More Evidence That XP is Vista's Main Competitor 428
Ian Lamont writes "Computerworld is reporting that Windows XP Service Pack 3 runs MS Office 10% faster than XP SP2 — and is 'considerably faster' than Vista SP1. XP SP3 isn't scheduled to be released until next year, but testers at Devil Mountain Software — the same company which found Vista SP 1 to be hardly any faster than the debut version of Vista — were able to run some benchmarking tests on a release candidate of XP SP3, says the report. While this may be great news for XP owners, it is a problem for Microsoft, which is having trouble convincing business users to migrate to Vista."
Mod parent "Troll" (Score:2, Informative)
Lemme clue you in, sparky:
10.4, 10.5- Major versions (Paid upgrades)
10.4.1, 10.4.2...10.4.10, 10.4.11, 10.5.1- Service packs (Free downloads)
Re:Games (Score:5, Informative)
Someone else.
You can download a preview here [blogspot.com]
Re:Games (Score:4, Informative)
Kind of a meaningless statement really. To say Vista is the only OS that supports it is to imply that other OS's are somehow less able, but DirectX is a microsoft only tool, written just for windows, which is the only OS family that needs it in the first place. Linux and the others don't need it.
Anyway, the only reason XP doesn't support it is because Microsoft decided to prevent people still using XP when directX10 takes hold.
For the pedants, yes there is Wine/Cedega, but that's an emulator.
Re:Mod parent "Troll" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:boredom is Vista's main competitor (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Games (Score:5, Informative)
Re:the ever elusive desktop (Score:5, Informative)
It's hardly impossible to buy a home PC with XP on it these days.
Re:the ever elusive desktop (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry, as an avid Ubuntu and WINE user, I couldn't help but laugh at that one.
Re:Games (Score:2, Informative)
Cart
Re:the ever elusive desktop (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think XP support is going away though... Heck, Lenovo's newest models still officially support Windows 2000.
Re:the ever elusive desktop (Score:3, Informative)
Re:the ever elusive desktop (Score:4, Informative)
vista needs a lot of work for me to switch back (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Games (Score:3, Informative)
For the pedants, there's also the fact that Wine Is Not An Emulator. Seriously though -- that's why WINE is more than a little scary to MS -- it's not an emulator, so it lacks the major performance penalties that are usually associated with them. Instead, it's a fairly fast re-implementation of the Win32 API layer -- and since it's portable, it could (in theory, if it every gets DX10 support) provide unofficial backwards compatibility to people that MS would rather use Vista.
Re:Games (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Games (Score:4, Informative)
examples are vmware, virtualbox, et al
Wine is a compatibility layer
meaning it just redirects win32 API calls to the equivalent linux API calls
AFIAK (never really looked into the source of wine, or I'm guessing a bit here), but
void direct3D_DoSomething(args)
{
}
becomes
void direct3D_DoSomething(args)
{
openGL_DoSomething(args);
}
Re:what about memory? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Games (Score:3, Informative)
Off the top of my head, zsnes is an emulator. It emulates the hardware of an SNES and allows you to run SNES games on hardware that the games weren't intended for.
Virtual PC for the old G4/G5 Macs emulated an x86 processor on PPC hardware, allowing Windows to run on hardware it wasn't intended for.
Emulation is slow. It requires translating machine level instructions from one hardware set to instructions for another hardware set, and often one-to-one translations aren't possible. Compatibility layers, on the other hand, provide a set of libraries that run on the same hardware as the original libraries. Compatibility layers could run just as quickly as the original libraries if the new libraries were written as well as the old ones.
So the reason it's significant that Wine Is Not an Emulator is that with emulation, performance loss is unavoidable, with a compatibility layer it comes down to how well the code is written.
That said, I don't think Wine is a viable replacement for DX10 that's going to kill Vista and keep XP around for another 10 years unless the product vendors ship the product with the libraries needed for the translations. I don't anticipate that the average windows user, even the average gamer, would be able or willing to spend their time installing these libraries just to avoid upgrading their OS. Some nerds who are adamantly opposed to switching away from XP may extend there stay a while because of such a solution, but it's not going to kill vista.
XP SP3 more than twice as fast (Score:3, Informative)
Re:the ever elusive desktop (Score:4, Informative)
Re:the ever elusive desktop (Score:4, Informative)
To the point that they click 'yes' when the rootkit comes around. Now if it had some sort of 'rootkit installation detection' and came up with the prompt 'It looks like what you're installing is a rootkit, are you sure you want to install this?', users might actually click no and give their computer person a headsup.
The main annoyance of this nature right now is access - every time I open up a database it has to warn me to be careful and that this database could contain harmful functions - Yet I built that database ON MY OWN MACHINE. It has no scripts that a default office install doesn't put in there. It's just a collection of a few tables and reports. Yet it warns me and makes me click another button - of course I'm going to keep opening stuff up! It asks every time!
Re:maybe M$ will port dx10 to XP (Score:3, Informative)
But when MS looks at this question, they see no reason to do it. In fact, it would cost them one of their main reasons to upgrade to vista.
As far as someone else doing it, unlikely. The most logical candidate for porting outside of MS is a game company, and as part of their licensing with MS they can't. Also, for any third party, it's not just a 'port' but rather a complete reimplementation since MS isn't going to share source. I think nobody who would do a good job will find value in doing such a port, so don't hold your breath.
Tungsten Graphics' Gallium3D (Score:4, Informative)
are creating a new technology called Gallium3D.
Basically it's a middle layer that rests between Mesa3D (openGL API) and DRI/DRM (low level drivers) and whose job is to export basic building block available on most modern hardware (shaders, etc.) in a standart way.
The thing is Gallium3D isn't restrict to Mesa3D for the API. A lot of people are speculating about the possibility offered by a potential WineD3D running natively on Gallium. (Instead of being an D3D -> OpenGL translation layer).
TGI's powerpoint presentation in fact contained an illustration where Gallium3D was used between a thin DirectX layer and low level drivers on Windows.
(Maybe, Intel could pay TGI so they also make DirectX/Windows drivers for their GPUs)
In the end such kind of technology could bring :
- Working DirectX10 on Windows XP (similar to Alky/FallingLeaf but using a thin DX10 Layer on Gallium3D backend).
- Working DirectX on Linux and ReactOS (either expanding a potential Intel i9xx D3D driver, or building a better WineD3D for Gallium3.
- Easier OpenGL 3 (which differs a lot from OGL1 and 2 - Instead of needing Mesa to be able to understand 2 radically different APIs, OGL3 could be handled by just having another API Layer running on Gallium backend)
- A nicer and simplier framework to get a 3D stack through OSS for any small player (Non-mainstream hardware maker, open hardware project or opensource team creating drivers for unsupported hardware). Up until now there was only MESA that did offer OpenGL 1/2 API, and required a lot of duplicate work inside the various hardware-specific libraries.
So, to go back to the discussion, Opensource projects (including contribution from Wine) starting to play an important role in game deployment : this is something that may become a reality sooner that we may think.
(And it's not that game developers are deeply against OSS : OpenAL, OGG/Vorbis and similar have already poped up un commercial projects from Id, Epic, etc.)
Re:the ever elusive desktop (Score:5, Informative)
At best, all you'll be able to do is write wrappers for fluff like shader model 4. And that's what it is FLUFF. The real features of directx10 are virtual video memory, gpu multitasking, and so on. This simply cannot be backported to XP using opengl wrappers.
Right now, most directx10 compatible games ARE directx9 games that are extended to use some of the directx10 rendering fluff, so its relatively easy to just stub around all the gpu multitasking, and just implement wrappers for the new sharder stuff. And then we see idiotic frenzies because 'omg! directx game X has been hacked to run on xp'
But the reality is that only the fluff part of directx10 can be wrapped like this, and it just so happens that the fluff part is the only part the new direct9/direct10 'hybrid' games are using.
But if they start releasing REAL directx10-only games that make use of gpu multitasking etc those stubs will have to do *something*, and XP just can't do it, the kernel doesn't support it. So either its going to run like a DOG as they write some kludge to thunk around the kernel limitation or its not going to run at all.
To use a car analagy, directx10 is like a 90's Porsche, and direct9 is one from the 80's. Sure with enough welding and grafting you could put the new body on the old chassis, and then you could release photos showing that the new xenon headlights work, along with the heated side mirrors, electric sunroof -- and you can even start it and drive it around... and it runs nearly as fast as the 80's 911 always did, which you'd expect given that's what the engine is, and the extra weight you've added.
But if you look closer you'll find out that the AWD and ABS is missing, the automatic ride height adjustment is gone, and the number 6 on your transmission knob doesn't actually do anything
Re:the ever elusive desktop (Score:5, Informative)
OpenGL is not platform dependant, but that is NOT the issue.
In another post you wrote:
DX10 and OpenGL are nothing than just APIs to the GPU! You can emulate both ways, IIRC MS first tried to emulate OGL using DX in the early Vista days. OGL 2.0/3.0 will have DX10-like features. Maybe some even are possible to emulate in OGL 1.5.
OpenGL and DirectX10 Direct3D as 'scene description languages' work like that. You can even implement OpenGL3 entirely in software and emit the frames to a laser printer. And each frame will look perfect.
That's not the issue, and never has been. DirectX10 is a hell of a lot more than just the Direct3D scene description APIs.
The issue is that directX10, in ADDITION to its 'scene description language' is ALSO a PLATFORM. It specifies that the hardware actually be able to do certain things. Its true you can get away with emulating those features but you'll take a performance hit, and possibly a stability hit if there are timing constraints tied into those features. (Not to mention you lose the right to use the directx10 logos).
Another part of the directx 10 platform requires the operating system to support certain features that Vista supports, but XP does not. XP cannot do virtual video memory or gpu multitasking. Period.
Imagine if DirectX required pre-emptive multitasking support. (not hard to do, it actually DOES)
How would you backport that to Windows 3.1? Which only supports cooperative multitasking. There is no real way of doing that short of upgrading the 3.1 kernel to support pre-emptive multitasking, at which point you might as well just give them the NT3 kernel, and NT3 drivers...
And that's where we are now. To give XP virtual video memory and gpu multitasking, we'd pretty much have to upgrade the xp kernel to vista...and require vista drivers.
Don't confusing DirectX10 with OpenGL. There is a part of DirectX that is interchangable with OpenGL and its an important part. But there is a big part of DirectX that is NOT.