Slashdot Mirror
Gamers Don't Need Vista or DX 10 Says Carmack
Freshly Exhumed writes "In an interview with Marcus Yam at Daily Tech legendary PC/Console game creator John Carmack holds forth on DirectX 10: 'Personally, I wouldn't jump at something like DX10 right now. I would let things settle out a little bit and wait until there's a really strong need for it.' and then zings Microsoft's marketers over DX10's mandatory use of the Vista OS: 'Carmack then said that he's quite satisfied with Windows XP, going as far to say that Microsoft is artificially forcing gamers to move to Windows Vista for DX10.' There are a few good tidbits on Xbox 360 vs. PS3 development, and a fairly clear disinterest in Wii as a platform for his company's products is shown."
When "Windows 3.11 for workgroups" came, Microsoft wanted a network-oriented game to boost the networking popularity of its OS. Everybody at Microsoft was playing Castle Wolfenstein (from ID software) with their PC (under msdos). So they came with the idea of a special-networked-version of Wolfenstein under WFW. It could be a huge hit ! But the project never came to life.
Later, when WinG (the "DirectX zero" library) and Win32s (the 32 bits library) came, they had the same king of idea. Just take a popular msdos game, port it to WinG+Win32s, and show the power of the OS ! Doom (from ID) was the right choice. But the project never came.
Later, when Windows95 came, the same idea came again. Port Doom (from ID) under Win95+DirectX to show the power of the OS ! The first betas were lame (the graphics were computed as 320x200 and then upscaled to 640x480, so they weren't nicer !). The final version was fine, but slower than the msdos version (because more computed pixels mean slower framerate), so the "show the power of the OS !" part was a failure...
-- Rastignac was here.
Pretty funny. I won't get Vista for probably quite a while. Vista just isn't important to me for anything I do, and I haven't played the last 20 games to completion that I bought, so until I actually complete (or even start a couple) there's no reason for me to migrate to Vista.
As for the hardware, the DX10 cards (nVidia's 8800 GT'x' series) are awesome performers, but they're awesome even with XP, ie, do not require Vista. So the hardware gains seem to be available without DX10 although DX10 may expand on what's available.
Regarding Jobs and a mac, I bought a mac just as 10.3 was released (a PowerBook). I bought it partly because I wanted a nice small laptop that did a few things. It turned out to do most of my home needs so well that it took over all photo/video/mail duties from my Intel system. I just recently bought the Macbook Pro. Here's where it gets good. Despite years of MS indoctrination that caused me to "migrate" my PB account to a separate account the first time, I repeated the migration and my MBP account was exactly like my PB account, complete with all programs, settings, everything. To say it raised an eyebrow was an understatement. MS OSes can't even migrate accounts between two copies of the same version of the OS on the same platform, much less between two different platforms, with different OS versions and different application versions. Even my secure wireless settings were transferred.
That's why the Mac is gaining traction. It just works.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.