Question guys

"mark johnson" <mark-johnson RemoveThis @freeola.com> wrote in message
news:fndlh9$jih$1@energise.enta.net...
> Question?
>
>
> If a PC with these specs:
>
> Intel® CoreT 2 Quad Extreme QX6850
> 4 Gigs of Ram
> Dual NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI with 2 x 768MB GDDR3 dedicated video
> memory
>
> And its reached its full limits with games like crysis, then why would a
> console with just 512mb total like the PS3 and 360, plus not as powerful
> GPU's as just one 8800 GTX, be able to run anything more than the games
> its got right now?

Mark, the games we see can probably get a little better with graphics, as
developers learn to use the hardware. Keep in mind the 360 has three cores,
adn the PS3, 7. It will never be able to run a game like Crysis on a console
with the specs it has now, that can on a PC you give in example. It would be
watered down big time (look at Halo3 three, it wasn't true HD so they could
add more effects, it looked pretty good). I think what many people confuse
is that with many current games, they are developed all at the same time,
and many of those game looks great on a console as well on the PC. The PC
version will be way customizeable though. Take PC only games that are not
on a con sole in this gen and they blow away the consoles best looking games
with over graphics effects.


>
> This is not flaming BTW, I am generally interested in knowing, because I
> keep seeing everywhere on the net about people saying the PS3 / 360 can
> run games like crysis and that consoles haven't used a 1/4 of their power
> yet in the games right now.

They're wrong, only because the math doesn't add up. Your PC example would
handle well over double what these consoles can do and they are just
bragging. Console gaming is getting bigger and bigger and PC gaming isn't
because the technology allows for better looking games as consoles advance,
but PC don't stop advancing. But, you and I know that a tower with $3000+
(£1500+) in hardware will beat out today consoles. Tomorrows consoles
probably will be able to do what today's PCs can do, but tomorrow's PC will
more than likely have 16 cores with 8gig RAM and be all 64bit systems.
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

On Jan 25, 1:47 pm, "mark johnson" <mark-john....DeleteThis@freeola.com> wrote:

> Question?

That's nothing... Would you expect Doom 3 to run on a machine with
these specs?

CPU 733 MHz made by Intel
Graphics Processor 250 MHz custom chip by Microsoft and nVidia
Total Memory 64 MB
Memory Bandwidth 6.4 GB/sec
Polygon Performance 125 M/sec
Simultaneous Textures 4
Pixel Fill Rate no Texture 4.0 G/sec
Pixel Fill Rate 1 Texture 4.0 G/sec
Pixel Fill Rate 2 Texture 4.0 G/sec
Compressed Textures 6:1
DVD Rom 2-5x
Hard Disk 8 GB
I/O Game controller x4
Ethernet (10/100)
Audio Channels 256
3D Audio Hardware Support 64 3D Channels

And yet it did...

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages4/914444.asp

Even scoring one 10th of one percent higher than the PC version...

http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages4/469881.asp

Consoles have always outperformed equivalent PC setups for the simple
reason that there's no over-head. A console is designed for one
thing... gaming. Anything extra that a console does (Internet, HD-DVD,
Blu-Ray, Media Streaming) is cream. What a console has to do to
succeed is play games.

Take a look at the spec for running Gears of War on a PC...

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTQxNiwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA

"The required system specifications for the PC is Windows XP or
Windows Vista with an Intel 2.4 GHz or AMD 2.0 GHz or higher CPU, 12
GB of free disk space, an NVIDIA GeForce 7900 series or ATI Radeon
X1800/16x0 series and support for DirectX 9.0c and a broadband
connection and Games for Windows - LIVE Gold account for online
multiplayer."

Or Call of Duty 4:

http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=17802

"Required (min) Specs"
# CPU: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 2.4 GHz or AMD(R) Athlon(TM)
# 64 2800+ processor or any 1.8Ghz Dual Core Processor or better
supported
# RAM: 512MB RAM (768MB for Windows Vista)
# Harddrive: 8GB of free hard drive space
# Video card (generic): NVIDIA(R) Geforce(TM) 6600 or better or ATI(R)
Radeon(R) 9800Pro or better

Or you can just play them on an Xbox 360...

- Jordan
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

mark johnson <mark-johnson RemoveThis @freeola.com> wrote:

> Intel? CoreT 2 Quad Extreme QX6850
> 4 Gigs of Ram
> Dual NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI with 2 x 768MB GDDR3 dedicated video memory

> And its reached its full limits with games like crysis, then why would a
> console with just 512mb total like the PS3 and 360, plus not as powerful
> GPU's as just one 8800 GTX, be able to run anything more than the games its
> got right now?

Well, mainly the PC - unlike a console - has the burden of running Windows
on top of everything else. Think about this: Vista really wants about
1GB of RAM - and thats just to boot the OS. Any programs will need
additional memory, which is why you really need 2GB of RAM for a system
running Vista - if not 4GB.

Windows - and especially Vista - just isn't geared towards games. If
anything, DOS was a better environment simply because it allowed for
direct access to the hardware (good for speed), and was such a barebones
OS that you didn't have to worry about running a bunch of other stuff.


That's not to say that you could get Crysis working on a console. You'd
probably have to turn down the graphics quite a bit just to get decent
framerates. This could also be a matter of how well written the code is,
too. Used to be that to get real performance out of a computer, you'd
have to write things in assembly - giving you the most control over the
hardware, but at such a low level, writing programs in assembly was a long
and laborious process. Later on as hardware improved, only critical
sections of a program were written in assembly - the rest was just left to
the compiler to figure out. Nowadays, hardware is generally fast enough -
and cheap enough - that no one bothers with assembly at all, instead
sticking with relatively inefficient, high-level languages like C++ or
Java. While easier to write, these languages aren't known necessarily for
creating tight, efficient programs that are optimized for speed, memory,
and other things.

--
It's not broken. It's...advanced.
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

"Doug Jacobs" <djacobs.RemoveThis@shell.rawbw.com> wrote in message
news:13pl1tl2dks6na1@corp.supernews.com...
> mark johnson <mark-johnson.RemoveThis@freeola.com> wrote:
>
>> Intel? CoreT 2 Quad Extreme QX6850
>> 4 Gigs of Ram
>> Dual NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI with 2 x 768MB GDDR3 dedicated video
>> memory
>
>> And its reached its full limits with games like crysis, then why would a
>> console with just 512mb total like the PS3 and 360, plus not as powerful
>> GPU's as just one 8800 GTX, be able to run anything more than the games
>> its
>> got right now?
>
> Well, mainly the PC - unlike a console - has the burden of running Windows
> on top of everything else. Think about this: Vista really wants about
> 1GB of RAM - and thats just to boot the OS. Any programs will need
> additional memory, which is why you really need 2GB of RAM for a system
> running Vista - if not 4GB.

You're wrong on this. 1gig of RAM is the recommendation, and that is if
you're running some high end apps at times. It can run fine on 512megs RAM.
My system is 4 years old, 3.2gig oprocessor, 2gigs RAM, and I boot up and
after everyting loads in about 25 seconds, I still have about 80% resources.
The trick to this is, is learning what you don't need running at startup,
and many things can be disabled safely for the typical user in the Device
Manager/Services. I edit 1gig music files (they have to be made into
wave/audio file to the PC before I convert them to a digital format, e.g.
MP3, etc) and my page file still is barely being used.

>
> Windows - and especially Vista - just isn't geared towards games.

For now they are not en mass, but when I was at Best Buy after Xmas, I saw a
good deal of games with the Vista logo on them (Game for Windows icon).


> If anything, DOS was a better environment simply because it allowed for
> direct access to the hardware (good for speed), and was such a barebones
> OS that you didn't have to worry about running a bunch of other stuff.
>

Actually that was very bad because directly accessing the hardware could
cuase it to fail if something is wrong with the software controlling it. At
least Windows is the only thing that will crash if something is wrong in
today's OS. I can't say how many times DOS has cost a HDD full of files to
total losses because a program made it die. Also, the days where this was
pssoible, those OSes could only handle so much RAM, and the limitation is
that the most OSes that were DOS based, (up to Windows ME) those systems
could handle 2gigs RAM max, and that was hard to make it do on ME only, and
the largest file it could handle at any one time is 4gig, nullyfying today's
gaming bigtime. That's because DOS based systems ran (and can only run) on
the FAT filing format on HDDs. Also FAT could not journalize your filing
progress, whereas NTFS can and NTFS is secure and can be encrypted, FAT
cannot. If you had a crash on NTFS, it will recover your progress because it
made a journal of it.

NTFS format removed that limitation and RAM limitations. Also remember NTFS
OSes (Windows NT/ IBM warp OSes) were out long before even FAT16 , (as it is
today from Win2000 to Vista) and they don't boot up and use DOS in the
background like Windows ME, 98, 95, 3.* , etc.

>
> That's not to say that you could get Crysis working on a console. You'd
> probably have to turn down the graphics quite a bit just to get decent
> framerates. This could also be a matter of how well written the code is,
> too. Used to be that to get real performance out of a computer, you'd
> have to write things in assembly - giving you the most control over the
> hardware, but at such a low level, writing programs in assembly was a long
> and laborious process. Later on as hardware improved, only critical
> sections of a program were written in assembly - the rest was just left to
> the compiler to figure out. Nowadays, hardware is generally fast enough -
> and cheap enough - that no one bothers with assembly at all, instead
> sticking with relatively inefficient, high-level languages like C++ or
> Java. While easier to write, these languages aren't known necessarily for
> creating tight, efficient programs that are optimized for speed, memory,
> and other things.
>
> --
> It's not broken. It's...advanced.
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

"Tom" <noway.TakeThisOut@nothere.com> wrote in message
news:AoGdnQgxWJuyPgfanZ2dnUVZ_qelnZ2d@insightbb.com...

> Also remember NTFS OSes (Windows NT/ IBM warp OSes) were out long before
> even FAT16

Actually I meant FAT32
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

On Jan 25, 5:47 pm, "mark johnson" <mark-john....DeleteThis@freeola.com> wrote:
> Question?
>
> If a PC with these specs:
>
> Intel® CoreT 2 Quad Extreme QX6850
> 4 Gigs of Ram
> Dual NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI with 2 x 768MB GDDR3 dedicated video memory
>
> And its reached its full limits with games like crysis, then why would a
> console with just 512mb total like the PS3 and 360, plus not as powerful
> GPU's as just one 8800 GTX, be able to run anything more than the games its
> got right now?
>
> This is not flaming BTW, I am generally interested in knowing, because I
> keep seeing everywhere on the net about people saying the PS3 / 360 can run
> games like crysis and that consoles haven't used a 1/4 of their power yet in
> the games right now.

The people claiming that the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 will be able
to run Crysis in any form even remotely resembling a top-of-the-line
gaming PC are morons.

Even low-end gaming rigs are much more powerful than both consoles.
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

> You're wrong on this. 1gig of RAM is the recommendation, and that is if
> you're running some high end apps at times. It can run fine on 512megs RAM.

Come on now, for the longest time 'Recommended' specs in PC-Lingo
means it will run, but not how well. Yes, Vista can run with 512mbs
but I don't think I'd try it.

> > Windows - and especially Vista - just isn't geared towards games.
>
> For now they are not en mass, but when I was at Best Buy after Xmas, I saw a
> good deal of games with the Vista logo on them (Game for Windows icon).

The funny bit is, according to Microsoft Vista -is- geared towards
games. With the new DirectX and all they're trying to force gamers
into running vista exclusively. Of course right now its a step back
with framerates consistantly under XP with the same hardware, but what
can you do?

> Actually that was very bad because directly accessing the hardware could
> cuase it to fail if something is wrong with the software controlling it. At
> least Windows is the only thing that will crash if something is wrong in
> today's OS. I can't say how many times DOS has cost a HDD full of files to
> total losses because a program made it die.

Seriously? In all my years of happy DOS gaming I never had a game
'crash and destroy my hard drive'. Sure direct hardware access means a
software crash can require a reboot, but that doesn't mean your CD-ROM
drive is going to start melting or something. Also didn't the earlier
versions of Windows allow direct harware access as well? Wasn't
Windows NT/2000 one of the first to reserve that?

> pssoible, those OSes could only handle so much RAM, and the limitation is
> that the most OSes that were DOS based, (up to Windows ME) those systems
> could handle 2gigs RAM max, and that was hard to make it do on ME only,

Wasn't 128mbs the cut off on Windows 9x to where it didn't really
access passed that properly? I don't remember. A DOS based system
handling 2gbs of RAM doesn't really seem like a problem considering
when DOS was around memory sizes were a 1/10th of that at best. I
think your sizes are off. Having 2gbs of ram standard is a pretty
recent thing.

> the largest file it could handle at any one time is 4gig, nullyfying today's
> gaming bigtime.

I believe it was actually only 2gb.

= numsix
= http://www.villagebbs.com
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

On Jan 28, 10:49 am, numsix....RemoveThis@gmail.com wrote:
> > You're wrong on this. 1gig of RAM is the recommendation, and that is if
> > you're running some high end apps at times. It can run fine on 512megs RAM.
>
> Come on now, for the longest time 'Recommended' specs in PC-Lingo
> means it will run, but not how well. Yes, Vista can run with 512mbs
> but I don't think I'd try it.

"Minimum" requirements were what was needed to have the product
running at the lowest quality. "Recommended" requirements were what
was needed to have the product running well although not at the best
settings.

> > > Windows - and especially Vista - just isn't geared towards games.
>
> > For now they are not en mass, but when I was at Best Buy after Xmas, I saw a
> > good deal of games with the Vista logo on them (Game for Windows icon).
>
> The funny bit is, according to Microsoft Vista -is- geared towards
> games. With the new DirectX and all they're trying to force gamers
> into running vista exclusively. Of course right now its a step back
> with framerates consistantly under XP with the same hardware, but what
> can you do?

I don't see how they're going to accomplish that considering most
games released now run just as well, if not better, on XP as on Vista.

> > Actually that was very bad because directly accessing the hardware could
> > cuase it to fail if something is wrong with the software controlling it. At
> > least Windows is the only thing that will crash if something is wrong in
> > today's OS. I can't say how many times DOS has cost a HDD full of files to
> > total losses because a program made it die.
>
> Seriously? In all my years of happy DOS gaming I never had a game
> 'crash and destroy my hard drive'. Sure direct hardware access means a
> software crash can require a reboot, but that doesn't mean your CD-ROM
> drive is going to start melting or something. Also didn't the earlier
> versions of Windows allow direct harware access as well? Wasn't
> Windows NT/2000 one of the first to reserve that?
>
> > pssoible, those OSes could only handle so much RAM, and the limitation is
> > that the most OSes that were DOS based, (up to Windows ME) those systems
> > could handle 2gigs RAM max, and that was hard to make it do on ME only,
>
> Wasn't 128mbs the cut off on Windows 9x to where it didn't really
> access passed that properly? I don't remember. A DOS based system
> handling 2gbs of RAM doesn't really seem like a problem considering
> when DOS was around memory sizes were a 1/10th of that at best. I
> think your sizes are off. Having 2gbs of ram standard is a pretty
> recent thing.

Having Gbs of RAM at all is a relatively recent thing if we're talking
about PC gaming all the way back to the DOS days. Even Windows 2000
only required 64Mb of RAM which meant that most people were looking at
PCs with about 256Mb (512Mb if you were high-end) RAM. The only reason
I personally had 1Gb RAM at the time was because I was working with
Photoshop.

> > the largest file it could handle at any one time is 4gig, nullyfying today's
> > gaming bigtime.
>
> I believe it was actually only 2gb.
>
> = numsix
> =http://www.villagebbs.com
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

On Jan 28, 5:05 pm, Doug Jacobs <djac... RemoveThis @shell.rawbw.com> wrote:
> The King of Gaming <king.of.gam... RemoveThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > It works flawless for me, would never dream of going back to the
> > ancient XP.  You're falling victim to FUD put out there by Linux and
> > Mac fanboys.  It's funny to me that all of the people proclaiming XP
> > to be some kind of god-like system were obviously born after 2005.
> > When XP first came out people bitched and moaned and claimed 2000 or
> > 98 was better and that XP was rubbish.
>
> I've usedVistaand frankly don't see what the big deal is.  The whole UI
> has been rearranged (again!) making it difficult to find things.
>

Then frankly, you don't know what you're doing. Get educated, and try
it the right way.

Of course, you used to moan and groan 24/7 about next-gen gaming (in
particular the PS3) and now that you found them both under your tree,
all that's dried up hasn't it? Give Vista a shake, and stop inhaling
the FUD.
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

Tom <noway.DeleteThis@nothere.com> wrote:
> > Well, mainly the PC - unlike a console - has the burden of running Windows
> > on top of everything else. Think about this: Vista really wants about
> > 1GB of RAM - and thats just to boot the OS. Any programs will need
> > additional memory, which is why you really need 2GB of RAM for a system
> > running Vista - if not 4GB.

> You're wrong on this. 1gig of RAM is the recommendation, and that is if
> you're running some high end apps at times. It can run fine on 512megs RAM.
> My system is 4 years old, 3.2gig oprocessor, 2gigs RAM, and I boot up and
> after everyting loads in about 25 seconds, I still have about 80% resources.
> The trick to this is, is learning what you don't need running at startup,
> and many things can be disabled safely for the typical user in the Device
> Manager/Services. I edit 1gig music files (they have to be made into
> wave/audio file to the PC before I convert them to a digital format, e.g.
> MP3, etc) and my page file still is barely being used.

You've tweaked your system, however. Many people don't know how to do
this, and then complain when their computer is slow after it starts up all
5 dozen programs that all insisted they be started at boot-up...

> > Windows - and especially Vista - just isn't geared towards games.

> For now they are not en mass, but when I was at Best Buy after Xmas, I saw a
> good deal of games with the Vista logo on them (Game for Windows icon).

Meh. The sticker means nothing really. It's about as informative as
those stickers proclaiming "WORKS WITH PS2" you used to see plastered on
DVDs.

Vista still has driver and performance issues, and while more games run on
Vista now, not all of the older ones do, which is a problem... While
running some games under Vista allows you to use the new DirectX-10, those
same games will also run under XP, often with better framerates.

While things have gotten better, most gamers I know will stick with XP
until Microsoft pries it out of their cold, dead hands - or at least gives
them a very good reason to upgrade to Vista that doesn't require them to
sacrifice up to 30% of their system's performance just get to the desktop.

> > If anything, DOS was a better environment simply because it allowed for
> > direct access to the hardware (good for speed), and was such a barebones
> > OS that you didn't have to worry about running a bunch of other stuff.
> >

> Actually that was very bad because directly accessing the hardware could
> cuase it to fail if something is wrong with the software controlling it. At
> least Windows is the only thing that will crash if something is wrong in
> today's OS. I can't say how many times DOS has cost a HDD full of files to
> total losses because a program made it die. Also, the days where this was
> pssoible, those OSes could only handle so much RAM, and the limitation is
> that the most OSes that were DOS based, (up to Windows ME) those systems
> could handle 2gigs RAM max, and that was hard to make it do on ME only, and
> the largest file it could handle at any one time is 4gig, nullyfying today's
> gaming bigtime. That's because DOS based systems ran (and can only run) on
> the FAT filing format on HDDs. Also FAT could not journalize your filing
> progress, whereas NTFS can and NTFS is secure and can be encrypted, FAT
> cannot. If you had a crash on NTFS, it will recover your progress because it
> made a journal of it.

I never had a GAME destroy my hard drive. Windows 3.x, sure. But not a
game. For that to happen, the computer would have to crash during a
disk-write, which in games didn't happen very often. Even if the game was
using some form of virtual memory, having that corrupted wasn't a big deal
since it was always re-initialized when you started the game.

Granted, some game companies were better with drivers than others... I
can still remember the intricate balancing routines you had to go through
in order to get everything loaded in just the right order to just get a
game running. Back then, you had to practically be a systems engineer.

Win95 definitely made things better for game stability with its DirectX
architecture, but the trade off was performance. I think it was a fair
trade myself...I'd much rather have a slow but stable game, than one
that crashes all the time no matter how pretty it looked...


--
It's not broken. It's...advanced.
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

The King of Gaming <king.of.gaming.DeleteThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
> It works flawless for me, would never dream of going back to the
> ancient XP. You're falling victim to FUD put out there by Linux and
> Mac fanboys. It's funny to me that all of the people proclaiming XP
> to be some kind of god-like system were obviously born after 2005.
> When XP first came out people bitched and moaned and claimed 2000 or
> 98 was better and that XP was rubbish.

I've used Vista and frankly don't see what the big deal is. The whole UI
has been rearranged (again!) making it difficult to find things.

I don't see anything in Vista that makes a compelling reason to upgrade -
even if I do buy a new computer.


When XP came out, all the reviewers said it was worth upgrading - but only
when you bought your new system. Otherwise, the improvements and such
weren't really worth buying a whole new OS for - unlike when going from
DOS/Win3.x to Win95 or from Win95 to Win98/Win2k.

Meanwhile, Vista came out, and was named 2007's most diappointing product
by a major IT publication. Yeah, that's a ringing endorsement. Also,
it's not FUD that Vista launched with an incomplete set of drivers. While
you can pin some of the blame on the hardware companies, just what in the
world are you supposed to do with a OS Microsoft claims is the best thing
for gaming when none of the 3d cards were fully supported and the world's
most popular soundcard hardware vendor was saying they'd never be able to
support Vista at all?

What few actual improvements Vista contains are way overshadowed by the
unamious findings that Vista runs SLOWER than XP. That's not FUD. That's
fact.

--
It's not broken. It's...advanced.
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

geez all this PC talk makes me think its not worth it to go for a gaming
PC,too much hassle.

What's a good internet PC? live video,music DL,etc.

Why don't they come out with a bare bones gaming specific PC? Not like
Alienware but more of a stripped down but highly cappable gaming rig
without all of the unnessesaries?
 >> Stay informed about: Question guys 

On Jan 28, 5:22 pm, Doug Jacobs <djac... RemoveThis @shell.rawbw.com> wrote:
> Tom <no... RemoveThis @nothere.com> wrote:
> > > Well, mainly the PC - unlike a console - has the burden of running Windows
> > > on top of everything else. Think about this: Vista really wants about
> > > 1GB of RAM - and thats just to boot the OS. Any programs will need
> > > additional memory, which is why you really need 2GB of RAM for a system
> > > running Vista - if not 4GB.
> > You're wrong on this. 1gig of RAM is the recommendation, and that is if
> > you're running some high end apps at times. It can run fine on 512megs RAM.
> > My system is 4 years old, 3.2gig oprocessor, 2gigs RAM, and I boot up and
> > after everyting loads in about 25 seconds, I still have about 80% resources.
> > The trick to this is, is learning what you don't need running at startup,
> > and many things can be disabled safely for the typical user in the Device
> > Manager/Services. I edit 1gig music files (they have to be made into
> > wave/audio file to the PC before I convert them to a digital format, e.g.
> > MP3, etc) and my page file still is barely being used.
>
> You've tweaked your system, however. Many people don't know how to do
> this, and then complain when their computer is slow after it starts up all
> 5 dozen programs that all insisted they be started at boot-up...

That has been an issue with ALL OSes Doug, Vista somehow didn't just
become the exception. It's not the maker of the OS' fault that people
keep on not keeping up.

>
> > > Windows - and especially Vista - just isn't geared towards games.
> > For now they are not en mass, but when I was at Best Buy after Xmas, I saw a
> > good deal of games with the Vista logo on them (Game for Windows icon).
>
> Meh. The sticker means nothing really. It's about as informative as
> those stickers proclaiming "WORKS WITH PS2" you used to see plastered on
> DVDs.
>
> Vista still has driver and performance issues, and while more games run on
> Vista now, not all of the older ones do, which is a problem... While
> running some games under Vista allows you to use the new DirectX-10, those
> same games will also run under XP, often with better framerates.

Wrong, history proves this. When XP came out, it was way more buggy
than what Vista is now and had way less legacy support. Why do you
think Vista is so big, it took on amny of the drivers that XP supports
retaining them, then also has MS generic drivers support to aid in
Vista functionality. What you dexribe is growing pains of any new
operating system. What kills me, is that some do not care to learn
from that.

>
> While things have gotten better, most gamers I know will stick with XP
> until Microsoft pries it out of their cold, dead hands - or at least gives
> them a very good reason to upgrade to Vista that doesn't require them to
> sacrifice up to 30% of their system's performance just get to the desktop.

Again, Vista took on more legacy, something MS should stop doing while
actually helping hardware manufacturers out. It really isn't as bad as
you say. But having said what you just did, XP was more of a hog
trying to upgrade from 2000/98/ME than was XP to Vista. Vista uses its
resources much more effinciently trhan XP did. XP has been out for a
long time, so anythign with it is going to run smooth since it is well
broken. OSes don't stop moving forward, obstinate thinking does.

>
>
>
> > > If anything, DOS was a better environment simply because it allowed for
> > > direct access to the hardware (good for speed), and was such a barebones
> > > OS that you didn't have to worry about running a bunch of other stuff.
>
> > Actually that was very bad because directly accessing the hardware could
> > cuase it to fail if something is wrong with the software controlling it. At
> > least Windows is the only thing that will crash if something is wrong in
> > today's OS. I can't say how many times DOS has cost a HDD full of files to
> > total losses because a program made it die. Also, the days where this was
> > pssoible, those OSes could only handle so much RAM, and the limitation is
> > that the most OSes that were DOS based, (up to Windows ME) those systems
> > could handle 2gigs RAM max, and that was hard to make it do on ME only, and
> > the largest file it could handle at any one time is 4gig, nullyfying today's
> > gaming bigtime. That's because DOS based systems ran (and can only run) on
> > the FAT filing format on HDDs. Also FAT could not journalize your filing
> > progress, whereas NTFS can and NTFS is secure and can be encrypted, FAT
> > cannot. If you had a crash on NTFS, it will recover your progress because it
> > made a journal of it.
>
> I never had a GAME destroy my hard drive. Windows 3.x, sure. But not a
> game. For that to happen, the computer would have to crash during a
> disk-write, which in games didn't happen very often. Even if the game was
> using some form of virtual memory, having that corrupted wasn't a big deal
> since it was always re-initialized when you started the game.

Did I say games?, I said software (I generalized) and it has been
shown to hurt hardware, because it is trying to run it outside of the
operating system. You're totally at the mercy of the program
developer, which may not have your OS setup in mind when creating the
software; that's why DOS went out the window, it really didn't do much
anyway, and it had huge limitations, as I already noted.

>
> Granted, some game companies were better with drivers than others... I
> can still remember the intricate balancing routines you had to go through
> in order to get everything loaded in just the right order to just get a
> game running. Back then, you had to practically be a systems engineer.

Yes, and thank MS for plug-n-play OSes, that helped many of people who
would be totally lost,. I am going to assume you've had ex[experience
with Linux distros before? Even today, you have to use command line
install for most hardware to get it to work with them. Back before
even XP, it was a nightmare. People have problem with Windows now, let
then try installing their software/hardware drivers on Linux distros,
even of today without good'ol P-n-P.

>
> Win95 definitely made things better for game stability with its DirectX
> architecture, but the trade off was performance. I think it was a fair
> trade myself...I'd much rather have a slow but stable game, than one
> that crashes all the time no matter how pretty it looked...

And the third iteration of 95 was the first to use FAT32 filing
format, in which today couldn't swallow a small part of todays PC
games.
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