What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away

[Ralf Maximus]

It's not just Microsoft, it seems.  Here's an article citing the makers of FarCry & Crysys with the same behavior:

http://www.rlslog.ne...s-me-sick/#more-5980

Not only that, but it appears Crysys was intentionally tweaked to display crappier graphics on DirectX 9 than on 10.  Hackers have patched the Crysys demo to look exactly the same under DirectX 9, despite the maker's claims that they rely on features available only in DX10.

Which begs the question: why would a videogame manufacturer try to force customers to DirectX 10, available only on Vista?

[f0dder]

Which begs the question: why would a videogame manufacturer try to force customers to DirectX 10, available only on Vista?

-Ralf Maximus (November 20, 2007, 12:26 PM)

Duh?

Why would DX10 be Vista-only, when there's no reasons it couldn't be implemented for XP?

Why was Age Of Empires III artificially XP-only?

[Ralf Maximus]

Which begs the question: why would a videogame manufacturer try to force customers to DirectX 10, available only on Vista?

-Ralf Maximus (November 20, 2007, 12:26 PM)

Duh?

Why would DX10 be Vista-only, when there's no reasons it couldn't be implemented for XP?

Why was Age Of Empires III artificially XP-only?

-f0dder (November 20, 2007, 12:36 PM)

The primary difference being AOE is a Microsoft product, Crysys is not.  That MS would do this makes a twisted, evil kind of sense.

But how to explain the behavior of an independent company who (one would assume) benefits most by supporting DX9?

[lanux128]

It's not just Microsoft, it seems.  Here's an article citing the makers of FarCry & Crysys with the same behavior:

http://www.rlslog.ne...s-me-sick/#more-5980

-Ralf Maximus (November 20, 2007, 12:26 PM)

things were much simpler & more in perspective when it was only Microsoft.. what about printer manufacturers who add more and more "features" in terms of software, drivers, print monitoring tools in each of their newer models..

[Lashiec]

But how to explain the behavior of an independent company who (one would assume) benefits most by supporting DX9?

-Ralf Maximus (November 20, 2007, 08:10 PM)

nVidia invested a lot of man hours helping Crytek with the technical side of Crysis, the game runs great on a 8800 GT, the new and impressive graphic card from them... connect the dots

And Crytek now says DirectX 10.1 (supported by the new Radeon 38xx) it's not a big deal. More signs!

It happened before. Halo 2 was exclusive for Vista... until hackers made it run in XP. IIRC Age of Empires II could not run under Windows 2000 (see a trend with Ensemble Studios/Microsoft games?), Doom III was NT-only, until someone learned to use an hex editor, and discovered why it could not run (a simple API that was named differently under NT OSs), etc.

[f0dder]

In the case of Doom III, I don't think ID has deliberately tried to make it NT-only... but they might have done the sane thing and not worried about 9x compatibility. There is quite a difference in that regard, considering all the limitations 9x has.

But from 2k->XP there isn't really a lot of new and incompatible stuff added, and those XP-only games... well. foo.

[nontroppo]

Here are another set of benchmarks, showing on average a 24% slowdown of Vista compared to XP. The benchmarks are aimed at windows virtualisation on OS X, but they tested straight bootcamp installs of XP and Vista (thus native):

http://www.mactech.c...ualizationBenchmark/

[Armando]

Thanks nontroppo. Interesting stuff.

On another note, I wonder... How can Windows XP under bootcamp run faster than on "a PC"... ??? Doesn't it only depend on the machine's specs ???

The machines specs are :

PC : Fujitsu Lifebook A6025, with an Intel Core Duo running at 1.86 GHz, 1GB RAM, running Windows XP SP2.

MacBook : 2GB RAM machine, running a 1.83 GHz Core Duo processor.
MacBook Pro : 4GB RAM machine, running a 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo processor.
Mac Pro was a 4GB RAM machine, running a Quad Core configuration with two 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon processors.

[nontroppo]

I suspect that is comparing the Macbook to the Lifebook - 0.03 clock slower but 2X the memory.