ETQW and Operating Systems

(Chain-iT) #21

Does this mean ETQW will only be playable on vista :s gosh, I shouldn’t buy vista just to play this game untill XP is broken or I lost my cd key again. It ain’t worth it I think

(kamikazee) #22

Read Wils’ post with more precision. :wink:

(Rhoades) #23

learn to read.

(Logistikos) #24

I think I read somewhere that Vista may require 1 Gb of Ram to run properly, but that’s not an official fact. I’m mostly excited that Vista may end up pushing the hardware barrier higher when it comes to standard PC specs. It means games and programs will simply get more and more powerful with more technology available to consumers.

(Nail) #25

Graphics: Vista has changed from using the CPU to display bitmaps on the screen to using the GPU to render vectors. This means the entire display model in Vista has changed. To render the screen in the GPU requires an awful lot of memory to do optimally - 256MB is a happy medium, but you’ll actually see benefit from more. Microsoft believes that you’re going to see the amount of video memory being shipped on cards hurtle up when Vista ships.

CPU: Threading is the main target for Vista. Currently, very little of Windows XP is threaded - the target is to make Vista perform far better on dual-core and multi-core processors.

RAM: 2GB is the ideal configuration for 64-bit Vista, we’re told. Vista 32-bit will work ideally at 1GB, and minimum 512. However, since 64-bit is handling data chunks that are double the size, you’ll need double the memory, hence the 2GB. Nigel mentions DDR3 - which is a little odd, since the roadmap for DDR3, on Intel gear at least, doesn’t really kick in until 2007.

HDD: SATA is definitely the way forward for Vista, due, Microsoft tells us, to Native Command Queueing. NCQ allows for out of order completions - that is, if Vista needs tasks 1,2,3,4 and 5 done, it can do them in the order 2,5,3,4,1 if that’s a more efficient route for the hard drive head to take over the disk. This leads to far faster completion times. NCQ is supported on SATA2 drives, so expect them to start becoming the standard sooner rather than later. Microsoft thinks that these features will provide SCSI-level performance.

Bus: AGP is ‘not optimal’ for Vista. Because of the fact that graphics cards may have to utilise main system memory for some rendering tasks, a fast, bi-direction bus is needed - that’s PCI express.

(Rhoades) #26

system hog.

(kamikazee) #27

Pushing specs just for eye candy… Currently, you roughly use 5-10% of a PC’s capabilities for a usefull purpose. I wonder to which number this will decrease when these new systems come out…

(carnage) #28

2GB of RAM just for the OS gosh

(corvey) #29

Microsoft Vista, nothing new about it and is now better than ever before!

Microsoft Viruses. Instability. Spyware. Trojans. Adware…

(Sebultura) #30

Yeah, I’ll do the switch… but for Linux.

(SCi-Fi) #31

i would or may do when some of the bugs are worn out as i want a 64bit os, so when sp1 is outfor vista then yeah plus with dx10 :wink:

(ParanoiD) #32

I will get vista asap as it gets out! Ofcourse ill hack it cus M$ doesnt deserve the money they ask…

But why is everybody so negative about MS? 2 GB is only for vista-64 to make it go fast. 1 GB is enough, 1 GB is good for 32-bit and thats what we all have at this moment as well. 512 should be enough and only 512 is enough in my eyes on xp as well right now. 256 isnt enough, i use 300 mb when i am just internetting, MSN and listening music. And YOU DO NOT NEED all teh eye candy, there is as usual just an option to have the old skool windows theme. I don’t know what system u guys are using, but its 2006 and you cant say that a system from 1999 is still a good system. I still have running a PII 350 MHz, 256 MB over here and i am typing this message right now on it. I use windows XP SP2 on it and it runs fine. It has a long time to boot (after 10 mins im ready to go) but then it runs stable, quick enough and good. I don’t need a virusscanner on it which saves some performance as XP is way more secure then windows 98. I could put on Windows 98 and would boot faster but then would be more instable, no support, more virusses etc. etc. I think 90% or more here is using windows XP and I guess some had the same ideas about XP before it came out, just see. XP was in my eyes even heavier when it came out for teh systems at that moment then Vista will be. An Average midrange system is already AMD Athlon 3000+, 1 GB and a GeForce 6800GS these days, it would run Vista easy!

I have used the vista beta a few weeks ago on a laptop of a friend where we did try it out. It was teh 64 bit version. I didnt see anything go slower on a midrange model then in XP and still we had effects on. Everything seemed to go fast enough, even in a beta. The system specs were:

AMD Turion ML-32 (1.8 GHz, 512 kb) = AMD Athlon 64 3000+
1 GB DDR 333 (single channel)
ATI Mobility Radeon X700 128 MB.

Everytime we got promped a screen to enter the password to install something! Vista really improves teh security jsut liek Linux and Mac OSX. First see vista and try it before you start bashing it, it wont be that bad at all!

(Nail) #33

maybe around 90% are windows users, but lots use 2K

(kamikazee) #34

Finally some good news.
I’m just studying on how to setup permissions on a Windows Server box and the domain around it, and I can say that it takes quite some work to make it really secure.
I hope that Vista defaults to more secure settings…

(corvey) #35

OK, we have a multi-billion dollar company called Microsoft charging on average 300 per copy of their operating system. Every couple of years they come out with a new operating system to fix the previous fuckups they made. Why in the hell would you pay to get ripped off again when you can just have a secure linux server for FREE and just use whatever wincrap version you have now to play games on?

Microsoft is overcharging by at least 200%… If you have to buy a new operating system every year or two, then the price should be a lot lower. Think about it…

Do you really want to give Bill Gates another 300 dollars? I’m sure he probably won’t even send you a nice email thanking you for the extra pocket change.

(Sauron|EFG) #36

The recommended amount of RAM for XP Pro is 128 MB (64 MB is the minimum!), and all know how well that runs. If that’s how Vista runs with 1GB it’s unusable for most ppl. :stuck_out_tongue:

Most people spend their time running aplications, not using the OS itself, so even if the average computer has 1 GB RAM it’s a bad idea for the OS to hog that much resources. Modern games wants a lot of memory, so you’ll need a 2nd GB to avoid swapping out the entire OS.

(Rhoades) #37

5gb of RAM should be sufficient for running Vista, and running games.

(Nail) #38

I’m not as concerned about O/S updates for $200+ every couple of years as I am with Vid Cards that cost $800+ and come out quarterly just to see the eye candy in a game that just gets turned off by most gamers

(SCDS_reyalP) #39

$300 what ? Surely not USD. The ‘home’ editions usually cost < $100, and most corporate customers don’t pay full retail for each seat.

Vista will certainly offer some good features and improvements, but from the sound of it, it will also bring a lot of bloat. 2k/XP were certainly a worthwhile improvement over 9x. MS will no doubt try to encourage people to migrate by making as many apps as possible vista only :banghead:

Back to the original topic:
It isn’t even clear that whether ET:QW or vista will ship first, so that pretty much eliminates any chance of ET:QW being vista only. If ET:QW ships first, it would be normal practice for QA to test it on whatever the latest vista beta is, but still say it is officially unsupported on vista (since it wasn’t tested on the final). If there are serious problems with ET:QW on vista, there would no doubt be a patch at some point.

(B0rsuk) #40

I want my operating system to be a platform for running apps, not a resource hog.

In my work there’s no xp anywhere. All workstations use win2k, servers use linux and freebsd. Good luck making us switch to vista.