - something that is the opposite of XP or other OS models.

You can find a ton of reviews that fall into these categories.
Here is a recent one for Example:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=797

The majority of the problem with Vista is just like this article mentions 'perceived reality', and also the 'missed advantages' Vista does offer to everyday users as well as gamers.

Gamer example: run several high end games in a Window at the same time, notice you barely lose FPS in any of the Games even though they are running on the screen at the same time, or even in Flip3D (or a 3rd Party Expose' Mimic utility). Not only would this choke XP, since Vista DOES the GPU scheduling and is not application yield based like you find in OpenGL based OS designs, this is something that is nearly impossible to do on anything outside of Vista. And yes there are people that do this, just find almost any MMO player than has more than one account or playes more than one MMO, and they are usually running

It's not just NVidia that supported horizontal span, ATI did as well.


This I realize; however, I remember that ATI was working on enabling this for Vista, but not sure of the status of that project.

NVidia has said several things 'couldn't' be done in Vista, and then ATI provides the feature and NVidia runs back to the drawing board with a me too version in their driver. This has been a large part of the driver fight NVidia and Microsoft have had, as NVidia keep not wanting to implement features, claiming technical reasons, when it is either them being stubborn or their hardware not performing well with the features enabled properly.

ATI having worked with the XBox 360 team have a bit more experience when it comes to unified shaders and how Vista handles video, since it is a lot like the 360. Sadly ATI's hardware hasn't been up to the level they wanted yet, and also since they have adhered to the DX10 and 10.1 specifications, their cards take a bit more of a performance hit than NVidia cards do since they are skipping some of the features and not using the mandated FSAA modes for DX10 - also another reason MS added this specifically for certification for DX10.1.

I'm not sure I can credit that it'll be faster running windowed than full screen. Everything I've ever dealt with runs slower windowed... and when I'm looking at running a racing sim at 3200x1200 performance is important. Do you have a source on this?


http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero_glass_performance/page3.asp

I also have our internal tech lab results, and basically on older systems with 1gb or less than 2gb of RAM and 2003-2004 Video cards the FPS gain is about 3-7FPS, on newer systems with 2005/newer video the advantage can be more dramatic with a 4-28FPS gain.

This is running a mix of games from DOOM and Oblivion to MMOs like WoW and CoX, with only a couple of artificial benchmarks that can be forced to run Windowed. Also the systems range from a 2003 Laptop with NVidia 5600 Go to the latest Intel Quad Core with the top NVidia 8800.

I won't claim that 100% of the time running inside a Window is going to be faster for everyone or every system or every game. However, it is most of the time suprisingly, and I don't think even Microsoft anticipated this since Aero is turned off when running a game in full screen mode. Something they will need to readdress in Windows7.

Indeed. And there's a whole set of tools used by the enthusiast community that require such

This is true, but RivaTuner could rewrite their driver to snake through user mode to do the same thing. It truly isn't designed well for Vista, as its tools and optimzations are still XP sighted. (For example the 2D/3D overclocking settings that are moot on Vista)

There are also usually alternatives available to every utility, I can think of several Overclocking applicstions, including NVidia's own nTune that works fine with Vista 64.

Most of the utilities 'needlessly' use lower level drivers, and by them being re-written for user mode, Vista 64bit becomes more stable by forcing the developers to do the right thing.

Even during the Vista beta most utilties repackaged the drivers to work flawlessly on Vista 64bit. I ran into this with several CD/DVD Virtualization and Ripping tools and by the end of beta, DVD43 is the only one I can think of that doesn't work on Vista 64, and there are several alternatives to it.

So MS is simply lying about the host OS requirements for Virtual PC to avoid supporting the home versions?

Nope. MS never has said anything about the Home versions.

Here is where people get confused. Virtual PC 2005 Server requires and uses pieces of IIS. Since Home versions don't have IIS, it can't run Virtual PC 2005. (Virtual PC 2005 is technically the server version anyway.)

So instead there is Vitural PC 2007, that was designed

There are several VERY notable games that look far better under DirectX 10. Crysis, Bioshock, Lost Planet

According to wikipedia, that's been deprecated and replaced by Live since 2004. I personally don't know of any software that uses it.

...here; this might be preferable to 14 separate pages.

They adopt the FSF malarkey that all code should be given away free. I put food on my family's table by developing software and the notion that it should be given away free just misses the mark. Market-based economics can bring out the best in innovation

You assertations about what the FSF says, just miss the mark. First, it's a long-standing point that selling free software is perfectly ok.

Second, most software that is developed is bespoke, so if all COTS makers went out of business there'd be plenty of work for talented coders.

Third, copyrights are a form of government interference in the market. Free software is very much pro-free market, it's proprietary software that is against it.

Business is good for all of us. Economic success and security is good for America.

But freedom is even better. And we can quite well have freedom and economic success; but not when large business interests push through laws like the DMCA, or when we allow them the conduct blitzkrieg BSA raids to shut down competitors.

Performance increases are flatlining? Since when? That would imply innovation is decreasing, and that would be incorrect. Do you even know what you're talking about? I seem to recall an individual from IBM that has a method to completely re-engineer storage as we know it and increase it 100 fold. Not Linear. Nvidia (and previously ATI) in their high competition moments have doubled the speeds of their graphics cards every 6-12 months. Video game systems increase exceedingly more than double their processing capacity per 2-4 year generations. The PS3 can handle 55.3 billion operations , where the Ps2 could only handle 6.5 billion operations.

People do indeed pay for processing power, thats what money is. Things are getting better, and faster, and cheaper, as they always have in the first place. You still have to spend on average 400-700$ for a decent up to date PC, and 700-1000 for a medium gaming rig, and 1500 for a real gaming rig, and 3 grand for an insane gaming rig. That hasn't changed one bit in probably 8 years now. Paying less than those amounts is similar to comparing buying a new but inexpensive car (like a civic) versus buying a 10-20 year old thing to just "get around town"(like an 87 or 97 buick/cadillac).

Windows will be gone in 10 to 15 years hopefully, things will continue get better at that point.

spilled coffee on the keyboard! Will that hurt much?
http://www.firingsquad.com/media/article_image.asp/2253/20

Considering the fact that new engines like Unreal Engine 3 were also made for non-DX platforms (ie PS3 and Linux) and developped when DX9 was around, DX10 is quite useless for now; the difference between DX9 and DX10 in Bioshock is for instance ridiculous http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/bioshock_direc tx10_performance/page4.asp. This may not change for quite a while if everyone is staying on XP.

While I don't have any ironclad evidence, I was able to find a designer quote talking about the beta being thoroughly tested on 64-bit systems and a thread on PlanetAMD64 discussing the demo with no major 64-bit issues.

So I'm guessing it does.

Battlefield 2 worked fine when I played it, if that helps at all.

They did. It was called TrueX, and was manufactured by Kenwood and Hi-Val.

The drive rotated at equivilant 6-10x speed (CLV), and delivered 40x-72x speeds constantly, thanks to seven independent read heads.

A buddy of mine bought the first-generation drive, and I was amazed how quickly it installed Windows. It was also very quiet...but beyond that, it wasn't that amazing.

Reasons why it failed:

* TOO EXPENSIVE. It couldn't compete with cheap CD drives.
* POOR BIOS support, drives would often not be detected during POST.
* POOR COMPATIBILITY, the drives had trouble reading certain discs.
* CRAPPY ACCESS TIMES, what do you expect when the disc spins so slow?

The consumers responded by bringing a class-action lawsuit over the problems. Kenwood lost the lawsuit, and the technology was quietly buried.

Reviews such as here and here show that Vista gaming performance is actually better than XP's in Direct3D applications, at least with AMD's more mature drivers. OpenGL performance, on the other hand, is horrible, along with Nvidia's drivers altogether. But Vista gaming isn't as bad as the article makes it out to be.

There will be plenty of similar reviews, but I recommend the article at Firingsquad.com,
http://firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_vista_aero _glass_performance/
which shows that Vista, with the most CPU/GPU?Mem intensive Aero GUI enabled, is not negatively impacted as far as gaming performance is concerned.
Everyone just assumes that Vista is going to be a bloatware, but according to the numbers, it is going to be a great OS for gaming as far as the performance goes.
If you add nice GUI, taking advantage of the powerful GPU, that you, as a gamer, already have, security enhancement etc, it looks like a pretty decent OS for gamers.

I tend to agree, though the difference is that the original Quake spawned a huge online, multiplayer, and modding community by virtue of being timely, expandable, and versatile as hell as well as eventually giving to the greater community through the release of the source code. Also 3 years before Unreal. The article is referring to that aspect of the game. CTF, and RA are the big ones, but even a veeeery early Counterstrike relative was created on Quake, called Gooseman's Guns/Navy Seals. Refer to this interview here

Quake definitely ignited the online FPS phenomenon, even though UT certainly refined it quite significantly, quake is responsible for countless mods, still played in some form to this day, the half-life franchise was built on the engine (as well as countless other games on Id engines) and who can forget The Adventures of Dank and Scud?

I'm uncertain about this, but I believe Quake was also the first game able to take advantage of consumer video cards for hardware acceleration.

Print Version - all on one page, less clutter

link to printable article (one page)

http://www.firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?curre nt_section=Features&fs_article_id=2092

damn multi-pages...

Also, they left out Fallout 3 (which IS in development, I mailed them). So looking forward to F3.

yah, +1 funny, -1 depressing.

Here is the PC games Firing squad is looking forward to for 2007. Most of the release dates are still very vague (only 2 were narowed down to months, and one of those was Burning Crusade). We see alot of "Sometime 2007" and "First half of 2007", a few have the quarter listed, and Valve is in at "summer" (God let them hit that date, I want those 3 games!).

So, we will see. Mabey this will be the year we will all remember as "The year of compleated release dates"...

or not.

No, the guy's right to bitch about their cookie use. That site gives visitors the following raw deal: Have a permanent cookie and you won't get interstitial ads after the first one (I'm assuming they set a perm cookie: I only allow session, so didn't see how long they tried to set cookies for), or turn cookies off and the site becomes a pain to navigate, because you'll get a full page ad for 15 seconds at every click.
There are other choices, but lets be honest: The other choices are available only to a minority, the majority of IE surfing users won't even want to hear an explanation of cookies because "it sounds a bit too technical".

I had a rant on their forum too with a bugmenot.com account.
http://forums.firingsquad.com/firingsquad/board/me ssage?board.id=feedback&message.id=1877

link to single page print-ready version, so you don't have to click through page after page of minimal text and maximal ads.

http://www.firingsquad.com/print_article.asp?curre nt_section=Features&fs_article_id=2069

Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it.

Monkeyboi

Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it.

Monkeyboi

Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it. Don't read this, I mean really. Its a load of crap. Really, it isn't good. Its just writing for the sake of writing. Honestly. I mean it.

Monkeyboi