Monday, October 29, 2007

Vista FUD

Relating a conversation between Nick, Adam and myself on Saturday.

Clarification here, here, here and here.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Fact: Bott encountered no DRM problems because no publisher has been game to activate the output quality restrictions for non-HDCP compliant outputs. I agree that Gutmann's fears of this being activated "by mistake" appear overblown.

Fact: Windows XP drivers cannot be used on Windows Vista, and the driver model has changed significantly. This forces manufacturers to rewrite their drivers, possibly losing features in the process, such as the Nvidia dual screen feature cited by Bott himself. Bott has absolute zero grounds for questioning Nvidia's assertion that it was the DRM aspects of the rewrite that made their old mechanism for providing this dual screen feature no longer viable. The fact that ATI used a different mechanism that still works is irrelevant: Nvidia's approach works on XP, but doesn't work on Vista, and it wasn't Nvidia that changed the driver model.

Fact: Measure your network throughput while playing a DVD. Wonder why you are only getting a few megabits of throughput on a gigabit network card (Hint: it's not the hardware).

Like all MS operating systems, you're going to be better off waiting for SP 1. Until decent games start coming out that are DX 10 only or significantly better in DX 10, there are zero compelling reasons to migrate away from XP.