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More Evidence That XP is Vista's Main Competitor
Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld is reporting that Windows XP Service Pack 3 runs MS Office 10% faster than XP SP2 — and is 'considerably faster' than Vista SP1. XP SP3 isn't scheduled to be released until next year, but testers at Devil Mountain Software — the same company which found Vista SP 1 to be hardly any faster than the debut version of Vista — were able to run some benchmarking tests on a release candidate of XP SP3, says the report. While this may be great news for XP owners, it is a problem for Microsoft, which is having trouble convincing business users to migrate to Vista."
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"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The Best Buy crowd will get pushed to Vista, it's true. But it hasn't been a week since I ordered a new desktop for myself from Dell, and I bought it with XP Pro installed. (And XP Home was an option.)
It's hardly impossible to buy a home PC with XP on it these days.
WWN isn't updated because nobody does it, but the development progressed considerably since then and I would say DX9 is in very good shape now. DX10 headers and stubs was a google SoC project, which unfortunately didn't go very well, but alas, the effort is there. In some cases wine is faster than windows, especially now that you read how slow vista is I think wine has some advantages.
I was using vista on my laptop, an athlon 64 dual core with 2GB ram. All I used it for was playing WoW when I'd go to my gf's house, and after several rounds of BSOD's with no solution in sight, I did a little searching and found that I could in fact install XP on there by using a quadro driver for the onboard nvidia graphics. (the vendor did not list any XP compatible drivers, but apparently it has the same motherboard in it as another model). Now, I no longer have to run WoW at 1024x768 but can run at 1280x800 widescreen, with all the mods I want and it flows effortlessly where before it would chop and lag horribly. Vista is pretty, yeah, but I need my laptop to do more than sit there like a prom queen ;-) When I hear of them fixing the performance, I might consider switching it back.
emulators emulate hardware
/* directX code */
/* minor rejigging to make it work with equivalent OpenGL API call */
examples are vmware, virtualbox, et al
Wine is a compatibility layer
meaning it just redirects win32 API calls to the equivalent linux API calls
AFIAK (never really looked into the source of wine, or I'm guessing a bit here), but
void direct3D_DoSomething(args)
{
}
becomes
void direct3D_DoSomething(args)
{
openGL_DoSomething(args);
}
DirectX10 cannot run on XP. XP cannot multitask the GPU for example. Period. There is no possibility of creating a wrapper that uses opengl to make that happen.
At best, all you'll be able to do is write wrappers for fluff like shader model 4. And that's what it is FLUFF. The real features of directx10 are virtual video memory, gpu multitasking, and so on. This simply cannot be backported to XP using opengl wrappers.
Right now, most directx10 compatible games ARE directx9 games that are extended to use some of the directx10 rendering fluff, so its relatively easy to just stub around all the gpu multitasking, and just implement wrappers for the new sharder stuff. And then we see idiotic frenzies because 'omg! directx game X has been hacked to run on xp'
But the reality is that only the fluff part of directx10 can be wrapped like this, and it just so happens that the fluff part is the only part the new direct9/direct10 'hybrid' games are using.
But if they start releasing REAL directx10-only games that make use of gpu multitasking etc those stubs will have to do *something*, and XP just can't do it, the kernel doesn't support it. So either its going to run like a DOG as they write some kludge to thunk around the kernel limitation or its not going to run at all.
To use a car analagy, directx10 is like a 90's Porsche, and direct9 is one from the 80's. Sure with enough welding and grafting you could put the new body on the old chassis, and then you could release photos showing that the new xenon headlights work, along with the heated side mirrors, electric sunroof -- and you can even start it and drive it around... and it runs nearly as fast as the 80's 911 always did, which you'd expect given that's what the engine is, and the extra weight you've added.
But if you look closer you'll find out that the AWD and ABS is missing, the automatic ride height adjustment is gone, and the number 6 on your transmission knob doesn't actually do anything
I was under the impression that OpenGL wasn't platform dependent, so if 2.0/3.0 will be released it won't be able to use the same GPU features on WinXP and Vista?
OpenGL is not platform dependant, but that is NOT the issue.
In another post you wrote:
DX10 and OpenGL are nothing than just APIs to the GPU! You can emulate both ways, IIRC MS first tried to emulate OGL using DX in the early Vista days. OGL 2.0/3.0 will have DX10-like features. Maybe some even are possible to emulate in OGL 1.5.
OpenGL and DirectX10 Direct3D as 'scene description languages' work like that. You can even implement OpenGL3 entirely in software and emit the frames to a laser printer. And each frame will look perfect.
That's not the issue, and never has been. DirectX10 is a hell of a lot more than just the Direct3D scene description APIs.
The issue is that directX10, in ADDITION to its 'scene description language' is ALSO a PLATFORM. It specifies that the hardware actually be able to do certain things. Its true you can get away with emulating those features but you'll take a performance hit, and possibly a stability hit if there are timing constraints tied into those features. (Not to mention you lose the right to use the directx10 logos).
Another part of the directx 10 platform requires the operating system to support certain features that Vista supports, but XP does not. XP cannot do virtual video memory or gpu multitasking. Period.
Imagine if DirectX required pre-emptive multitasking support. (not hard to do, it actually DOES)
How would you backport that to Windows 3.1? Which only supports cooperative multitasking. There is no real way of doing that short of upgrading the 3.1 kernel to support pre-emptive multitasking, at which point you might as well just give them the NT3 kernel, and NT3 drivers...
And that's where we are now. To give XP virtual video memory and gpu multitasking, we'd pretty much have to upgrade the xp kernel to vista...and require vista drivers.
Don't confusing DirectX10 with OpenGL. There is a part of DirectX that is interchangable with OpenGL and its an important part. But there is a big part of DirectX that is NOT.