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Valve Says Choice to Make DX10 Vista-Only Hurt PC Gaming
Journal written by Erris (531066) and posted by
Zonk
on Mon Aug 27, 2007 03:09 PM
from the they're-in-a-place-to-know dept.
from the they're-in-a-place-to-know dept.
Erris writes "Valve's President Gabe Newell is calling Microsoft's choice to make DirectX 10 Vista-only a 'terrible mistake' that has harmed gaming. His company's latest hardware study shows the strategy has not moved gamers onto Vista. The result is that almost no one is using the newest version of DirectX, and companies are shying away from creating new input devices that support it. Nine months after release, after Christmas, after graduation, and with school mostly back in session, still only 8% of gamers are using it." Update: 08/27 21:09 GMT by Z : An AC points out that these numbers may be framed poorly given uptake numbers for XP's release.
Related Stories
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Technology: Real Life DirectX 10 Performance 67 comments
AnandTech has a look at the performance PC gamers can expect see under Windows Vista with DirectX 10. Unfortunately, it isn't pretty. Despite the power of the new 10-compliant graphics cards, the choices made in developing this technology have resulted in a significant gap between what is possible and what is actually obtainable from commercial PC hardware. What's worse, the article starts off by pointing out that much of the shiny effects exclusive to DX10 games would have been possible with DX9, had Microsoft been inclined to develop in that direction. From the article: "[Current] cards are just not powerful enough to enable widespread use of any features that reach beyond the capability of DirectX 9. Even our high-end hardware struggled to keep up in some cases, and the highest resolution we tested was 2.3 megapixels. Pushing the resolution up to 4 MP (with 30" display resolutions of 2560x1600) brings all of our cards to their knees. In short, we really need to see faster hardware before developers can start doing more impressive things with DirectX 10."
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Hardware: DirectX 10 Hardware Is Now Obsolete 373 comments
ela_gervaise writes "SIGGRAPH 2007 was the stage where Microsoft dropped the bomb, informing gamers that the currently available DirectX 10 hardware will not support the upcoming DirectX 10.1 in Vista SP1. In essence, all current DX10 hardware is now obsolete. But don't get too upset just yet: 'Gamers shouldn't fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and, more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about. The spec revision basically makes a number of things that are optional in DX10 compulsory under the new standard - such as 32-bit floating point filtering, as opposed to the 16-bit current. 4xAA is a compulsory standard to support in 10.1, whereas graphics vendors can pick and choose their anti-aliasing support currently. We suspect that the spec is likely to be ill-received. Not only does it require brand new hardware, immediately creating a minuscule sub-set of DX10 owners, but it also requires Vista SP1, and also requires developer implementation.'"
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Gaming the system for fun and profit (Score:5, Informative)
The original journal entry already had comments that poke holes in twitter's claim about those numbers, which is probably why it became inconvenient and forced him to switch to his sockpuppet [slashdot.org] account instead.
Ironically, the same story in Heise.de has a link to another one [heise.de] about a gaming convention in Leipzig drawing all-time record attendance. I suppose it's possible that DX10/Vista will hurt the gaming industry, but with the game release cycle being 12-16 months, I'd say that will be apparent later on.
Here [steampowered.com] is a direct link to the original Valve survey, which amusingly enough shows Vista as having an even larger market share among Valve gamers as it has overall (8% vs 5-6%). That means Vista's market share among gamers has been increasing at a rate of about 1% per month since it was released, which is even higher than XP's uptake vs. Windows 98/ME. I can't even begin to imagine what the relevance of Christmas and back to school as claimed by twitter is for gamers who probably switch OSes only when they switch their $3,000 boxes anyway, but I'd say that 8% share is actually not bad in that segment. That share will probably start growing more exponentially as time goes by.
Welcome to the Trolled By Twitter Club, Zonk.
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That said, I don't think it's healthy for the industry and I dread the day I break down and install Vista to get the most out of Starcraft2.
Re:Gaming the system for fun and profit (Score:5, Informative)
However, even while Vista has about 8%, Vista + DX 10 is 2.3% of users. That's about half as many as are using DX 7. About 15% use DX 8, and the rest are DX9 types.
In terms of being able to sell one's product to the most people, it then makes more sense to make sure DX 7 runs it well, than it does for DX10. Unless you want to jack the price up, to compensate. Let's see, to make a new game for just DirectX 10, that would be about... 2000$ for the same revenue stream, based on steam's percentage.
The other thing people forget, is how Microsoft's tools are no longer targetted at the PC, instead they are targeted at the Xbox. This has had rather (IMO) disastrous consequences for one game I play, Supreme Commander. GPG was being partly funded by Microsoft (or would have been, my memory is foggy), and it was intended to be the first DX10 game and use Microsoft's networking, etc.
This is great and all, but the way Microsoft and GPG used it, it has to be peer to peer. And each computer runs the sim. Which would be fine, if it weren't one of the most taxing games on a cpu currently existing. This would be fine in a homogeneous environment, such as the Xbox. However, PCs aren't. So if one person has a crappy computer, it will slow EVERYONE down.
Microsoft stands to make more money from Xbox, so they are either intentionally, or unintentionally, doing things which are killing the PC games market.
Parent
Why OpenGL should have been the de facto standard (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, DirectX is a nice graphics library, but the seriousness of the vendor lock-in is just staggering -- and scenarios like this are a perfect example of a game development company's worst fears.
This situation was created because not enough effort was put into OpenGL when it needed it the most to make it a truly cutting-edge standard. The blame for that particularly lies with Microsoft and their aggressive campaign for Direct3D (and DirectX). As a result, OpenGL languished for several years, with only incremental feature updates (to version 1.5, which IIRC wasn't even a real release, but more of a vendor patchset for 1.4). In the meantime, DirectX leapfrogged its way to version 9 with a ridiculous amount of features being added.
OpenGL 2.1 finally came out last August (http://www.opengl.org/documentation/current_vers
Now, OpenGL 3.0 is "on track" to be finalized at the end of this month. Whether that will happen is anyone's guess, but it looks like the DX10 situation has finally lit a fire under their collective asses. Who knows, we may even see an OpenGL 3.0 specification by September, but I'm not really holding my breath.
http://www.opengl.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?
Of course, even though there's a brand spanking OpenGL almost ready to again kick Direct3D's ass performance wise, Microsoft has already taken steps to ensure that won't happen. OpenGL 1.4 (yes, 1.4!) is implemented in Vista as a translation layer to run Direct3D calls on the hardware. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D_vs._OpenGL#
So even if OpenGL 3 is technically superior, publishers probably won't adopt it because of the widespread view that it's slow (thanks to Vista's emulation). iD Software will likely use it as they always have, but it'll become harder to explain to your average user why he needs to install unverified drivers and disable his nice flashy interface just so he can run said game.
It's almost sickening, really, when you think about the damage DirectX has done.
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Re:Why OpenGL should have been the de facto standa (Score:5, Informative)
Let's start with the suspense in OpenGL versions. This was caused by a board that was taking too long to arbitrate disputes and pander to everyone. It was full of many companies, all of which who were competing and would stop each other as much as possible. That's why not many OpenGL updates were issued, but plenty of things became vendor specific extensions. Now I've heard that the board has been disolved and a single entity is taking the reigns. This explains why OpenGL has been picking up lately. No disputes, just progress.
For issue number 2, the Vista / OpenGL myth. You are partly correct, Aero will be disabled. Where you are wrong is that it will be disabled while you are using the OpenGL application. I have already tested this myself and it is no biggie. It is also somewhat expected, as OpenGL and Direct3D would fight for the hardware. They work fairly differently and if the OS cannot keep context you end up with missed renders/glitches/etc.
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It's not 8%! (Score:5, Informative)
This is the relevant part of the survey you need to look at:
So indeed the author of that Journal was correct: ~2% or 1 in 50 users can't use DX10. In other words the people "poking holes" need to learn to read.
Just looking at the Nvidia card numbers we can easily see the problem is most likely Vista and not the cards themselves.
Roughly 37k out of 61k Nvidia users on Steam have DX10 cards but can not utilize DX10 because they have not upgraded to Vista. So approximately 60% out of a group of people composed of people who are cutting edge sorts, buyers of new computers, or people who've done a recent computer upgrade have not yet upgraded to Vista.
None of this is proper statistics of course but as far as this sort of thing goes that's a pretty shocking number. I want to believe gamers are being smart but the realistic side of me though says the most likely reason is simply that Vista has a lot of problems for gamers right now and they are just waiting till driver issues resolve.
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Re:It's not 8%! (Score:5, Funny)
Wine: A better Windows than Vista!
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What I think is that gamers haven't had a reason to upgrade to Vista from XP
You have a point. I'm a gamer and a Windows Sys Admin. I've installed Vista a bunch of times but always end up annoyed and go back to XP. I just installed it again this weekend, to judge for myself whether or not DX10 made much of a difference in Bioshock (it didn't). I don't like Vista. They made a lot of bad decisions and, straight out of the box anyway (plus latest drivers), it's demonstrably slower and buggier under many circumstances than XP is on the same hardware. So far it offers nothing I wa
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Microsoft is desperate to push Vista down the throats of computer users. The big app developers like Adobe are wise to that song and dance, so despite what was probably a concerted effort by Microsoft to get one of the big apps to release a "Vista Only" version, that's not going to happen. So, MS figured that they could go after what is usually a reliably pliant popula
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twitter comment:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24993&cid=2716 111 [slashdot.org]
RazzleFrog reply:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24993&cid=2716 156 [slashdot.org]
Containing the sentence "Did you even read my post?"
Eris reply:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24993&cid=2717 040 [slashdot.org]
Where he says: "Sure I did, did you?"
Smoking gun...
and yet, thanks to nvidia's incompetence... (Score:3, Interesting)
yet here we are!
Proud of game makers (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Proud of game makers (Score:5, Informative)
Not that it really matters, since any intelligent OpenGL user never works directly with the API any more than is absolutely necessary. The source code to any recent high profile game is big... No... fucking huge ass big! So to make things a little easier to follow, everything gets wrapped up in layers. Most companies use game engines that were developed by third parties in order to reduce the need to a) hire people that are really good at the low level 3D interfaces; and b) waste huge amounts of time on an engine for a single title, thereby pushing back their prospective release date by no less than 2 years. iD is one of the few companies that makes both the engine and the game. In fact, several game engines exist that are written by companies that never produced a game themselves. Ever heard of GameBryo?
On top of that, there are countless middleware libraries that address a huge gamut of issues. SpeedTree, OpenAL, SDL, GameFace, Bink, Smacker, Miles, RakNet, ad nauseam. The point is, only a very small number of games are written to directly use OpenGL and DX without some sort of wrapper, and the number of successful commercial titles in the last 8 years that wrote everything from scratch can probably be counted on one hand.
Anyhow, out of all of these libraries, there is a huge subset that actively supports Linux. Most of these libraries are written using very generic programming techniques, or at least provide a standard interface that never changes regardless of target platform, and provides the dirty system specific implementations as a run-time or compile-time plug in. It is much to their advantage to do things this way, as these libraries are expected to not only run in Windows, but also on consoles, and by that I mean pretty much all of them.
The reason they don't just release every game for Windows for Linux as well is because these middleware libraries often come with "per platform" licenses. "For $30,000, you can use this library in 1 title on 1 platform. Kick in another $15,000 and you get another platform license. Kick in a grand total of $75,000 and you can release it on all platforms it supports." The trouble is, most games are using anywhere from 2 to 6 middleware libraries, and that ends up being a lot of cash that they're expected to recoup on Linux support. Given the demographics that generally comes with Linux desktops (dual boot rigs for people that want to game with higher % of users that run cracked software, or grandparents that only check email and perform mild web browsing), it just plain isn't worth the effort, and certainly isn't worth the investment/risk ratio.
End of story.
So... what was TFA about?
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Too bad Valve. (Score:5, Interesting)
Now multiple applications and games can share the 3D hardware. In DX9/WinXP and earlier only one App at a time could use the 3D hardware. It needed to be done, and it could only be done with the cooperation of the OS. This cannot be put back into XP because this sort of control and separation could not be done in XP.
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Re:Too bad Valve. (Score:4, Interesting)
Google Earth, Media Center, WPF apps, and a lot more uses 3D.
Why the hell shouldn't our GPUs multitask?
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I call BS.
At the lowest level, a video driver (for XP or any architecture, really) just translates requests from applications (including the OS itself) into something the video card understands. Whether the video hardware can handle multiple simultaneous renderings or not depends only on the hardware and the API (in this case, Direct X provides the API, as exported by the actual driver).
For XP to supp
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That is a logical fallacy. The driver-OS interface changing does not necessitate the need for an gaming hardware API to be tied to a particular OS.
The entire purpose of DirectX is to provide an abstraction layer ontop of the drivers in the first place. It's quite true that it might mean writing two versions of DX10 but the API does not depend on the changes Vista implemented.
PC Gamers can smell a Rat - And it's Vista (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:PC Gamers can smell a Rat - And it's Vista (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatively, you can also hear the FUDsters and hysteria-inducing misleading rants about the DRM boogeyman, UAC and just about anything else in Vista. The "poor Google, they are being victimized by Microsoft" crap when Vista search is much better than GDS and all Google had to do was give the user the option to shut down the indexing service. The wailing cries by the AV snake oil vendors. And let's not forget the concerted efforts by the FSF to convince everyone that Vista is "defective by design" and directing their minions to the closest Amazon product page to astroturf and vandalize the hell out of everything. It goes on and on and on.
I sure as hell haven't seen much more than FUD coming from the groups of people who would be the most affected once Vista gains traction. I don't have a problem with people doing that so much - Microsoft is known for those types of tactic as well. The problem is that the same people doing all this are the ones that have repeatedly claimed they own the moral high ground. The ones that claim Microsoft is not "honest". FUD always works both ways. It erodes your credibility when people realize you've been feeding them soup to undercut your competitors. It happened to Microsoft, and it will happen to them as well.
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Forced Upgrade (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a great time to consider an alternate desktop OS.
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Game developers chose this (Score:5, Insightful)
When game developers chose to standardise their efforts on Windows they bit the hook. Now they are unhappy about being on the line. Too bad.
We warned them. Now if some forward thinking company thought to maintain some cross platform efforts they are ready to seize a significant opportunity. Unreal engine? Id? Is that you?
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and Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln (Score:5, Insightful)
One major difference... (Score:3, Insightful)
And yes, I know there are 'alternatives'. But Apples market is pretty specific and Linux no matter what anyone says is still quite a ways off (and yes, I use Red Hat in production and now Ubuntu on my secondary workstation at home).
And FTR after over 8 years of Linux use,
Quit sucking off Direct3d and Microsoft (Score:4, Insightful)
These game producers are idiots.
You got what you wanted when you only support Microsoft.
They got you by the balls.
Dx10, Vista and Network Problems? (Score:4, Interesting)
We all know that if you play music on Vista, it causes a degradation of network performance. What happens if you have a networked game decoding an MP3? Is this all handled in the game's own system, or does it depend on the OS to do it. Do you get a drop in network performance in the game? That would be incredible...
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I don't see how it is going to hurt (Score:4, Informative)
There's no reason to believe this won't continue. The only change is in how it is done. Rather than having multiple different render paths you can turn on and off with software options, that maybe people understand and maybe they don't, different render paths will use different DX versions. So if you want a SM 4.0 path, you use DX10, and so on.
The idea being that in the future, you'll be able to tell what your hardware supports and if you can run a game easily. You have a card that's DirectX 11. A game says "Requires Direct X 10.1, 11, 12, or better." You then know that your card will work fine, and that you probably won't get any eye candy benefit with anything better than a DX12 card.
Right now it is more confusing since cards only support older feature sets, but can use newer APIs. So say you have a GeForce Ti 4400. That's a DirectX 8 card. However, it can use DirectX 9.0c. But it isn't a 9.0c card, it doesn't support those features, it only supports the 8.0 features. So game makers either have to list cards that work, or refer to feature sets which users probably don't know about.
This is a much clearer way of doing it.
So I don't see the big problem here. To use DX10, you must have DX10 hardware which is very rare right now. Most people don't have it, most people don't care, games will continue to target DX9 (or even older). This is going to continue for some time. I bet games will still be targeting DX9 hardware when DX11 is out. I'm sure some of them will support the newer standard for more eye candy, but they won't all mandate it.
It's moving in a similar direction to OpenGL in that respect. If you look at nVidia cards, only the 5 (FX) series and later support GL 2.0, the earlier ones are 1.5 only. Why? They can't accelerate GL 2.0. Rather than have it implemented in either a semi-working fashion, or a slow software emulation, you just support the maximum level you can. It's going to be the same deal with DirectX. Rather than only supporting part of the latest API, you'll just support the level you are capable of.
Hopefully it should make it much clearer for all involved.
OpenGL (Score:5, Insightful)
Actual experiences vs. FUDdy the boogeyman (Score:3, Insightful)
As seems usual many Slashdotters seem to be overreaching, equating their fantasy lives with what's happening in the marketplace, and what most users are experiencing.
Among machines I use regularly in Seattle and in Southern California I'm now running:
- Two machines that use XP
- A TabletPC with XP
- A Dell XPSII laptop that was running Vista RC1, then Vista RC2, and as of a week ago is running the release version of Vista
- A smaller Dell laptop that followed a similar upgrade path to the machine above
- A new Dell 9200 Desktop with a quad-core Q6600 CPU and a DX10-capable GTS8600 video card
I have used all of these machines to run a wide variety of software:- Office
- the original Unreal Tournament from 1999
- Homeworld 2
- Visual Studio 2005
- Visual Studio 2008
- Photoshop CS2 suite
- Sorenson's toolsets
- Morrowind: Oblivion
- ...and tons of other stuff
The problems I have had to date?- In Vista RC1 headphone support on my laptops didn't work
- Some of the more advanced developer tools I've used and plugins for VS.NET have required elevation to install correctly
That's it, folks. Other than that Vista seems like a pretty decent tool that chugs along and mostly stays out of my way whether I'm using it for new or old software. It has not been the ordeal that some of you wish it was, and if my problems are limited to issues involving beta OS releases and installation issues associated with expert-level tools, I can't imagine Joe Sixpack is tearing his hair out over ubiquitious tools like say, Office.Part of being a good advocate for a cause like free software is having the maturity to be intellectually honest. Your hyperventilating every time the name of Microsoft is spoken doesn't make FSF any better or any more appealing. Indeed, people whose living depends on computing may shy away from free software solutions, afraid that they might attract more of your kind to the workplace. Who would want to work with such a negative personality type?
-KF
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As seems usual many Slashdotters seem to be overreaching, equating their fantasy lives with what's happening in the marketplace, and what most users are experiencing.
...I can't imagine Joe Sixpack is tearing his hair out over ubiquitious tools like say, Office.
I understand ranting against those who like to bemoan Vista as the source of all OS evil, but you must have certainly realized you make the same type of argument in the midst of it.
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Lets see, you regularly use 6 machines! (Check, that's definitely average)
And one of those machines is a quad-core with a DX10 graphics card (Check, completely average)
So obviously your experience translates well for everyone. Gosh, we should all stop bitching and listen up. So apart from
Features are doable, a single API is not. (Score:3, Insightful)
One of the major goals for D3D 10 (and going forward) was to release OEMs from legacy baggage, a not-insignificant portion of which stems from the Win2k/XP display driver model which is simply not equipped to provide the facilities that both Vista and the graphics cards themselves need. There's also a signifigant "slimming" of the API (removal of the fixed-function pipeline, cap bits, etc.) which, BTW, is the exact same direction that OpenGL is going.
What really would be the better solution? Creating two distinct next-gen 3D APIs for the XP and Vista lineages? I'm sure the IHVs would love that. Bring the XP D3D10-alike into Vista, continuing the status-quo of legacy-burdened software? Thats very forward-thinking. Hack a version of Vista's D3D 10 onto XP but having wildly different performance characteristics and losing all the benefits that stem from the new driver model? The software devs are just itching for yet another scenario to optimize for, I'm sure.
Simply put, its possible to support most D3D10 features on XP, but it is *not* possible to create a single next gen Direct3D API that supports both Vista and XP without making severe concessions to performance and/or feature set. Sometimes you just have to cut the cord.
Why don't they just standardize on OpenGL... (Score:3, Insightful)
DX10 was not designed to force people to upgrade (Score:3, Interesting)
I think that in the long term, the change (moving to the Vista video architecture) will be a good thing. The Vista video model seems to address a lot of real issues like sharing the 3D features of the video card (previously not a real possibility). In the short term, the change is a bit painful and offers no real benefit (just nifty eye candy and effects). If I were a game developer, I certainly wouldn't develop any games that only run on DX10.
I don't think that is entirely unexpected -- most developers still support DX8. However, just like most developers can expect most of their gamers to have DX9 hardware and software, eventually developers will be able to expect gamers to have DX10 hardware and software. Then there will be benefits.
In the meantime, I can understand some frustration. For example, due to my laptop's lousy video driver, I can't play full-screen video in DX10 (Aero transparency enabled) mode. However, if I switch to the "Basic" mode, suddenly all is well. So this is certainly painful.
Win-Win for Microsoft. (Score:5, Interesting)
PC gaming is further messed up and more people go to console (Xbox). Win.
The downside for Microsoft is what? People pissed with Microsoft tactics? Yeah that would be new...
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Re:Huh? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Microsoft makes DX10, Microsoft Makes Vista, and Microsoft makes money, not good feelings, not altruism, but good old MONEY off sales of Vista. Last I saw, XP was a money drain on Microsoft as they no longer sell it but must still support it.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, it hasn't been working out too well for Microsoft. Between the horrible driver support, expensive hardware requirements, and the general incompatibility issues you expect whenever upgrading to a major new OS, Vista has been mostly a bust for gamers (and even general users.) Furthermore, this doesn't even include the normal warnings about buying version 1.0 of ANYTHING for your PC - much less anything from Microsoft that hasn't had at least 2 SPs released for it, much less waiting for a major refresh, like Win95b.
Then there's the whole DX10.1 debacle, which promises to make all existing "DX10" video cards obsolete before they've even gotten proper support. Whee! Microsoft sure loves them some gamers!
Most gamers I know are putting off the upgrade to Vista for as long as possible - Microsoft's profits be darned. XP ain't broke, so why "fix" it with Vista which so far has proven to be more a step backwards than anything else?
In my opinion, Microsoft wants to KILL PC gaming - and is using Vista and DX10 to do it. Think about it. How much does Microsoft make off every sale of a non-Microsoft PC game? Exactly $0. All those copies of HalfLife2 - $0. WoW - $0. Civ, BioShock, Sims - $0, $0, and $0. Sure, they make money on the sale of Vista, but that's what, one sale per gamer until Vista's replacement comes out 4-5 years later? Meanwhile, over on Microsoft's XBox side, EVERY copy of EVERY game sold results in a paycheck of $5-10 in licensing fees. This includes not just the games you see in stores, but also the titles you can download off Xbox Live Arcade. There's also the money Microsoft makes from selling Xbox SDKs to the developers - since they have no choice BUT to buy it - unlike on the PC where Microsoft has much less control on what software is used. Furthermore, the console market is exponentially larger than the PC gaming market - and has been for years. Microsoft even makes money from online play on the console with its Xbox Live service - which is yet another area they're making exactly $0 off of PC gamers.
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Re:XP unable to support dx10 or what? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:XP unable to support dx10 or what? (Score:5, Interesting)
http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
It can be done, but Microsoft just wants people to jump to Vista. I think they are barking up the wrong tree. Gamers who want the best possible performance aren't going to jump to an OS that eats more resources and slows their rig down. I'll consider buying a Direct X 10 game the moment Wine/Cedega supports it.
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Re:XP unable to support dx10 or what? (Score:4, Funny)
You won't have to buy it. It'll be abandonware by then.
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Is Microsoft obliged to provide new technology for old versions of Windows, free of cost? Graphics card manufacturers are free to agree on alternative standards, such as OpenGL, to expose new features of their products without forcing an OS upgrade or locking game writers into a particular OS. Last I heard, OpenGL works fine on Vista, XP, Mac and Linux.
No, but they're smart if they do. DirectX keeps gamers wedded to the Microsoft tit. Let's be honest, the two drivers of PC tech are games and pr0n. When I made my choice between PC and Mac as a kid, I wanted the machine all my friends had and that was so we could share games. Going on a BBS? Hell, an Atari ST could do that with its cheesy 300 baud modem. My best friend had to suffer through that until his dad finally built a 386. But games? PC's were where it was at, at least for the then-current generatio