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The Vista Assault has Arrived

02.03.07 - 01:39pm

I don’t know if you watch much TV, read any magazines, or surf the Internet much but if you do then you may have noticed that .. no way.. Vista is really out! Microsoft has pulled all the stops in regards to advertising and will be hitting consumers on all fronts in hopes of recovering some of the $6 billion investment it has dumped into Microsoft Vista. Along with an operating system that’ll replace the aging Windows XP that launched in 2001, Vista comes with a bunch of new toys of which most important is the new DirectX 10. DX10 has pushed the graphical envelope once again with even more shader technology being packed into it making video game realism a possibility. A few other notable changes include a re-write of the TCP/IP handlers and the sound processing capabilities of the OS making multiple soundstreams a possibility.

This isn’t Microsoft advertising but I sure wish it was.

DX10

DX10 is by far the most exciting piece of technology in my opinion. OS security is great and making it faster is great but to be honest I was fine with the Windows 2000 interface. DX10 though will help me escape the drudges of college and allow me to create, enjoy, and destroy hundreds of various environments. I eagerly await the arrival of Supreme Commander and Crysis and hopefully both of these games will be playable on my system. Initial Crysis results have been disappointing with 8800GTXs struggling to push more than 30 frames per second, then again these were at 2560×1600 resolutions with all the settings cranked. I just need 30 FPS at 1650×1080 with all the eye candy cranked, hopefully 4GHz + a single 7900GTO will do the trick. It’ll be a few months till DX10 titles really begin to flood the market but most users won’t notice the difference with DX9 and DX10 games melding seamlessly. In related DX10 news, rumors indicated that ATI/AMD will be releasing R600 aka Radeon X2800 in early March. Ironically this will coincide with the launch of several DX10 titles, I wonder if this was coordinated. No matter though, even if R600 is a monster it will still have to compete against the G8x Nvidia series which has already been out in the wild for a month. By March 8800 prices will have plummeted with a new 320MB 8800GTS landing you under $300 for some amazing performance. I’m really looking forward to strapping two of these guys into an SLI motherboard.

Vista Performance

One of the biggest questions lately have been how will Vista impact 3D and non-3D performance? Gamespot has done a few tests comparing memory usage and performance in Vista and XP Pro to try and clear things up. Their results are quite stunning really and it’s worth atleast looking over the charts and graphs. I myself am currently in the process of downloading a copy of Vista Business and will be comparing both 3D and non-3D performance in Vista, XP Pro, and possibly a stripped version of Server 2003. I am very interested in seeing how Vista will perform and see how much I can cut down Vista, I don’t relish the fact that Vista may consume over 500MB idle.

I will surely have my plate full while playing around with 3 operating systems so it my once again be a while till I post. Thankfully that NT machine is finally up and running and I am almost finished benching for HWBot. This weekend will also mark the final corrections to this theme that have been delayed by almost a week. I will also be creating some sort of advertising scheme in hopes of helping to pay for some of the projected hardware purchases I have scheduled over the next 3 months. More on that once the place is actually looking good. Now look in awe at all of my trophies, each gold trophy is technicall a WR (world record) according to HWBot.

Category: News