Vista posts

Okay, not awards, per se, but at least some recognition of things that didn't suck -- stuff like improved performance and big price reductions (sometimes). Generational advancement in the CPU and video card arenas brought more power to our desktop systems than ever before. DDR3 stopped costing its weight in gold. The Phenom... got its ass handed to it all year long. (Seriously, AMD? You can't roll out a replacement soon enough.)

Also, one of the biggest legends in the realm of physical vaporware finally came to market, but BI doesn't see a lot of folks ponying up two grand for the Optimus Maximus keyboard. At least it made it to market after a rumor-and-tease gestation period that rivals that of Duke Nukem 3D.

There were a handful of big stories in the realm of gaming hardware in 2008, and, for a change, they were almost all good news for gamers.

Which bitter flavor of OS do you currently use? BI isn't interested in XP vs Vista or Windows vs Mac vs Linux, simply:

Alongside their announcement that all Games for Windows LIVE Gold membership features will be free effective immediately (and retroactively for games such as Halo 2), Microsoft also discussed the upcoming DirectX 11 upgrade to their game development API (Application Programming Interface).

Fortunately, unlike the Windows Vista-exclusive features of DirectX 10, DX 11 will offer full support for Vista and all future iterations of the Windows operating system. Full compatibility with all DX 10 and 10.1 features is also expected.

On the technical side, DirectX 11 will also add increased multi-threading resources to allow machines with multiple processes to take better advantage of certain titles. New compute shader technology will be available for developers to one day use a system's GPU as a parallel processor, and tessalation, which, according to the press release Big Download received via email, "blurs the line between super high quality pre-rendered scenes and scenes rendered in real-time," will also be available.

No information regarding a release date for DirectX 11 was made available, though most don't expect its release until sometime in 2009.

New PC buyers have until the end of today to finish deliberating between Windows XP Home/Professional and Vista. As of tomorrow, the decision to use an iteration of the Windows Vista OS will be made for you. How very... Microsoft.

CNET reports that "As of June 30, large PC makers will no longer be able to sell Windows XP-based PCs, at least on mainstream notebooks and desktops. Retailers will also have only until their current supply is exhausted to sell boxed copies of the operating system."

Outside of "mainstream" PC providers, XP will continue to be available "from smaller computer makers known as 'system builders' until January 31, 2009," as well as "so-called ultra-low-cost-PCs until June 30, 2010."

Welcome to MacMonday, a weekly column where we'll talk about issues related to gaming on Apple's platform beyond "Why isn't PC Game X coming out on the Mac?" In this inaugural edition, let's discuss Spore, Will Wright's latest masterpiece.

At this point in time, the closest we can get to playing Spore properly (until its release in September) is to download the Creature Creator demo. Like any downloadable, the first thing you'll want to do is check the required specs to make sure your box can run the game properly. When you come to that, however, you'll see that the specs make two requirements upfront: an Intel Core Duo Processor, leaving PowerPC Macs out of the loop, and OS X 10.5.3 Leopard. Let's take a look at what this means for Mac gamers.

Many gamers have opted out of upgrading to Microsoft's latest Windows operating system, Vista, due to a myriad of complaints. In spite of supporting DirectX 10 exclusively, gamers were dismayed by the strange drop in performance when switching over to Vista. Gaming performance dropped down about 10 percent when run on Vista environments, as opposed to XP. Now that SP1 is becoming readily available for download, benchmarking is finally possible.

The folks at Extreme Tech tried out Vista SP1 and XP SP3. There are improvements for both platforms, but Vista easily gains the most in this first patch. Whereas before, games on Vista produced lower framerates, they now perform identically to XP games. With driver issues finally being resolved on the maturing Vista product, gamers may finally make the leap to Vista ... provided they aren't waiting for the next Windows OS.