Why Windows Vista Won't Suck

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-03-06 10:58am

Those two reasons are why I said in another thread that right now is a bad time to upgrade.

Yogi · Post by **Yogi** » 2006-03-06 11:03am

ggs wrote:
Chardok wrote:wait a second, so a 500 dollar video card today will not support DX10 which comes out in a mere 4 months?! Ridiculous.
Welcome to the video card industry, All your money are belong to us.

Only if you desire cutting edge tech. Otherwise, just wait until a year or so after Vista is released and buy an average card then. It's not like they're going to stop making XP compatible programs any time soon.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-03-06 11:49am

Hmm, interesting.

Chardok · Post by **Chardok** » 2006-03-06 12:13pm

I just want to be 100000000% sure I'm clear on this.

I go out to buy a new computer TODAY

It's got a really good PCI-e 7800 GTX card and windows XP.
Yippy skippy, I'm happy, games run smooth, whooppee!

One year later:

Ooh! New game! sweet! Awww, requires DX10! SHIT!

Is that what I'm looking at here, seriously?

Post by **Ghost Rider** » 2006-03-06 12:16pm

Chardok wrote:I just want to be 100000000% sure I'm clear on this.

I go out to buy a new computer TODAY

It's got a really good PCI-e 7800 GTX card and windows XP.
Yippy skippy, I'm happy, games run smooth, whooppee!

One year later:

Ooh! New game! sweet! Awww, requires DX10! SHIT!

Is that what I'm looking at here, seriously?

Yes.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-03-06 12:20pm

However, if you read the article I posted (but more importantly, the comments), you'll still be able to run Vista itself well, given the Aero engine need not be used if your GPU can't support it (and for all the bells and whistles, it needs to be somewhat beefy). Vista will have DX9 and 10, so if your card supports the latter, you have support for all games previously run on XP and so on. But to make use of DX10 requires a new card given how radically different it is.

Chardok · Post by **Chardok** » 2006-03-06 12:28pm

Ghost Rider wrote:
Chardok wrote:I just want to be 100000000% sure I'm clear on this.

I go out to buy a new computer TODAY

It's got a really good PCI-e 7800 GTX card and windows XP.
Yippy skippy, I'm happy, games run smooth, whooppee!

One year later:

Ooh! New game! sweet! Awww, requires DX10! SHIT!

Is that what I'm looking at here, seriously?
Yes.

That seems alot like cutting off your face to spite your face. I mean...you're going to be alienating thousands of people, and forcing game designers to...basically make two versions of every game they make for about 5 or more years in order to ensure good sales (One that is DX10 compatible and one that is compatible with DX9 and below) right?

Fuck it. I'm going to buy a new rig with a middle of the road video card and I supPOSE I will have to buy a DX10 compatible one later, as previously suggested. Oh well, goodbye 7800 GTX. Shit.

Now, will XP be able to run DX 10? Or are they mutually exclusive?

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2006-03-06 12:36pm

Today's video cards may not be hardware compatible with the latest DirectX 10 hardware features, but they will still have DirectX 10 drivers and will be able to run DirectX 10 developed software. That's like saying you have to throw away your GeForce4 Ti4600 to play a DirectX 9 game.

Ace Pace · Post by **Ace Pace** » 2006-03-06 12:43pm

Chardok wrote:Now, will XP be able to run DX 10? Or are they mutually exclusive?

No, DX10 is Vista only.

Admiral Valdemar · Post by **Admiral Valdemar** » 2006-03-06 12:45pm

DX10 is Vista exclusive. A lot of what Vista brings to the table needs to be more than simply a few new functions strapped on to the XP builds of late. It's a new OS, and as such, most of it will not be equivalent to XP, else there'd be no reason to upgrade (course, many argue there's no reason to upgrade anyway).

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2006-03-06 12:46pm

Ace Pace wrote:
Chardok wrote:Now, will XP be able to run DX 10? Or are they mutually exclusive?
No, DX10 is Vista only.

There's a big reason for that though; DX10 is going to be a huge departure from DX9, so much so that Vista has to support a legacy DX9 mode for DX9 games. They couldn't adapt DX10 for Windows XP even if the wanted to. Hell, they weren't even going to call it DX10, originally it was supposed to be the WDM 1.0.

Expect most games to ship with both DX9 and DX10 modes for the first few years after Vista ships.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-03-06 01:11pm

It will be a while before there are DirectX 10 only games out. Rest well knowing that the DirectX10 path will have all the glitter & gold over the DirectX9 path.

Hmm, they are apparently claiming Superfetch can use USB devices as a backstore for temp data.

I really hope that can work with say something like Gigabyte's I-Ram, great way to get around the 4gb limit for RAM on most comercial motherboards (ever 64bit mode isnt going to help if the hardware doesnt support it). This should allow the near-speed of a ram-drive but with the stability and size of hardrive.

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2006-03-06 01:28pm

ggs wrote: Hmm, they are apparently claiming Superfetch can use USB devices as a backstore for temp data.

I'm dubious about the possibilities of Superfetch; I think it will be much more useful for hybrid drives and RAM disks then USB devices.

I really hope that can work with say something like Gigabyte's I-Ram, great way to get around the 4gb limit for RAM on most comercial motherboards (ever 64bit mode isnt going to help if the hardware doesnt support it). This should allow the near-speed of a ram-drive but with the stability and size of hardrive.

Once 64-bit Vista launches, we'll see motherboards with 4GB+ memory support on consumer boards. Right now, there just isn't a market for it.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-03-06 02:20pm

[quote="The Kernel"]I'm dubious about the possibilities of Superfetch; I think it will be much more useful for hybrid drives and RAM disks then USB devices. [quote]
Superfetch relies on having lots of memory or devices with better accesstime than harddisks. Which IMO is a forward looking way of figuring out what todo with all the idle ram and idle devices they project computers to have.

One problem under WinXP 32bit, is the max size of the file cache is ~900mb. No matter how much ram you have, it the file cache will not get bigger than that ~900mb.

For an Operating System; idle ram is wasted ram. It is also trivial to setup system level caches which yield ram pages when memory is demanded. This is what .NET does, application might look to have a "lot" of memory allocated to them but when some application demands more memory the .NET apps release the unused pages they had allocated.

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2006-03-06 02:33pm

That's the problem though, most USB memory devices, although theoretically capable of improved access times to hard disks, aren't actually built with performance in mind and thus are fairly slow. My Cruizer Titanium for example is pretty high end for a USB memory device, yet it still can't compare to the transfer and access times of my hard drive.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2006-03-06 02:59pm

The Kernel wrote:That's the problem though, most USB memory devices, although theoretically capable of improved access times to hard disks, aren't actually built with performance in mind and thus are fairly slow. My Cruizer Titanium for example is pretty high end for a USB memory device, yet it still can't compare to the transfer and access times of my hard drive.

"Seek-time" is in the tens/hundreds of nanoseconds for flash drives. The transfer rate just sucks ass(read speed isnt too bad, write speed really sucks). Harddrives have between 6-10 microseconds seektime, and +30-40mb/s substained read bandwidth.

For 64kilobyte reads (the min read chuck size used for paging operations) which randomly reads from a multi-hundred mb file, a flash drive kicks a harddrives ass. Hidiously baddly.

The USB flash drive would probably be used a "write-rarely, read-often" device, which expliots the upsides and minimizes the downsides of using flash drives

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2006-03-06 03:12pm

ggs wrote: "Seek-time" is in the tens/hundreds of nanoseconds for flash drives. The transfer rate just sucks ass(read speed isnt too bad, write speed really sucks). Harddrives have between 6-10 microseconds seektime, and +30-40mb/s substained read bandwidth.

For 64kilobyte reads (the min read chuck size used for paging operations) which randomly reads from a multi-hundred mb file, a flash drive kicks a harddrives ass. Hidiously baddly.

The USB flash drive would probably be used a "write-rarely, read-often" device, which expliots the upsides and minimizes the downsides of using flash drives

This is true (although there are still latency problems with USB under certain conditions), but the problem with using small filesizes is that you have to prevent them from being swapped often or else you will degrade the flash memory in the drive over time.

Really I agree with the people at Seagate and Western Digital here, the best way to handle this is with putting the memory on a hybrid drive instead of trying to use a flash memory drive.

HARM · Post by **HARM** » 2006-03-06 03:22pm

It is a microsoft product; therefore, overpriced and full of holes.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-03-06 03:35pm

HARM wrote:It is a microsoft product; therefore, overpriced and full of holes.

Do you have anything of substance to add, or are you trying to a me-tooing Microsoft bashing troll on his way to joining the Parting Shots roster? I can't wait to read your entry.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2006-03-06 03:54pm

What's the point of Superfetch when stuff could just be cached in RAM? W/ larger memory sizes being supported...

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-03-06 03:57pm

The Kernel wrote:Today's video cards may not be hardware compatible with the latest DirectX 10 hardware features, but they will still have DirectX 10 drivers and will be able to run DirectX 10 developed software. That's like saying you have to throw away your GeForce4 Ti4600 to play a DirectX 9 game.

Except that in the case of many upcoming games, that's actually true. A GF4 won't be able to run them at all because it doesn't support PS 2.0 or better.

People who upgrade every 12 or 18 months might not care about the DX10 incompatability, but I like my systems to last a long time, and so do most gamers.

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2006-03-06 04:33pm

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote: Except that in the case of many upcoming games, that's actually true. A GF4 won't be able to run them at all because it doesn't support PS 2.0 or better.

People who upgrade every 12 or 18 months might not care about the DX10 incompatability, but I like my systems to last a long time, and so do most gamers.

That varies from game to game, and it depends on hadware requirements of the particular game, not the DirectX implementation.

The point I was making is that the GeForce4, despite not having all of the DX9 features, if fully DX9 compatible. Hell, the GeForce2 GTS is also fully DX9 compatible as well as it has DX9 drivers.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2006-03-06 05:25pm

The point I was making is that people with a GF4 are now forced to upgrade if they want to play certain games, despite it having more than enough horsepower to run these games on low settings, and people who want to avoid this fate over the next few years should wait for the post-Vista graphics cards.

Chardok · Post by **Chardok** » 2006-03-06 05:31pm

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:The point I was making is that people with a GF4 are now forced to upgrade if they want to play certain games, despite it having more than enough horsepower to run these games on low settings, and people who want to avoid this fate over the next few years should wait for the post-Vista graphics cards.

That's the problem I'm getting at, though, now game makers are going to be FORCED to make two versions of games, incurring higher costs and ultimately passing those onto gamers, raises the price of games, right? It just blows my mind that Microsith isn't working with game manufacturers so that the "Next gen" cards they release for several (At least) MONTHS prior to this new shiny DX10 thing comes out are compatible. I mean, Fuck if I'm spending a goddamned fortune on a spiffy video card right now only to see it made obsolete in only a very few months.

Arrow · Post by **Arrow** » 2006-03-06 06:29pm

Chardok wrote:That's the problem I'm getting at, though, now game makers are going to be FORCED to make two versions of games, incurring higher costs and ultimately passing those onto gamers, raises the price of games, right? It just blows my mind that Microsith isn't working with game manufacturers so that the "Next gen" cards they release for several (At least) MONTHS prior to this new shiny DX10 thing comes out are compatible. I mean, Fuck if I'm spending a goddamned fortune on a spiffy video card right now only to see it made obsolete in only a very few months.

I can't get that worked over this. This is pretty much the same situation we have today with SM2.0 and SM3.0, and that we had in the past with DX8 and DX9. A switch has to be made, and graphics code will be duplicated. SOP. And I'm quite sure that MS is working devs to get them up to speed with DX10, especially sense the big names have seen the new DX10 hardware (IIRC, Epic has worked with G80s a bit).