Vista Service Pack 1 - released tomorrow

[Twilight]

The Stig said:
Even the much-vaunted DX10 is nothing more than code-bloat and visually imperceptible 'improvements' at a 30% performance penalty.

I do have to agree with this. WTF is up with DX10?

My friend has a practical super computer (he's wealthy as hell) - we were playing around with frame rates on Crysis, and the game performed FAR better with DX9 than DX10, and the difference in visual quality was almost totally negligible. Maybe VERY subtle lighting differences, but those differences didn't warrant dropping almost 8-10 frames per second. Ridiculous.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I guess it depends on your definition of "negligible." Here's an example of what DX10 is capable of versus DX9.

Personally, I wouldn't do an OS upgrade for prettier lighting. But it's worth keeping in mind that many games won't take advantage of DX10's new features for a while.

 

[The Doctor]

Twilight said:

The Stig said:
Even the much-vaunted DX10 is nothing more than code-bloat and visually imperceptible 'improvements' at a 30% performance penalty.

I do have to agree with this. WTF is up with DX10?

My friend has a practical super computer (he's wealthy as hell) - we were playing around with frame rates on Crysis, and the game performed FAR better with DX9 than DX10, and the difference in visual quality was almost totally negligible. Maybe VERY subtle lighting differences, but those differences didn't warrant dropping almost 8-10 frames per second. Ridiculous.

That's one example. Another would be the DX10 modes in 'Company of Heroes' and 'Bioshock.' Both cause substantial performance degredation with almost no improvement in visual quality. Even DX9 games in Vista run at 10-40% slower than they do in XP.

As for 'all MS systems running slower than their predecessors,' I have one thing to say: OS X. Apple has managed to make each iteration of their operating system faster on the same hardware than the previous one. It can be done.

 

[Arrqh]

The Stig said:
As for 'all MS systems running slower than their predecessors,' I have one thing to say: OS X. Apple has managed to make each iteration of their operating system faster on the same hardware than the previous one. It can be done.

Apple, of course, doesn't have to worry about a multitude of vendors failing to provide driver updates. And gaming performance, which is really what we're talking about here, isn't exactly something that a many Apple users really look at closely... unless they're also running Windows.

DX10 is not "noting more than a code-bloat"... it's simply new, and isn't being fully utilized yet. Just like when DX9 came out or DX8, etc etc. Additionally, I'm not sure where you're getting the idea that Bioshock has "substantial performance degredation" in DX10 mode as that doesn't appear to be the case... at least, not on nVidia cards which at the time had much more mature DX10 drivers then the comparable ATI drivers. Again... this is a driver issue. Surprise surprise!

 

[Noname Given]

Twilight said:
Oh, definitely.

Vista gets something of an undeserved bad rap, but it's just a heavily skinned XP with a few bug fixes and rapidly disappearing compatibility issues.

So I'm not sure why so many people heap shit on Vista while singing XP's praises. If you don't like XP, you won't like Vista. But if you like XP, you're really not warranted in criticizing Vista (with the important exception of system resource usage), because it's effectively the same operating system.

There's not much that warrants spending the cash to upgrade from XP, but if it's on your shelf already, why not? It's marginally more stable (I crashed XP all the time, and I've never once crashed Vista).

So yeah, Vista is a mediocre but fully useable operating system. There's no real "risk" to it, particularly if you're comparing it to XP.

Well, my main beef with Vista: WindowsXP DOES NOT 'reserve' 20% of your CPU cycles for DRM (Digital Rights Management); even if you NEVER play a music/video/DVD, etc. on your PC.

Since MS considers that an 'important feature' of Vista (even though most componies say they didn't ask for it, and have their own independent DRM schemes); and is unwilling to modify their DRM implementation; that the main reason I'll only go to Vista IF I have no other option.

MS OSes are fat enough - why would I want one that purposely throttles my CPU performence, even when I'M NOT using anything that would make use of DRM?

 

[Flavius]

Twilight said:
Apparently this has been confirmed - this wasn't supposed to be released until the 15th...

Just FYI.

http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/web-sig...a-coming-feb-4/


No need to head to any link tomorrow - your computer will automatically start complaining that you should update.

According to this in Wired sp1 has been released to manufacturing. The official roll-out is not to begin before mid-March.