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Gamers React to Vista Launch
As cranky as IT folks are about having to roll out new Vista installs, support them, update them, etc, gamers are matching them in irritation. Ars Technica recommends you dual-boot XP and Vista if you want to keep gaming on your PC. Voodoo Extreme explores Vista's crappy audio setup, while Computer and VideoGames reports that some small developers think Vista will ruin PC gaming (a comment we've heard before). C&VG does have a slightly more hopeful article up too, talking about the future of Vista gaming and what the new OS could mean for games ... once all the kinks are worked out.
/me yawns wide enough to drive a truck through.
/me goes back to sleep.
What's that? Vista? Oh well, SWG and WoW still run on Linux.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Maybe now that Microsoft has a console, we are supposed to stop gaming on PCs?
Existing/in development Windows games are most easily ported to the Xbox, provided they use DirectX (which most do), so Microsoft doesn't really have much to lose if developers start to write fewer games for Windows.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
One of the articles says that hardware acceleration is no longer available in Vista, but doesn't say why (aside from the fact that MS didn't include it in their sound layer rewrite). Is this mainly a DRM thing?
Might be a bit ironic if these sound cards target MS operating systems only to have Linux (and Mac?) being the only ones that support the hardware acceleration.
And my reaction is that Vista is going to have to offer a whole lot more than DirectX10 to get me to switch. There's far far too many items on the minus side, and only one on the plus (for my purposes, at any rate). At this point, I've decided that unless the landscape has drastically changed by the time games start requiring DX10, I'll just be living without those games.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
It breaks WildTangent stuff? Cool. There's a good reason to upgrade to Vista now.
There might be some other positive aspects. For one, I noticed last night a demo wouldn't install on my PC running Vista x64, because it's crappy copy-protection (and what morons put copy protection in a freakin demo?) couldn't install it's drivers because they were unsigned. Maybe at the least, if we're going to have to live with obnoxious copy protection in games, the developers of the crap will have to be a little more responsible and careful before just crudding up someone's PC.
I already use Vista and I still game. I have absolutely no issues, albeit everything's still a little bit slower at the moment (nVidia never had mature G80 drivers for XP, why would I expect mature Vista drivers ;)). For me, Vista isn't just about my gaming experience, I want my entire PC experience to improve and I think Vista does that well. I could easily throw my old hard drive back in (with the XP partition still available) and go back, but I don't want to. Vista may have its oddities (UAC stopping programs from saving their settings, etc), but overall I'm satisfied.
Do I think people should upgrade? Maybe, if they really want to. If someone's building a new gaming rig, I'd say to just upgrade now and get it over with. Unfortunately, I planned my new rig a couple months ago when Vista was coming out. Then it was delayed and I ended up having to purchase a copy of Windows XP to put on it. So I now wasted $120 on Windows XP that I don't even use anymore. Why would anyone want to do that (keep your piracy comments to yourself)?
Because I can't see shelling out a fresh $2000 just for a brand new laptop with fancy windowing that any MacOS can handle with existing graphics cards or that wouldn't be a good reason to just not bother and switch to a Linux or BSD laptop instead.
Besides, if a game won't run on my Wii or my son's Mac Mini (intel), it's not worth getting.
And that includes Spore, which I've been wanting for more than a year now.
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Just thought I drop a link to this article that actually looks at current gaming performance on Vista for both NVIDIA and ATI:
3 54&pid=2
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?type=expert&aid=
Voodoo extreme has nothing to do with this article. They are only pointing to it.
The real article is at IGN:
http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.html
Please, skip the redirections and ad views...
And I must say that this decision (no hardwrae acceleration) will badly hurt Creative Labs. Maybe, just maybe, this screw up will restart some competition in the sound card market?
Assuming you have the HD space, why would you install a new OS that you have never tested before, and not keep your old, working one? Especially with all the rumours revolving around Vista, its just common sense.
Bankers react to Vista Launch
Claims Adjusters react to Vista Launch
Baristas react to Vista Launch
Southpaws react to Vista Launch
Episcopalians react to Vista Launch
Underwater Basket-Weavers react to Vista Launch
Pizzeria Owners react to Vista Launch
Pre-Op Groin Shavers react to Vista Launch
etc.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Let's everybody migrate to Linuzzzzzzzzzz now. It sure has better gaming support
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
The most unpleasant surprise so far has been this snippet from NVidia's Forceware 100.54 driver release:
* DirectX 9 and OpenGL NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs and DirectX 10 NVIDIA SLI support for GeForce 8800 GPUs will be available in a future driver
No SLI support at launch. I'm a little ticked that I've spent the last month settling in to using Vista at home (legally, via an MSDN subscription), and now that the operating system has launched, my second 7900GT will continue to be nothing more than a case-warmer, until some point in the unspecified "future". I could go back to XP, but it's a pain in the ass to reinstall everything and get re-settled again.
The audio rewrite allows for example per application sound level control so it's not "just because", although I guess the removal of HAL isn't such a good idea. Anyway, Creative has the ALchemy project which translates the old DirectSound instructions into OpenAL, and thus allows some old games to use EAX. IMO, EAX in old games isn't such a huge deal, and all the new ones will work fine.
The main problem with Vista and gaming are the horrible video drivers, or at least NVIDIA drivers. Not only they are slow, but they also don't allow overclocking (very useful for a 6600 which can run above 6600GT speeds), but even some basic settings seem to make no difference.
The completely spin-doctored reaction by Microsoft didn't help much. Be sure to read the comments on that one..they're basically getting slaughtered on their own weblog.
Just a highlight I'll quote here: Says it all for me, really.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
As in the spyware company WildTangent that gets packaged with a number of apps including AIM? Wish a CREDIBLE developer would have said that, and not them, being from the bottom of the barrel.
That's what partitions are for. Partition Magic is particularly helpful here in resizing and copying partitions, and best of all it's not really a Symantec product, although they own it now.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
...in one single post. my head is spinning.
First, I find it extremely disturbing that Taligent wants to automatically install their stuff without consent from users.
Second, Making DirectAudio flow through CPU is not such a bad move. Hardware based audio made a lot of sense in the old days when the genereal processors had low performance compared to dedicated audio processors. Modern processors are more than capable for providing great audio at a tiny fraction of available CPU cycles. Games now advertise hardware audio for marketting reasons. Nothing stops you from generating EAX type effects using current APIs available in the system.
Moreover Creative has been bypassing the OS audio layers completely using OpenAL for quite sometime and they have been actively prompting it.
Once Creative creates the proper drivers for Vista people will get back their EAX support.
I seem to remember a similar thing being said about the latest version of Windows around about 1995.
It's not going to happen. Windows and the gaming industry rely on each other far too heavily for either to allow this to happen. Much of what continues to prop up Windows's dominance of the home market is the one home computing activity for which Windows is still undeniably the better choice - gaming. Meanwhile, I seriously doubt that the gaming industry wants to return to the days of market segmentation when they couldn't write games for only one platform while maintaining access to 95% of the market.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/chrisl/archive/2007/01/25/ 519180.aspx
Wow, I'm way behind. Everything I enjoy plays just fine on Windows 2k. My next step is Ubuntu & virtual machines, I'll never *ever* switch over to Vista...
There is a war going on for your mind.
...and the idiot who wrote that article doesn't even appear to understand how DirectX works. The Windows Vista team could rewrite the audio stack all they want and it would have f*** all to do with DirectSound using HW or not. If the audio stack allows for DirectSound then HW acceleration is up to DirectX and the audio card's device driver, NOT the Windows Vista developers.
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I like Vista so far. I bought it last night at midnight on a new HP machine, and so far, it's really nice. Of course, I got a 22" LCD monitor to go with it, which makes reading Slashdot almost magical. :-)
I installed Doom 3 and Quake IV on the system (the newest games I have since I bought an Xbox 360 a few months ago) and they ran just fine. I got about 60 fps on both games at high (not maximum) detail settings and no noticable lag or excess hard drive activity. I had no sound problems or video problems. Granted, being a brand new Vista system the driver issues others were seeing are probably moot.
So far, I'm impressed. Vista is light-years beyond XP and is right up there with Mac OSX. I have a Mac laptop and I'll say they are a little similar, but not a rip-off. The main similarities to me are the login screen and the gadget sidebar, which looks an awful lot like the Dashboard mated with the Dock. For gaming, Vista is top-notch. I've also heard (not verified) that a game for Vista will be able to play someone on the Xbox360 on my home network in the same game. If that's true, that would give me good reason to buy lots of new games for both platforms and have people over.
Vista is just a conspiracy between Microsoft and the hardware companies to get everyone to spend at least $500 on hardware for an OS no one really needs.
Could someone PLEASE explain to me why it is that Aero NEEDS a 128MB video card when it doesn't do anything beyond what Stardock.com's Object Desktop has been doing for the past 8 years!?
You forget that Games and Gamers are what keep the Windows Monopoly going for the larger part. So, no, 'Baristas react to Vista Launch' is not a headline, whereas 'Gamers react to Vista' is.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Umm.. Maybe you should read those release notes again. The driver with SLI support will be released TOMORROW.
And btw, Nvidia's driver for 8800 cards on Vista works perfectly. I use Vista as a gaming platform, and I'm not seeing ANY of the problems portrayed in the article. Maybe Realtek actually has good drivers.
Henning Same Shit (TM)
Here's one reason: Microsoft dropped support for the gameport.
:)
Before I say why this means a lot, let me say that I've been playing a lot of Battlefield 2 lately, a game in which using a joystick makes it much easier (and more natural) to flying all the fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft in the game. I've dug up my MS Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick to play the game and let me say it's every bit as good as it was when i first got it.
IMHO, the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback joysticks are some of the best joysticks ever made. Their force feedback system used cables rather than springs and rubber bands so they are extra sturdy and hard to break. Anyone who's owned one of these joysticks knows what I'm talking about.
Obviously, the normal reply is "Get a new joystick!" Maybe it's just me, but I can't deal with the fact that all current joysticks look so ridiculous (*cough* Saitek), with all their colored plastic bits etc. Hell, owning a joystick is nerdy enough, but why does it have to scream "Don't come near me!!!" ?
Here's an interesting thing. So the gameport *is recognized* by Vista, and when it tries to find drivers for it, it locates "Creative Game port" (I have a Sound Blaster card) and starts installing it when it fails by saying that the INF file is incorrect.
Anyway, that's why I'm still dual-booting into XP
Well, I know it's intuitive, my 15 yo son just paid $1.99 for a two-week trial version for his Mac. But, you'd get more exercise, and avoid Cartman's fate if you actually could use Wii gestures to attack.
But still, there really are very few games that we need to have WinVista for anymore. Most exist on the Wii, 360, PS3 (hah), MacOS, BSD, and some on Linux.
So, when faced with the question - do I spend $2000 just to buy a new WinVista Premium laptop - or spend $2000 on 40 new games for my Wii and my Mac Mini, the answer is pretty darned simple, and it means there's no real need to "upgrade" to WinVista when it means tossing a perfectly good machine away.
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How is that a rebuttal? GP is referring to costs associated with DRM -- the blog you pointed to doesn't mention cost anywhere.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
Actually, Red Steel is one of the worst games on the Wii. Most are 4 or 5 star out of 5 games, like Rayman's Raving Rabbids, Zelda, Trauma Center, etc. Don't judge a console by it's worst title. Just as we shouldn't judge the PS3 by the only good non-cross-platform game for it, Resistance: Fall of Man (the only good one so far).
Now, I admit the 360 is coming out with a bunch of games, but for some reason most of the good games are Japan-region-encoded. Which means not gonna happen.
However, this proves the point that WinVista is not needed for modern gamers - we have many decent platforms to play them on, ranging from Wii to PS3 to 360 to Mac to Linux/BSD.
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? It needs 256M. And because 128M is too little.
Actually you are totally incorrect. Yes SOME things Aero can do, ObjectDesktop can do, but its not even close to the same.
Thats almost like the people that compare OpenGL to DirectX...
I'm not sure why you're surprised. Early adoption in Windows OS releases is always a recipe for headaches.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hello Tim Dean,
FTA - However, all this talk about hardware and software acceleration raises another big question: is hardware acceleration such a good thing after all?
No it doesn't. It brings many questions to mind, but certainly not that one. Maybe you should go back to wondering if you left your iron on and leave the thinking to Microsoft. Oh, never mind. As you were.
Really other than that it was a decent read.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
Well, I know it's intuitive, my 15 yo son just paid $1.99 for a two-week trial version for his Mac. But, you'd get more exercise, and avoid Cartman's fate if you actually could use Wii gestures to attack.
Given the amount of time that many people spend playing WoW, you'd be able to tell which ones were the Wii players by their ONE MASSIVE ARM.
Blame Nvidia. We all knew that an across the board 10% drop in performance was coming. New OS=slower by 10%, that's just the way it is. But if anyone is to blame it is Nvidia. Nvidia's crap driver's are causing slowdowns in the effect of 15-50% and thus ruining gaming on Vista. ATI users are in mcuh better shape but they could use some help also.
Unless your an IT professional and need to learn Vista to keep your skills current plan on staying on XP for a long time. Your simply not missing anything.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Hmm. But if you have both a Wiimote and a Nunchuk, then you probably would only have one massive arm if you hotkeyed all your weapons and spells to the one arm.
Regardless, if we have WoW on the Wii, and can play most WinVista games on the Mac, the Wii, the 360, and the PS3, then we have little need to bother with shelling out $2000 for a brand new PC or laptop when we can buy something for half that much or less which works just as well.
Economics is a cruel mistress - she charges by the hour.
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Agreed. I was almost shocked when I saw how much StarDock had done to improve on Windows' aging UI. They've done a lot that people ask for in Windows all the time, but their marketing is so poor, few people realize and even fewer will pay the $10 or $20 registration fee for it. But now people are going to move to Vista for between $100 and $500 for the software alone? Unbelievable.
I liked Windows 95 and XP a lot. I'm not your usual anti-Microsoft Slashdot troll. But Vista is just bad news from every angle so far it seems.
I used Red Steel as an example because it has sword fighting in it, and aside from Zelda it's AFAIK the only game with sword fighting. Zelda's sword fighting isn't much better it might register more reliably but basically you just wiggle the remote instead of pushing a button, which IMO doesn't really add much "fun" to the game. At least in Red Steel the on screen actions map more realistically to your movements (albeit poorly). If you'd rather use a "good" title go putt or box in Wii sports... neither are much better.
Collector's Edition
I've learned to always wait 3 years - a minimum of 2 years - before buying a new Microsoft OS. Hotfix and patch and Service Pack and Driver Architecture releases later, it's finally worth considering - or dead as a doornail as was the case with Windows ME.
I'm a dedicated Windows user and Vista just like any other OS needs at least 2 years of sitting on the market before anyone should buy it, or they're just getting hosed with buggy, unoptimized software. The gaming benchmarks this round are no different than when XP came out - Windows 98 hosed XP in gaming benchmarks left and right. Two years later, I moved to XP and performance was comparable. And, I didn't have to download Service Pack 1 - it came on the disc.
Maybe in 2 years everything will be optimized, the new Aero features will scale up and down depending on real application needs, and most importantly, the aggressive DRM will be relaxed. Or maybe in 2 years even dedicated Windows users like myself will have moved to other OS's. Whatever happens, give it those 2 years or you'll be spending hundreds of dollars to play guinea pig to a technological mess. Don't waste your time.
Aside from Zelda? Quite frankly, the sword fighting in Zelda rocks.
Again, though, my point is that we who game are no longer forced to upgrade Windows to WinVista just to play games. Most games are now available on one of: Mac, Linux, BSD, Wii, 360, and PS3. The days when we were forced to keep up with Windows upgrades is over. Especially when, as is true with WinVista, we literally have no choice but to shell out $2000 or more for a new PC or laptop just to play. Instead, we can easily do just as well with one of the other choices - and we probably have one or two of them.
I've got a Wii (runs my old GC games), a Mac Mini (with a nice giant monitor from Sony), and some older xBox and PS2 consoles, so I've just decided to heck with Windows Vista. If I end up needing to buy an xBox360 or PS3 to play them, it will be later when the consoles are cheaper and I have to buy a new HDTV for $300 or less anyway in 2009. Even if I hold out until 2008, the price for an HDTV should be below $500 and a PS3 is likely to have a street value of under $400 (selling in Japan today for that). So why bother tossing my perfectly good WinXP machine?
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No need to spend 2 grand. A decent gaming PC costs $600-1000. Not top-of-the-line, but CERTAINLY good enough to play WoW, CS:Source, etc with a decent resolution, and decent settings.
Core 2 Duo 6300 - $180
Mobo - $130
2GB RAM - $160
7600GT - $120
320GB HD - $90
DVD burner - $30
Case - $40
PSU - $40
$790 for the parts listed above, if you buy from Newegg. And you could DEFINITELY cut back in some areas, like getting 1GB of RAM, or getting a different video card, like a 7600GS.
Here's the other factor: if you're going to spend money for a gaming platform, why buy a one-trick pony? Yes, the Wii, Xbox360, etc all have web browsers and such, but a computer (whether it's running Windows, Linux, Mac OS, whatever) is so much more versatile. I can build a gaming machine today for $800, and 2-3 years from now I can buy a new gaming machine, and use the current one as a server.
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But will the $790 PC you mentioned run WinVista Premium? According to all the insider reviews I've read we're looking at 4GB RAM min, and a much higher end video card. Those who've run it with 2GB RAM say it crawls like a swapping bear even when you kill all the graphics effects in the display.
Closest I've seen is $2000 so far. I don't homebrew - haven't since my old Apple II+ and S100 bus days.
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Bull. Shit. It runs just fine on my Core 2 Duo T2400 with 2GB RAM and Intel GMA 950, that's Windows Vista Ultimate with all Aero mods turned on. It flies, and it ran great when this laptop had 1 GB. Anybody who says you need 4 GB minimum is on crack.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Ok, I'll inform the media at the Wall Street Journal, the NY Times, the Seattle Times (hint, where MSFT is), and the LA Times that they're wrong about it really needing at least 4GB of RAM to run well while playing games.
I doubt they'll listen, since they're just reporting reality.
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PLEASE explain to me why it is that Aero NEEDS a 128MB video card when it doesn't do anything beyond what Stardock.com's Object Desktop has been doing
/sarcasm
Hey, all those security holes and networking routines for Aero (look, if print spooler needs to talk to the net, so does Aero!) take up a LOT of memory - especially when they have to be coded to Microsoft specs to ensure buffer overruns that can get your machine taken over for you... Also remember that some managers at MS feel their employees are more productive if they write more lines of code - or at least the bloat would make it seem that way...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
If I understand this properly, Microsoft stopped supporting existing DirectSound drivers, because these drivers ran in kernel space and were pretty buggy. Advanced sound card features accessible through the DirectSound API no longer work.
Why didn't HW developers already have Vista drivers ready to go? Did Microsoft forget to tell them that it was invalidating the old drivers? That doesn't seem likely.
Obviously, Microsoft must have some way of allowing sound-card drivers to talk to sound card hardware. Why didn't they just add a layer of indirection under DirectSound to have it use this mechanism, so that only minimal changes or a safe shim are needed for vendors' existing DS drivers?
Any DirectSound developers care to comment?
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
Assuming you don't have other stuff still open.
Which, frequently, is in fact the case.
The people mentioning this are talking to the average consumer, not the hard-core gamer who actually shuts down all the other stuff.
You'd be surprised what most people actually do. It's kind of interesting.
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But what about the gamers who don't want to give up a keyboard / mouse? You can only run so much on Mac or Linux. I personally hope the amount of games that run on Mac/Linux increases exponentially.
(Vista is nice, but not $400 nice. So it's going by-by as soon as I grab a copy of Office 07, which is $150-for-every-PC-I-have nice.)
Er, no. They're not. They're full of it, and so are you. I'm not even using the RTM- this is RC1, and it still can whip through every modern game in my arsenal with absolutely no trouble at all.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
So, let me get this straight, you're running Vista Ultimate, have a few docs open on the desktop, the virus scan kicked in, and you're playing a game maximized in the foreground that was designed for Win Vista?
Sorry, I don't believe you.
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there's a keyboard on the Mac.
there's a keyboard on the Wii - heck, last night I was setting up my WinXP laptop to be the Nintendo WiFi server and I used it to type in web pages in Opera on the Wii.
huh?
You do know Opera runs on the Wii, right? And it sure uses a keyboard - just it's one you point and click - which is what most people do on their PCs frankly.
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WinVista games? Sorry, I don't believe you. The specs on the ones I've seen assume a lot more.
But maybe you have a nice machine. I'm not buying a new one.
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While they're at it, can someone explain why I can get more and faster effects from Beryl on a 32MB MX400?
I know the Mac has a keyboard, and that's why I mentioned it in my post. How many games are available on the Mac, without running a form of Windows? Not enough. I also don't mean a keyboard for typing, I mean gaming with a keyboard and mouse.
As in the spyware company WildTangent that gets packaged with a number of apps including AIM? Wish a CREDIBLE developer would have said that, and not them, being from the bottom of the barrel.
Slashdot covered WildTangent's bitching about Vista two weeks ago (this story linked to a less relevantThey can go frick themselves.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
there's sword fighting in warioware: smooth moves.
please me, have no regrets.
I had that problem years ago. I just learned to be ambidextrous while playing with my Wii and the forearms evened out.
Given the amount of time that many people spend playing WoW, you'd be able to tell which ones were the Wii players by their ONE MASSIVE ARM. Don't be so sure about that, I heard from a friend that those Night Elves look pretty hot on a PC too.
Ok, I dig dual-booting between OSX and windos for games, and between Linux and windos for games. But between windos and windos for games???
Does that make even remotely sense to anyone?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I must admit, everytime I see wild claims of "Vista breaks gaming", deeper reading usually reveals "Vista breaks our stupid copy protection that needed admin access". I see this as a good thing. Ive had enough computers fucked over by SecuROM, StarForce and friends.
It's the same thing. People having one massive arm from playing with their wee...
As far as the OS is concerned, hyperthreading, multi-core and multi processor systems aren't much different. Multithreaded programs will benefit from these systems with Windows, and so will users who run several CPU-intensive programs simultaneously (even if those programs are single-threaded).
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
And my reaction is that Vista is going to have to offer a whole lot more than DirectX10 to get me to switch.
Nah not that much. The only thing Vista is going to have to offer you to switch is 1 (one) "Killer game" which is available only in Windows Vista(tm) which k1ckz 4zz and you just *must* play. And I am sure they *will* go for that maybe with Halo 320 or any similar thing.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
So when three people who actually use the OS tell you something, you don't believe them, but you believe every word from the mainstream media?
Wow...
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Even if you don't build your own, that doesn't mean you have to get ripped off. If you're paying $2000 for a PC and it's not top-of-the-line (at this point meaning quad-core and/or 1-2 $400+ graphics cards), then you're overpaying for what you get.
On Dell's site I put together a machine just now with essentially the same parts as the build above, and it was close to $1200. If you really want your 4GB of RAM (and I'm telling you it's not necessary), then it's still only $1450. I'm a big advocate of building my own machine, cause honestly it's that much cheaper, and I can leave out any parts I don't want. Paying Dell $40 to upgrade from a CD burner to a DVD burner? No thanks, I'd rather just pay $30 for the DVD burner alone.
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"Given the amount of time that many people spend playing WoW, you'd be able to tell which ones were the Wii players by their ONE MASSIVE ARM."
Slashdotters, masturbation, etc...
Oh, it's just too easy.
Feel free to compare the installed base of XBox360 consoles to the installed base of PCs.
Then feel free to revise your inane comment. "PC Gaming Is Dead" statements are so amazingly stupid, they are downright boring.
only ones that mattered to me were Diablo II, Sims, Sims 2, Warcraft, and Starcraft.
They all work on a Mac.
And many now work on consoles.
Can't say I care any longer. Not "upgrading" to WinVista - it would cost too much and give me less than just buying a Mac or getting a Linux or BSD laptop.
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Why the frack would you need a Core 2 Duo? Graphics power is still #1 in gaming performance. Either save some dough by getting an A64 X2 (cheaper proc and mobo) or channel that into a better graphics card (X1900XT or 7900GT for ~$200 is nice).
Hell for gaming you could even go single-core. An overclocked Sempron is incredibly cost effective.
"I had that problem years ago. I just learned to be ambidextrous while playing with my Wii and the forearms evened out."
How many years have you been playing the Wii???!? If you are playing the Wii enough to have muscle mass change in your forearms in the last 2 months it's ben out, you need to take that onscrren advice and "why not take a break, press the + key to pause the game"
Benefits of dual-core for a gamer:
a) Can have other processes running besides the game, and the "second" core can handle them while the "first" is taking care of the game.
b) Future games will make extensive use of multiple cores. Not many right now (Quake 4 is about the only good example), but future-proofing is good.
Other points:
a) More than anything, I'd say HL2 is CPU-intensive than GPU-intensive.
b) The exact parts doesn't matter, I was merely pointing out that a good system doesn't have to cost $2000. Substitute in a C2D for an AX2 if you'd like, or replace the video card. Point is, $700 is perfectly reasonable for a good gaming system.
c) Personally, I'm more of a fan of getting a $120 GPU every 12 months or so, than buying a $200 GPU every 12-16 months.
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