Gaming On Windows 7

Jason Wilson writes "Windows 7 comes out Oct. 22, and many gamers are wondering whether it will be a boon for gaming, as Microsoft promised Vista would, or a disappointment (like Vista was at its launch). Former ExtremeTech editor Jason Cross, who's covered games and tech for 13 years, discusses the pluses and minuses of Windows 7 for gamers — how it differs from Vista, if it'll run older games, and the benefits of 64-bit computing. 'Windows 7 basically takes the Vista codebase and rewrites, refines, optimizes, and overhauls most of the internal stuff without making dramatic changes to the driver stacks that Vista did over WinXP. The changes to the fundamental driver models are small and mostly serve to improve performance. Plus, the hardware makers — especially the graphics guys — are on top of the changes this time around. Nvidia and ATI have been shipping quite good Win7 graphics drivers for months now.'"

Comments

Re:DX9 vs DX10 / 11

[ShooterNeo]

Actually, the OP is correct. Modern games with a recent graphics card are bottlenecked by the CPU. Specifically, GTA 4 needs a monstrously powerful CPU in order for the engine to draw the city at a decent framerate. This is probably a result of poor programming by the folks that ported the game, but in any case you need a beefy CPU to enjoy GTA4.

Re:PC gaming is dead.

[4D6963]

Everyone else has already moved on to consoles

Translation : I bought a Xbox 360 when it came out and since then I never play PC games anymore, which gives me the feeling that the whole world has done the same as I have.

Here's a hint : PC gaming has over the last 15 years been given about as many death knells as Apple.