Posted on 02/27/2007 11:28:24 AM PST by ShadowAce
So you're saying these humans who become zombies when they drink Kool Aid? And they hate Microsoft? Wow, that's incredible!
2. There is plenty of spyware for both Linux and Mac computers.
Really? Human zombies and spyware on Macs? Good heavens, we should alert the authorities!
That article is unscientific. I know plenty of people in the field and I can assure you not everybody with a Ph.D. in C.S. produces quality work. I'm not familiar with Gutmann myself so I can't say for certain. All I know is that this does not include empirical analysis and hence isn't scientific - it's a propaganda piece written by an educated man with credentials. Much of what he says is true - just misleading.
The official word from Microsoft is that they don't constantly check unless protected content is playing. This doesn't include games. (Most evidence I've seen is anecdotal, but the majority of people claim to be seeing performance increases in Vista.)
You might consider that drivers have ALWAYS been polling hardware as it is a necessary function of operation. I find it amusing that people continually assume Microsoft has arbitrarily decided to implement constant driver polling.
Again, as I understand the whole DRM issue, it isn't a matter of Microsoft wanting to do this. If they want to support HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, and the like, then they have to incorporate DRM protection mechanisms. Otherwise, they simply won't play. The same things would happen in today's operating systems and will happen in any future operating systems that aim to support these media formats because the media formats demand it.
I don't fight for Microsoft - I don't care about them one way or the other. I do, however, fight against misinformation.
Again, the official word from Microsoft is that content protection is only active when DRM-protected content is playing (HD-DVD / Blu-Ray). The computer knows when DRM-protected content is playing; it doesn't make any sense to poll constantly.
As far as disabling hardware, I have absolutely no idea where you got that. Vista doesn't arbitrarily disable anything - as is true with any operating system, it the hardware doesn't support DRM-protected content then it can't play it.
I hope that is clear.
MS's official word means nothing. Games play video all the time. Am I to accept MS at their word, or trust my past experiences with their software? If MS loses the gamers, the repercussions will be far and wide.
Gamers have driven the graphics card industry and much of the Motherboard improvements over the past couple decades. If this group leaves, what they adopt as their next OS platform will directly effect MS's bottomline and will likely cause MS to have a real OS competitor.
You're absolutely right, but there's no reason (logically) to think that any video would automatically trigger DRM checks. Is it possible? Of course. I'm also not saying that Microsoft's implementation decisions are governed by logic - I know better than that.
I read an interesting article on Vista gaming on Tom's and it seemed to suggest that gaming on Vista is heavily driver-dependent. ATI's drivers produce nearly identical results on XP and Vista while NVidia's Vista drivers perform significantly worse than their XP drivers. It stands to reason that NVidia will soon release drivers that achieve performace at least equivalent to that of XP.
Between all the articles I've read on Vista gaming I haven't seen mention of DRM affecting gaming performance whatsoever. The consensus seems to be that drivers (some in their early stages) are clearly suboptimal. Otherwise, gaming on Vista shouldn't be any different from gaming on XP (performance-wise) and may even be better with further evolutions of drivers.
I don't even run Vista (my machine is far too old these days) but I probably will when I build a new machine shortly. The best tests are those you do yourself, and without those I can only interpret. I will say I don't think Vista gaming will be affected.
My gaming performance is about the same with either Vista or XP on as the OS. Mind you, I wouldn't dream of installing Vista on an old computer. I dropped $2000+ on new parts for my main Vista box (4 GB Kingston HyperX PC 8500 RAM, 500 GB SATA HD, nvidia 8800GTX video card, Intel BLKD975XBX2KR Motherboard, X-Fi platinum sound card (which is made useless as Creative doesn't have the drivers done yet!))
And as far as nvidia goes; yes, the drivers aren't quite there yet. I was using beta versions until the official release date, and then nvidia released the 'official' ones. However, they still need some work.
Very interesting. Do you know how Vista effects DirectX? I am assuming MS is keeping that, otherwise they are going to really infuriate the gamers.
I like Tom's Hardware for the straight scoop and his ability to do real performance comparison.
I had a Radeon9800 card go bad on me a few months before the warranty expired. Had to send it to Canada for a fix and they ended up sending me another card. That one started to have problems after about a year and I got tired of the problems its drivers had working with XP. I had originally upgraded to XP from 2K in the hopes that XP would resolve my game drops. It didn't. 2K actually seemed better for the games I run with the Radeon card.
I finally got feed up with ATI and bought the best NVidia card I could shove into my AGP slot. <<< Hence you see that I will soon need to pass this machine onto my kids and buy a new computer using the PCI or whatever is the latest MB graphic card connector is. NVidia seems to work alot better with XP than ATI did. I was constantly updating my ATI drivers and dealing with Catalyst. With NVidia, I don't think I have updated the drivers once yet. And yes, I always turn-on off auto-update everywhere I find it. I can game for hours without or before a game crash. I suspect that I am overheating the card playing BF2142 or have a intermittent memory problem.
Bottomline is that I'll stay with NVidia the next go around too. I do agree that if comparable ATI/NVidia cards ran the same on XP, they will likely run the same on Vista when NVidia updates the drivers. However, given my ATI experiences, it just may be possible that ATI never optimized their drivers for XP, where as Nvidia did. Thus ATI may work better on Vista when compared to NVidia, because ATI should have had a better framerate on XP and never got it quite right.
I know Vista supports DirectX 10 - I'm pretty sure XP won't support it. Saying it's exclusive is meaningless, I think, but Vista will be the only official support for DirectX 10 (at least now). I'm also assuming DX9 is included.
Oddly enough, I recently switched from NVidia to ATI on this machine (my laptop has an NVidia card). I used to have a Geforce 3 (this machine is nearly 6 years old) and then I switched to a 4600Ti. At that point, I didn't notice any difference in the games I played - mostly Unreal Tournament. At one point I was ranked 10th in the world, which depending on your point of view is a high point or a low point. In any case, the fan gave out on the 4600, but not before making a horrible, horrible (and uncorrectable) noise. So I switched to an ATI (9600XT) - not used for gaming much anymore. It's a pretty good card and it only ran me about $90, so I can't complain. On the plus side, my new monitor was way too bright, and the ATI drivers provided a really useful gamma correction that made the monitor picture fantastic (22" Viewsonic). I used to absolutely abhor ATI drivers as the ATI Fire card and drivers I had would routinely completely freeze the machine. A later Windows update saved the complete blue screen and instead kicked the machine back to 320x240 so I could at least save.
On my laptop - I think it's a 6800 Go Ultra, by the way - those drivers are pretty good too. I hook that machine up to my LCD to watch baseball games, and the drivers are pretty good about recognizing the LCD and automatically setting the correct resolution. I'm happy with those as well - for once in the history of ATI and NVidia I don't have a clear favorite.
I'm sure they'll be fixed within a month or two.
That sounds like one hell of a machine. (As long as it's not for World of Warcraft.)
Oh yeah? What about these zombies?
Not on MY box! It's all for EQ2!
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