Slashdot Mirror
DirectX 10 Only On Vista
Next Generation is reporting that DirectX 10 will only be released for Windows Vista. Those of us puttering along with XP will have to make do with 9. From the article: "The exclusivity of DirectX 10 means that in order to enjoy the high-end features of next-generation GPUs, gamers will need to adopt Vista. Some end users are upset with Microsoft, as the move effectively forces gamers to buy Vista if they do intend to remain serious about cutting-edge PC gaming." It may even be worth it for titles like Crysis.
From a marketing standpoint, this is the only way Microsoft is going to get a lot of people to buy their new OS.
I can only speak for myself but from what I've heard, Vista will offer few enhancements over XP that I really need in an OS. Better searching? I don't particularly need it, but Google Desktop. IE7? Not a chance, Firefox has me hooked and has many more features. "Gadgets"? No thanks, but Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets) if you wanted them.
Additionally, I'm still concerned about Microsoft's (and other companies') plan to control our PCs, even though we haven't heard a lot about it recently. So by the time Vista comes out, I'm likely going to move over to a Linux distribution, probably either Ubuntu or Gentoo, and this is really the only thing I might still want out of Windows: gaming.
This move smacks of Microsoft-brand lock-in, and it still won't convince me to move.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
You'll all get your copies from work.
Does the article use DX10?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Nobody uses the default Windows OpenGL drivers for game-capable cards anyway, so the OpenGL-via-Direct3D won't matter.
what's wrong with using OpenGL?
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Why wouldn't a game vendor instead use OpenGL and ensure that the game works with XP also?
LetterRip
much more like an Apple zealot, which is why I'm as surprised as anyone about what I'm about to write.
But, really, I don't really see anything wrong with this, nor do I see it as all that different from what Apple has done with its various releases of OS X. For example, Tiger introduced all sorts of cool new developer functionality, like Core Data and Core Video (I believe Core Image was already present in some capacity in Panther, but I may be getting my APIs mixed up). These were/are great for developers, but the side effect of them being used means that the resulting apps are Tiger-only.
Isn't it essentially the same with Vista and DirectX? Certainly, it's a pragmatic, business decision - but it's hard for me to fault Microsoft for it.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Will this encourage game developers to continue using DirectX 9 for the time being, or possibly switch to OpenGL? Vista won't be common for the next few years, after all.
What! This is crazy talk! You mean I'm going to need the newest OS to play the newest games on the newest hardware. Has the world gone insane?
5 years ago this wouldn't have worked. But with Microsoft now buying up or publishing many of the more interesting game developers, and creating close and cushy relationships with most of the rest, all under the "XBox" umbrella, Microsoft has an amount of control over the PC game industry they've never had in the past. I really think Microsoft has a chance of getting PC game developers to adopt this even though most of their customers won't immediately be able to run it.
Once upon a time there was this dichonomy where we had the "Console" platforms, like the Super Nintendo or the Playstation, which were little walled-off cities where every detail of existence was controlled by the overlord who made the console platform; and on the other hand we had the "PC" platforms, where things were more free and anarchic and anyone could make a game. This dichonomy is dying. It won't be long before in the game world, "PC" will mean one single locked-down platform called Windows.
The thing is, DirectX 10 won't be used for a long time. What's the point in developing for a market that is very small and won't grow for several years? People are going to work on DX9 for a while yet, so this won't exactly have a huge impact. Telling us that we need to upgrade to Vista for DX10 isn't an issue for a long time yet.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
The advantage of monopoly. Good for Windows gamers that the 3d board vendors still ship MiniGL drivers. Now all windows needs is something like ALSA...
if they force me to buy Windows Vista to use Direct X 10, then I'll just wait until the come out with the Wii version, cause I'm not upgrading to Vista.
Personally, I think this is a bad decision by them, but I'm sure Microsoft made some kind of deal that worked for them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Since when is posting a rumor then posting later when it turns out to be true duplication? Log in and troll like you have a spine.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
Maybe more game creators will move to OpenGL.
A long shot, I know, but more likely with this move than without it.
I can only speak for myself but from what I've heard, Vista will offer few enhancements over XP that I really need in an OS. Better searching? [microsoft.com] I don't particularly need it, but Google Desktop. IE7? [microsoft.com] Not a chance, Firefox has me hooked and has many more features. "Gadgets"? [microsoft.com] No thanks, but Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets) if you wanted them.
Wait, you forgot about the need for RAM - you have to get 512MB to even "run" Vista, but the reality is when they say that, they mean "you need to buy at least 1GB of RAM or it will be as slow as a dog".
So, buy requiring you to buy more RAM, they make it easier for games to use that much RAM.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Cedega already supports DX9.x so when DX10 comes out, I'll just wait for Cedega to upgrade to that and I'll laugh at all the people that wasted money/bandwidth on getting Vista just to have "fancier" graphics and play "next-gen" games. Go *nix community go!
It must. I'm on Windows XP and I can't see it.
So we'll have to wait, what 10 years for DirectX 10, when Vista comes out?
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
(side note: this is old news - I heard of it at least a week or so ago)
What does this mean for the games market? It seems to me that few developers/publishers are going to want to limit themselves to only a portion of their current market by developing a DirectX 10-only game - at least not until Vista is on well over half of Windows machines, which is likely to take a couple of years. This is especially likely considering the current cutthroat state of the PC games market, where the bar to entry in the top-sellers list is extremely high (not to mention that it's dominated by innovation-fearing publishers who would rather spend their money marketing recycled games built on DirectX 9 than fund a whole new engine for a DirectX 10 game).
My prediction is that only a few DirectX 10-only games will be seen in the first year after Vista's release, and most of them will be mediocre Microsoft titles. The only other thing I can think of is if a game could be made that takes advantage of DirectX 10 when available but falls back on DirectX 9 otherwise; in this case, I'd expect to see a handful of FPS games touting optional usage of DirectX 10 features.
--
On the user end of things, most people aren't going to rush out and buy a new OS. Most people aren't going to know whether Vista will run on their system, much less what the advantages/disadvantages would be, so they will simply wait until their current system gets too old and will have Vista pre-installed on their next PC.
I'm guessing that a lot of people will be upgrading within the next year, though, as I've seen indications that a large number of people are, for example, still using early AMD64 CPUs and GeForce 5xxx and 6xxx video cards.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Microsoft has been saying DX10 would be Vista only for about a year now. I even blogged about it last September. If the gaming community is only just realizing it then they only have themselves to blame because they're a year behind the devlopment community.
There's actually very good technical reasons it can't be back-ported to XP and that's because it's changing the entire paradigm of the way the Windows OS works with the video card. The GPU and video RAM are being treated as OS resources that are time shared and paged in and out in exactly the same way the CPU and main system memory are currently. Simply put, this means at the very basic level that the driver interface (WVDDM) for the video cards is very different, and much thinner but as it is a new driver model, XP won't be able to load it.
So, game development companies are left with the decisions of whether to use DX10 which has a bunch of new features (general purpose geometry shaders that can create and destroy primitives in the pipeline), or maximize compatibility and shoot for DX9 which is being effectively frozen.
The bigger issue for most is that OpenGL becomes a "second class citizen" on Vista as any use of it outside full screen rendering effectively turns off the entire Aero interface. Users are going to notice this, and apps using OpenGL will get bad feedback for "breaking the interface when they run".
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
What is the world coming to, when you have to upgrade your operating system to get additional platform features?
http://outcampaign.org/
And I agree, there's nothing wrong with this. The fact that companies need to make money to continue development aside, it can get to be a real nightmare supporting legacy code for updates. In the case of DX, it is my understanding that there are some major changes and that they rely on Vista's new graphics driver architecture. Now that doesn't mean a backport would be impossible, but it sure means a whole lot more work.
I don't think developers should be under a particular obligation to backport new features to old OSes. If you want the new features, get the new OS, if you are satisfied with what you have, don't whine about it.
I don't fault either company for not backporting features and more than I'd fault a game developer. I don't ask iD to backport the enhanced graphics found in Quake 4 in to Quake 3. If I want the new graphics I can shell out for the new game.
A set of routines for graphics handling are seperate from how the drivers work. Geez, what next, opengl only working on linux if you build the kernel drivers modular?
No my dimwitted marketting receptacle the only reason for DirectX 10 to be tied to Vista is purely to force people to buy Vista. There is no other reason. Offcourse MS will have made sure that DirectX 10 is closely tied to Vista in the same way they made sure that IE was closely tied to 98 and then claimed that the two were inseperable. Because they made sure they were not because it was necesarry for techinal reasons.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
How will DirectX 10 compete with OpenGL for game developer mindshare? With news of version 10 does the DirectX featureset now dwarf OpenGL's (if it didn't already)? Are there any amazing revelations coming to OpenGL anytime soon?
Is anyone actually surprised by this??
MS pulled this stunt with DX5 and NT 4/2K.
Even though someone took the DX5 Win2K beta drives, and got them working on NT4, Microsoft refused to support DX5 on NT4 simply because they wanted to sell (gamers included) a new OS.
once moms and dads start finding that the 49.99 they just plunked down for johnny (or even lil jill) can't be played on their new 2006 Windows XP Dell without spending another couple hundred on Vista come late 2007.
No sig for you!!
This isn't a surprise - the exact same thing is happening right now, and has been, with XP.
I never "upgraded" past 2k - XP didn't have anything I needed or wanted.
When Age of Empires III came out, I bought it, as I did with all of the other Age of Empires games and expansions. No luck - the game "requires XP" to function. Not that it really does - there are undocumented switches to let it install on 2k, and it works fine (the demo was the same way). Ditto Rise of Legends, *another* game that MS bought that now "requires XP", even though it's not doing anything that's beyond what 2k offers.
MS has always had the strategy of selling OS upgrades by artifically requiring them - hell, they've done this since DOS version 5 and "setver". That they would make something Vista-only purely to drive Vista sales is par for the course.
Of course, in my case, it *didn't* drive sales of a new OS - at least not Microsoft's. I still run 2k to this day, alongside what I did upgrade to, my Powermac dual G5. Someday 2k will be useless to me (probably when I upgrade my mac to an intel based one and virtualize windows), and I'll reformat and run the old box as a freebsd one or such. I guess MS actually did me a favor in some sense...
95 take up was big because it really offered a huge difference between dos/windows 3.11 but still all the big companies stuck with supporting dos for a long time yet.
Vista offers far less and people have become wary of buying newly released microsoft software. How many of you waited when XP was launched to see if it was going to be another ME? Certainly no games were XP only for a very long time.
A game developer making a vista only game now is betting not only on MS actually shipping Vista on time, wich they can only do by redefining the term on time or with a timemachine, but also that it will be taken up by gamers.
The problem is that games nowadays have a very narrow window of hotness. Say a new game is launched, I need to have it but don't have the hardware. A month later I will have cooled off and just decide to get the game when it is on budget and I got the hardware. If I can't play it at launch I can just play it a year later fully patched and with complete walkthroughs.
Will Vista sell? Shall we be honest here? How many gamers have pirated copies? Live is expensive enough as it is and XP ain't cheap. Oh sure lots of people get it free with their machine from Dell but how many gamers buy from Dell? I steal my licenses from machines I free with linux (sorta illegal since they ain't mine but wtf. MS is getting free money for software never used because of their tax system).
If vista improves on the anti-piracy front then many gamers will be faced with the question of buying new hardware, new OS and that new game. With the PS3 and the Wii also shining seductivly in the stores.
Vista will take off on new computers but I think that like XP take off on already existing computers will be slow.
MS seems to agree and is setting artificial reasons for people to upgrade.
I don't think MS is going to be in trouble. XP takeup might not have been what they hoped but they still are earning billions so who cares. Game companies might be in for a shock though. If people don't buy the OS you set as a requirement you ain't getting the cash. MS can afford an ME. What game company can?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
It sounds like vista offers a bunch of API improvements, ala directx 10 and the presentation foundation. What's interesting is how few things *won't* be back-ported.
WPF is being back-ported to service pack 2 according the the wikipedia article. The powershell has already been released for xp. Directx 10 won't have games coming out for it for quite a while... what features exactly does that leave for vista?
XP offered a major upgrade in stability, to the point where it's almost on par with most other operating systems, an that was the selling point. What's Vista's selling point? Seriously, after all these years of development, does it have 1 single exclusive killer feature?
So far, the only thing I've seen are improved themes and hi res icons... I'd heard about built in virtualization in the past, but that hasn't been mentioned for quite a while. Was that dropped?
nor do I see it as all that different from what Apple has done with its various releases of OS X.
You're right: it isn't all that different. What is different is that Microsoft has somewhere around 80-90% market share, and Apple has a few percent. That's why Apple can get away with doing things that would land Microsoft in federal court.
In any case, making DX10 Vista-only is probably still OK, even for Microsoft. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, it will probably mean that I will put a lot of game purchases off until they are in the bargain bin, rather than rush out and buy Vista.
Yet another American icon: http://www.indygear.com/gear/fedora.shtml
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Oh, and MS left the ARB a while back.
I read that as Direct X10, not DirectX 10 and was wondering what the hell Vista was going to do to home automation that couldn't be done elsewhere.
This sig intentionally left justified.
... with all that WINE^H^H^Hhineing
See my art -> http://herbevore.deviantart.com
This was news in 2005, not nearly 1/2 way through 2006.
What you have to ask yourselve if this "need" was introduced or not. Would MS have been capable of doing DirectX 10 as a patch to XP? I think so. They didn't choose to do so but it had nothing to do with technical limitations. Smarter people then me have examined Vista and a lot of the improvements could easily be back ported. But then people wouldn't pay for an upgrade now would they?
Something smells fishy here.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"in order to enjoy the high-end features of next-generation GPUs, gamers will need to adopt Vista"
Should read, in order to enjoy the high-end features of next-generation GPUs, gamers will need to start using OpenGL.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
It's called a "hypervisor". It won't be shipped with Vista. The articles I've looked at say it will be shipped after Longhorn Server. So I'm not sure if it will even work with the consumer versions of Vista.
Some end users are upset with Microsoft, as the move effectively forces gamers to buy Vista if they do intend to remain serious about cutting-edge PC gaming.
Oh, really? As if that is a surprise. When's the last time MS did not use every dirty trick in the book in order to force itself into a market or its products unto "customers"?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Ah, I've seen this coming for ages. The PC games market is bouyed up by those who stay on the cutting edge only - your average Joe doesn't stand a chance of having a PC that you could run a modern game on... take a random family with a PC and a random game from the full-price shelves and see how much fun it is to get it working at a decent speed.
I'm getting away from MS as much as I can because of crap like this. My computer, my rules... you wanna force rules on me, you don't come onto my computer. I just can't be bothered to play about with MS-based computers any more just to get a poxy game to run.
I don't care whether or not it offers new features or is given away free in cereal or everyone else in the world uses it, I'm keeping MS stuff strictly away from my own machines. I didn't want DirectX but numerous upgrades were forced on me by the games I wanted to play, and many of the upgrades killed performance or broke the install.
Each time, I still ended up with a game that performed better under OpenGL (almost any Quake/Half-Life based game for instance) or could EASILY have been replicated without using any sort of acceleration library satisfactorily (Age of Empires II springs to mind - nothing in it that NEEDS DirectX and still a massive performance slog through any sort of WINE or similar program and for what? A 2D RTS that shouldn't need ANY fancy stuff to do it's job - hell, DOS versions of Command & Conquer on an old Pentium 133 did the same stuff in similar resolutions without coming NEAR the CPU time used for AOE just to draw a screen on a 1GHz)
I work with MS systems all day long, spending half my time working around stupid quirks and things that should have been in the OS since day one. I get paid to do it there so I tolerate it and almost nothing uses DirectX, even though I work in primary schools. I don't tolerate the amount of setup needed to get a game running at home any more. Those machines that I have reserved as Windows "consoles" are treated as if they are plastered with strict disclaimers:
- Games only. Do not use for serious work.
- And old games at that, unless you feel like upgrading everything to get there and spend hours chasing patches, upgrades, updates, firewalls, drivers and controller setups just to play a crap game that you'll uninstall within a week.
- And even if you do that, there's no guarantee that tomorrow the game won't work because of an update, a new requirement, or something else killing performance to the point where it's unplayable.
In computing terms I'm now firmly considering myself an old fogie and haven't bought a game in a shop for years (unless you count a 50p copy of Warcraft in a local bargain bin), certainly not one I enjoyed playing.
I recently sold off about 75% of my back-catalogue on eBay because I realised I would NEVER play them again - some still had the wrappers on, a surprising amount had been played once and then uninstalled (Black & White, for instance, which I bought based on hype, played through until my creature was taken away from me and then promptly uninstalled... my brother did the exact same when I lent it to him afterwards). I'm sticking with my favourites and re-living some of the classics. Emulators, DosBox and remakes all the way.
If I want anything else, anything newer, I will buy a console. An old one at that. Secondhand with so many games bundled in that I could play forever, all for the price of a single full-price new PC game. If I can't afford a modern console and one game, I won't be able to afford the money for a PC that could run a modern game well enough, or the time to get it working, certainly not when you take into account how much I'd use it for because it WOULD be JUST a console in a fancy wrapper.
I decided a few years ago to not chase the latest and greatest and to stick to what's fun. Counterstrike is the only thing I can't really do on any other OS (My Linux PC's are just too slow to run it even under WINE but, strangely enough, more
Surely you're not seriously comparing basic human rights and freedoms with this escalating trend of almost adversarial anti-consumer behavior that businesses are taking advantage of?
Maybe it's just me noticing it, but my asshole only stretches so far. But hey, you know, some folks enjoy anal sex. Who am I to argue?
BytesTemplar.com
I use my computer for mostley games but this really doesnt bother me because... 1. I will upgrade my computer sooner than later anyway and a new OS isnt going to be that much more 2. I also will wait out at least six months to let them work out alot of the bugs before I even consider buying a vista based computer 3. Upgrading is a way of life. I wish that they could do away with alot of the legacy apps and hardware so the PC could advance without being chained to 15 years of Floppy drives because someone feels the need to still use them. We finally got over DOS so we SHOULD be getting over the rest.
Everyone will get it from ThePirateB... hey!
:-(
Damn you, Microsoft! How am I supposed to get my free DRM shackles now!?!
Vista's new Display Driver Model. It allows for a hardware accellerated desktop environment, in addition to multiple hardware accellerated windows (ie two videos can both be playing hardware accellerated at once) and the ability for GFX cards to have virtual memory.
DX10 is built to take advantage of these new improvements. If they backported it, they'd have to do one of the following:
- Don't take advantage of the new DDM in Vista, and just do an incremental update.
- Backport the entire DDM to XP. This will result in less reasons to buy Vista anyways.
Option 1 was clearly unacceptable if MS wanted to make advancements in PC gaming software tech (stuff). Option 2 is clearly unacceptable from a business standpoint.
More and more it seems to me that Vista is all about gaming. It seems to me that Microsoft has essentially given up on creating a solid, secure platform for those of us who use their computers for work.
Which, I suppose, isn't all that bad a thing. The *nix OSes have such a long lead on all the important featuressystem uptimes, system security, solid code base, etcthat it probably really is best for Microsoft to focus on their XBox systems and cheezy Windows game-focused OS.
I'm pretty sure all the n00bs and game-players will be perfectly happy with Vista. It is very pretty, after all. I should think business people will be a bit more intelligent about their OS purchases next time around; pretty isn't nearly as important as, say, secure.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Whenever a computer user is "forced" to upgrade or install software they don't want to, that usually ends up with them installing a pirated copy.
Way to shoot yourselves in the foot Microsoft.
I'm quite aware of the proprietary extensions. OpenGL has a well-documented extension process, which ATI and NVI have used extensively. Many of those extensions were rolled into standard OpenGL (pbuffers being the most important one for me) as the standard developed.
NVI and ATI have had OpenGL 2.0 compliant drivers for some time now. Windows has never shipped with OpenGL compliance higher than 1.1, and mobile chipsets have only gotten useful in the last few years (my first efforts with mobile chipsets and OpenGL back in 2000-2001 showed mediocre implementations--especially with the stencil buffer).
Some of you people are upset and I don't understand why.
This has been known for a long time. The drivers are brand new for vista and these do not exist in XP.
XP is a six year old OS by the time Vista comes out. It's not like Microsoft forces anyone and forces an OS upgrade
every year.
o Direct 3D 10 has been designed from the ground up.
o D3D 10 has a brand new driver system that can now have multi-threaded GPU's.
o The shader compiler has been designed from the ground up.
o The 3D pipeline is all new and has been designed from the ground up (you now have geometry shaders and not just pixel shaders and vertex shaders).
o D3D 10 now does all memory management so you now have virtual memory (so your video card and system memory now become one pool of memory).
o There are no CAPS and there are no extentions so every DX 3D video card now supports every feature from the API.
o Shader Model 4.0 is more flexible and has unlimited instructions.
Basically everything is new and has been rewritten from the ground up to create a more reliable system and to get rid of legacy.
This isn't all the features just the ones I have from memory.
Do you honestly think that OpenGL could do this?
Windows Vista is a huge change from XP. A lot of people here in denial and we all know why. I don't think I have to say it.
Forcing people to upgrade? It sounds naughty.
Of course, perhaps games can be created that are backwards compatible with DX9 with merely a reduced featureset to refelect the capabilities of the libraries. The same software will turn around and take advantage of DX10 features.
I would find it nice, however, if game companies made a strategic move by developing games using cross platform libraries (such as SDL, but more advanced) so that they could develop and distribute games rapidly for multiple platforms (read: more linux games?).
Everyone loves great games. Not everyone has the latest computer or version of Windows. If I were a game developer, I might target linux platforms because I'd be comforted to know that my product relies on software that will enable it to enjoy a higher level of system compatibility across the board and better legacy support after it becomes old.
This is the second time this week, that i've seen the main article in a slashdot story being about some guy (or group of people) crying because features in a new version of software aren't being backported to old versions.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I see a lot of comments wondering if more games would use OpenGL instead now. What they don't seem to understand is that while DirectX contains 3d graphic calls, DirectX contains much more that just graphics. OpenGL is used only for rendering 3d-graphics, while DirectX can be used for almost everything a game needs (mouse/keyboard/joystick input, sound, graphics, networking, etc.)
Of course, the changes to DirectX that are not graphics related are probably going to be small, so some games may do like id does with their games, use OpenGL for graphics and DirectX for everything else.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
Like 100,000's of others I will stick with what I have right now... until WoW requires DX10, then I'll buy a Mac.
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
I've been using a Windows 2000 machine for gaming on the PC for years now and only recently (about 2 months ago) did i came across a game that required Windows XP to run properly.
;)
Thus, i would hardly be surprised if Windows Vista only games would take at least 3 or 4 years to appear (except games published by MS which i'm 100% sure will put out Vista-only games as soon as Vista is out - they did the same thing way back when Win98 came out)
Still, as an avid PC Gamer, i find myself seriously considering buying a Wii.
Let's hope Quake Wars can keep me entertained for a couple of years
I love how when Apple forces an upgrade on people it's called progress and considered a good thing that it doesn't have legacy support. When Microsoft does the same thing it's called anti-competitive and market manipulation.
.1 upgrade on a Mac, comparable to me getting Service Pack 2 in XP, for free, requires I go out and purchase a new copy of Mac OS. But Apple throws in enough eye candy that people somehow feel justified in spending the money for little substance. And the worst part is that these .1 upgrades cause compatibility problems. Sooner or later you're forced to upgrade.
And that's not to mention that a
Apple my control a small portion of the market in comparison to Windows, but it still has a big impact. I use Macs almost exclusively at work and PCs exclusively at home. I've been forced to upgrade my Macs far more often than my Windows PCs. And I'll add that as far as stability is concerned my PCs have been more stable than my Macs and I generally use both for the same kinds of work. I've always built my own PCs, I've never been one to buy from Dell or anyone else, I don't know if that gives me an advantage, but in theory I should be more at risk for stability problems.
It's no surprise that DirectX 10 will require Vista to run given all the new features being introduced. I don't like being forced to upgrade often, but this certainly isn't a new thing. Considering that Vista is the first new OS from Microsoft in quite few years these kinds of changes aren't surprising.
What I find more troubling, and what I'm surprised no one is complaining are the increasingly absurd system requirements for the latest games. As good as Oblivion looks, I find it ridiculous that even fairly new systems struggle to run that game at a consistent framerate. It's like developers want their games to have subpar performance on current systems so that they can be perceived as next-generation games and so that they show up on benchmarks everywhere. That's a good bit of consistent, free advertising. Regardless of how good the game is, if it becomes a defining game in testing the limits of your hardware it's going to be mentioned everywhere for at least a few months.
Then there's the whole issue of developers investing all this effort into graphics and neglecting every other aspect of game developement. Oblivion looks amazing. I'll give it that. However, it also completely and utterly lacks any soul. It's obvious they created a game world based on a series of photographs. The end result is a game that has no character, no sense of creativity because they were so obsessed with just mimicking real life.
Flip through Nvidia's promotional materials and a good 75% of upcoming PC games featured are damn FPS games. And it's the same old crap too. Most of the rest are RTS with maybe a small sampling of fantasy RPGs. And with the attention Oblivion has gotten every halfwit developer out there is going to try recreate the same lush forests in their games.
People here generally love to dump on Microsoft. However Vista is nothing more than the another step in the evolution of Windows. It looks promising, but its also entirely possible it will be a disappointment. The point is that people are criticizing the system unreasonably and really missing the root of the problem here given that we're talking specifically about gaming.
Really? Where do I sign up for that!
I've received a lot of free stuff from Microsoft for being a Windows game developer (joysticks, T-Shirts, mouse pads), but I've *never* had them pay me for releasing a product.
Spell cheek you've failed me four the last thyme!
I don't think my win xp install has ever crashed... it has problems, but crashes? No.
>XP is hardly a major upgrade in stability over the Win9x series. It is just as pathetic and broken and even more burdensome. However, it
>does a great job in hiding it.
Really? Have you ever used windows 98 or 95? I recall them crashing... a lot. I recall a lot of bugs.
>XP really only does a good job of hiding how horrible it actually is.
What does that even mean? If the machine never crashes, it is stable by definition. It isn't just "hiding" instability.
>4% crashes with WinNT, 8% crashes with Win2k, and 12% crashes with WinXP - that would make Vista be 16% crashes if they do.
4% of what? what are you taking a percentage of? You can't take a percentage of "crashes." That's totally incoherent.
Are you actually claiming that win95 was more stable than winxp? Fine... I'll tell you what. Go ahead and when you need to run windows run 95 instead of xp. Most win32 applications can still be made to run on it. Have fun.