13th November 2007, 5:20 PM
Quote:The more I read about Vista though, the more I realize just how much I don't ever want to upgrade to it. It just removes way too much. I mean, DX10 has utterly removed hardware accelerated sound! That's nuts. Bioshock plays fine on my machine but I can imagine if I turned off the X-Fi acceleration I'd see a small dip in frame rates. I got that nice sound card for a reason MS! Meanwhile, Creative has been working with all sorts of game companies to show them how to code in hardware accelerated sound alongside DX10 support. It is just annoying to have to program like that instead of using the same layer for everything, and I have to wonder what methods Creative is showing them to use... The point of an abstraction layer, well one point among others, is backwards compatibility so long as that abstraction layer exists. That's why every single one of my old games that actually uses DirectX (or OpenGL actually) still works flawlessly in XP, and it's the pre-layer stuff often needs tweaking. Then again, if it's just coding for Creative's driver set then that could work too. Creative did murder every other sound card competitor in the early 1990's, so as long as their new drivers continue to support the old X-Fi calls these games will be as compatible as ever.
The loss of hardware EAX is a pain. The main replacements are OpenAL (the audio equivalent of OpenGL) for new games, which works fine in Vista, and for legacy support a Creative app called ALchemy, which does EAX emulation (EAX to OpenAL or whatever) for certain games Creative has programmed it to support. This means that some games are indeed stuck without hardware sound acceleration support, but some, at least, do still have it.
... oh yeah, did I mention that I have an X-Fi card in this PC? I thought that a real sound card was essential, and Creative is the only place that makes them these days...
Quote:Indeed I have. I've played the demo on my own machine. One thing though. The highest graphics settings are greyed out. So... yeah. Second highest is playable but only barely. It is only smooth when I set it at something nice and low.
I know why those highest graphics settings are greyed out though. They utilize features of DX10. Mind you, my graphics cards don't support DX10 features anyway even if I had Vista, but there it is.
I've got a DX10 card of course so I can set it to max, but the framerate is bad and it's not THAT different... I've seen comparison shots and there are some small differences for sure, but yeah, High does look quite nice.
Quote:This is on top of things such as what ABF notes. Namely, the lack of full screen DOS support. This actually stems from one important thing, specifically that Vista has no support for DOS based screen modes, so it can't do any of the old DOS resolutions, thus it can't do any full screen DOS.
This one's the one thing I really miss outside of a few minor program incompatibilities. It's so, SO frusterating, because windowed DOS runs fine (or at least as fine as it ran in XP, that is; it's not near-perfect like Win9x, of course), but as soon as a program tries to go fullscreen... "not allowed".
Quote:Oh, let's see, what else. Ah yes, Vista 64-bit lacks support for 16-bit apps. I understand what's going on there, and they did find a way to get proper 32 bit support in there, but my question is if they had 32 bit support, couldn't they boot strap 16 bit support INTO that 32 bit support, since that's how they got 16 bit apps working in 32 bit mode to begin with? I'm not expecting it to be resident in memory the entire time, but rather just a subsystem that can be put into resident memory only when one attempts to load a 16 bit app. That said, I don't know how difficult coding such "on the fly" loading would be in an OS, as I have zero OS coding experience.
64-bit computing already has to emulate 32-bit stuff, pretty much... I can understand why they'd leave out 16-bit stuff, being as unimportant as it is for most people. I never even thought of getting Vista 64-bit though, of course, due to the massive incompatibilities with ... well, anything not written specifically for 64-bit OSes... I think that Vista 64-bit is right now what Windows NT or 2000 was in the late '90s -- an OS with a specific purpose that has not been tooled for the general public yet. It took XP to do that to the NT core, by adding in a lot of Win9x and DOS compatibility; Vista x64 isn't at that point yet.
32-bit does have limitations, such as that 32-bit Windows can't see more than 2GB of RAM at a time per program, and often not more than 2GB at all, so putting in more than 2GB into a system with a 32-bit OS might not be worth it, a limit which is beginning to matter, but even so, 64-bit computing has a long way to go to catch up to 32-bit systems...
Quote:I'll also note a few hardware incompatibilities, like no ISA slot support any more, but I expected that, and the one stickler I had (no Game Port support) can actually be resolved by installing a legacy driver. Further, they lack the old help system software, but that too can be installed into Vista for viewing old help file documents. These are examples of what they can do to add support for things, optional components.
ISA is irrelevent, they stopped putting those card slots on computers in the '90s... I have heard about the gameport thing though, and as you say, because you can fix the problem, it's not a major issue, given that there is a way to add in gameport support into Vista if you have a card with a gameport on it (Modern Creative soundcards do not, only their older ones or old dedicated gameport cards do). Finding a way to get a soundcard or something with a gameport on it functioning in Vista while simultaneously using another soundcard, a much newer one (X-Fi for instance), as your main soundcard, seems like it'd be the main challenge, not getting that gameport to work once you manage to resolve those difficulties. Of course, the other option is simply to buy new USB gamepads and joysticks...
Of course in addition to getting rid of gameports Creative also dropped their DOS SB16 emulation drivers that allowed DOS programs to think that your SBLive! or whatever was a SB16, meaning that even if DOS DID work in Vista you'd probably have no sound (or joystick, without the gameport joystick support, given that DOS can't see USB as far as I know)... Microsoft and Creative both have a hand in the death of native DOS support, and a new Windows XP system with a modern Creative card won't be much better for native DOS support than a Vista system, really... unless there's an emulator that fixes this sound problem for DOS games in XP on systems without a Creative card that has built-in DOS SB16 support?