Every post you've made in this thread is chock full of Vista paranoia. Know how much is done on a single CPU cycle. It's a lot. There are far larger wastes of CPU cycles going on. For example, on my computer, just going through the Task Manager, the following are wasting my CPU clock cycles: SoftModem Messaging Applet - I don't even use my modem! Apple Mobile Device Service - I lack both an iPhone and an iPod! ATK OnScreen Display - Virtually worthless, yet it explodes if it's not there, whether or not it's XP or Vista. Six ( :IMHO!: ) processes associated with AVG. iPod Service Module - Again, no iPod. iTunes Helper Module - What does this even do? Java Update Scheduler - Oh, fun. Bonjour Service - Great. Use that a lot . Microsoft Sync Center - I don't think I've ever even set up a device synchronization. Windows Defender UI - Great, load the UI for something I never touch. Three ( :IMHO!: ) prcesses for Nero Home. PowerDVD Remote Control Service - I haven't a remote control. Steam - I'm not playing any games, why does that need to be open? Trillian - I'm not chatting with anyone, yet there it is, actually registering percentages of the CPU and about 20 megs of memory. WMP Network Sharing Service - Not really interested. WMP Network Sharing Service Configuration Application - Why isn't htis built into the above? And yet, of all the Windows-related services that actually register as having hits to the CPU greater than 1 percent, It's only a lone svchost or two with one percent and the kernel itself hitting 1 or 2 percent. Yeah, that's a huge CPU hit to check all those drivers. I just wanted to single this out because it doesn't make a goddamn lick of sense. Yes. And this is where it's laughably fun. XP will never have legal HD content on it because of it. Apple will be going down the DRM road too with Leopard. The producers of the media strongarmed them into it. And, of course, since there are few Linux distros that will pull their heads out of the sand long enough to even consider DRM, they won't be getting it either. When it comes to production of consumer operating systems, nobody wants to be left out in the cold on this, because whether or not HD-DVD or Blu-Ray take off, HD content will be hitting the desktop one way or another, and it is a consumer demand. First, your source is laughably biased. I skimmed over it before in researching the topic. Secondly, I'm fairly certain a lot of this isn't solely due to DRM paranoia. It's due to security. Vista basically sandboxes you, and you have to go through layers of protection to get at anything important. While that would be the logical place to put anything DRM, it's also good to protect the rest of the operating system as well. Third, I'm on a relatively old system and I don't have problems with The Sims 2 at all running Vista. Fourth, device drivers don't really wake up or go to sleep. They're just kinda there. Uhh...no? I was just demonstrating that it's not some magical formula the system uses to determine protected commercial content. It's sitting right there in the file. Hence, my copy of CTRL-ALT-DEL.avi, provided by Windows XP itself, will not be suddenly regarded as protected content under Vista and forced through cryptology. If you're downloading movies off of the Internet, it really doesn't matter what OS you're using - any limiting factors would have already been stripped out. Really, Vista's security track record has been pretty good. DRM schemes might have been broken, but there have been few viruses targeting it, few dramatic needs for patches, etc., etc. I think, thus far, it's had a much better track record than XP did at this stage of it's life. It really isn't. Once again, I've not had a single problem with it in Sims 2. Haven't had a single problem with it in any of my games. And this is on old hardware too - this ain't some media powerhouse. Bus protection is good for stuff beyond DRM, and you just need to deal with it. In any case, RJHJ, that is certainly fair enough. XP's tried-and-true by now, so it's a good safe bet.
I experience no slow-downs or problems with Vista. Yes, I do use 2GB of Ram for it, so I'm sure that's part of the reason. It runs great for me. WoW runs flawlessly and since Vista manages dual-core processors better than XP, I can actually multi-task WITHOUT any slow-down. The only problem I have is with Vista's built-in Zip compression management. It runs balls ass slow, because of course, I think they rushed integrating with with UAC and Vista security. It can sometimes take so freaking long, you want to beat your computer. I solved it by using my registered copy of WinRAR as default for all compressed files. Of course, I'm on my first ever installation of Vista and plan on re-installing, now that I know most of the ins and outs. I loved XP and if I hadn't built a new PC, would have probably kept using it. However, that being said, Vista is 100x better than XP was when it was first released. Hell of a lot less problems and I haven't had any driver issues, except at first with ATi drivers not responding, because the driver fan control was whack. Anytime the fan would kick into higher gear, I'd get a black screen for a few seconds while the video driver rebooted. ATi recently fixed this however and now it's running perfectly again. 80-100fps in WoW is not bad by any means.
It seems like you are saying that HDCP was something that MS DECIDED to implement to aid in anti-piracy. The fact is that without HDCP, you couldn't get full quality AT ALL (like in all non-vista OS's afaik). The point you are missing is that HDCP is required to use blu-ray or HDDVDs without downsampling... you can't just "choose" to not use it if you want the full quality. So by picking an OS that doesn't support it, your content is going to be downsampled ALWAYS (even if all your hardware is HDCP compliant). It seems like you are saying that by avoiding to put this standard "in your box" you can avoid the downsampling debacle... you can't without using an illegal software crack. And, as I said before, an illegal crack is an option for individuals, but definitely could never be packaged with an OS if they want to avoid lawsuit hell. So, I suppose they could've just left out HDCP compatibility completely... then we'd hear bitching about how bad they suck for not allowing people to play blu-ray or HD-DVDs at full quality. As Kyle, said, it's not like this was "an option" for MS. It's simply the reality that in order to support these formats legally you must use this fucked up HDCP system because the movie industry is so scared about piracy they would rather alienate a lot of legitimate customers by making them waste cash and confusing them than let free copies get out. The joke is, of course, free copies are getting out anyway.
As far as Windows goes, I don't think I need to upgrade to Vista... if I want HD content, I'll download it, or wait for the AACS version x.y crack or whatever it takes. The MPAA went too far this time. My screen has the resolution for HD video, my video card has the VRAM and bandwidth for HD video, my OS, any of them, are capable of loading, buffering, rendering, and blitting HD video, and I'll be damned if I have to replace those just to assuage the MPAA's paranoia. I'm sure I'm closer to the average consumer than MS and the MPAA would like to admit. The only remotely compelling things in Vista are DX 10 and .NET 3.0. If MS is smart, they'll eventually release their own games on XP, same as all the other vendors do.
DirectX 10 does some seriously crazy shit and pretty much can't be ported back to XP because of how the OS works with the hardware. Thus, if the game uses DX10 features, it pretty much needs DX10. That being said, the idea of Halo 2 being a Vista exclusive is absolutely absurd, since it used the same damn engine as the first, which runs on XP just fine.
One key feature is the "unified shader" which does both pixel and vector operations (as well as the entirely new "geometry shader operations"). This means that unlike with dx9 hardware, you won't have to worry about vertex shaders being idle while pixel shaders are at full load, or vice versa... the shaders can be assigned dynamically to different tasks as the need is required. Another thing is the way draw and object calls are made. In DX9, there is a lot of overhead on each call, which really limits the amount of objects that can be present at any given time. With DX10, one of the biggest improvements is reduction to this overhead, as well as allowing a single call to create multiple objects. For example, with an RTS game, you could have a whole squadron of tanks all called at once, even though they all are using different animations at any given time. Previously, you had to make a call for each unit, which is why you haven't really seen many war games with "large scale" battles. The largest I have ever seen is with Total War series, and that is still limited to about 1000 per player (and even these troops do not act individually, they are restricted to units that act as a whole). Another HUGE change that developers love (and gamers should too) is that vendors are not allowed to "partially" support DX10 like they could with DX9. This means that if you buy a DX10 card, it supports EVERY DX10 feature, and that means that devs can have confidence that when they use a certain feature, it will come across to the end user. Here's a short and sweet article that gives a lot of info without being a gigantic read: http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/dx10/
Oh and FYI, from what I can tell, Virtualization capability of the entire graphics hardware is what limits DX10 to Vista.
Very interesting... got a link to any info on the last bit? That sounds like the only barrier to backporting DX10 to XP.
There is a group trying to backport it to XP, but it's being done by offloading a lot of stuff to the CPU, meaning you'd need a pretty powerful CPU to handle tasks that really should be handled by the GPU and/or Vista features.
Can't find much specifically stating WHY the virtualization is not possible on XP, just info on what the virtualization promises to do. Mainly it allows MUCH faster switching of the GPU to other tasks, as well as of course sandboxing the game so that if it kerplodes, your GPU won't need to be restarted like it does in XP. A personal example I can give which I think many windows gamers could relate to is the dreaded "windows key during fullscreen game". Certain game engines basically result in either a crash, or nearly a whole minute of waiting when this happens. The menu pops up, and u wait forever as the gpu switches from the game, to the menu, back and forth as it "Fades in". In Vista you see either an immediate minimization of the game or you simply see the menu pop up over the video without any slowdown. I don't see a port of DX10 for xp that doesn't suck coming any time in the near future (and by that I mean near enough that you wouldn't have gotten vista)... at least not without support from nvidia and/or AMD.
