NO COD6 MW2 for clans

[HD0087]

Originally Posted by Gazz

No, windows marketshare is actually falling and it has been for quite some time.

It's called depression, Their shares will jump back with everyone else eventually and talking about Windows7 sales less than a week from retail release is pointless. That OS is going to sell well just because of the price point of around 99€ for the basic Home Premium.
Its sales will hit the high point when Nvidia brings some competition to DX11 market.
Gaming is for sure the highest motivator to drive windows sales.

Richard, DX11 is well received in developer communitys. Dice upgraded their Frostbite engine months ago and compute shaders are a huge thing to the industry so its not going to flop.
DX10 was as bad of an "flop" DX has ever been so do you rly think DX11 would do even worse?

[Richard_Rahl]

Originally Posted by HD0087

It's called depression, Their shares will jump back with everyone else eventually and talking about Windows7 sales less than a week from retail release is pointless. That OS is going to sell well just because of the price point of around 99€ for the basic Home Premium.
Its sales will hit the high point when Nvidia brings some competition to DX11 market.
Gaming is for sure the highest motivator to drive windows sales.

Richard, DX11 is well received in developer communitys. Dice upgraded their Frostbite engine months ago and compute shaders are a huge thing to the industry so its not going to flop.
DX10 was as bad of an "flop" DX has ever been so do you rly think DX11 would do even worse?

Well, it is a possibillity. Consumers won't necessarilly jump to the shops to buy a Radeon that costs more than 200 euro (the cheaper 5xxxs probably don't beat the 48xxs and their Nvidia equivalents in raw performance). And according to Hardware.info magazine, The GT300 is so expensive to manufacture that it will never cost less than 500 euro. Additionally, Nvidia has designed the GT300 as a chip that is mainly aimed at gpgpu and not at gaming (though the latter is well possible with it of course).

DirectX 11 gaming:
- 120 euro (so 99 dollars for the Home Premium can't be correct) for a Vista Service pack sold as a "new" OS that is misnamed "7" (should be 6.something).
-200+ euro for a graphics card.

Which makes: 120 + >200 >= 320 euro

There are odds that a lot of people will spend that money on their next console. Despite things like "tesselation" and "DirectCompute", of which only true geeks will actually know what that is and actually care for. Most others won't care. They just want to play their games, if possible with nice graphics. But they will possibly (it is likely, but I am not absolutely sure) not buy any piece of new technology that only promises some vague things to them (except for the "Service pack" that is called "7" off course, because they really think it will be faster but it is not in most cases).

And of course are the devs positive, because from a technological perspective it is their best alternative. openGL lays behind in features (because those who use it don't demand more of them, afaik), is more designed for other apps than games (they say so, at least), and I have heard that devs complain about the relative difficulty to program for openGL games.

And once devs see that in practice, only AMD cards supporting the new technology are being sold in sufficiant numbers to make implementing DX 11 worthwhile, they will probably drop it and go back to version 10. I mean, what is the point implementing something that is only compatible with only one of the main brands? Intel chips will be too weak for a while, nvidia may get a serious sales problem, and AMD is the only one left.

Conclusion: I hope the game devs make their games compatible with DirectX 10 too (as a "spare tyre"), because it is hugely possible that console gaming is going to hit them very hard if they don't.
PC gaming won't die I think, but it will get into a coma if the developments will continue to be like this.


@Gazz: is Nautilus opening every folder in a new window, in Mandriva 2010 rc? Because that is the pain in the arse that decided me to avoid that stuff. Additinally, the Gnome desktop is not as customisable as in for example Ubuntu, as it seems (in Mandriva 2009). That I will try 2010 is not likely, GoblinX is much higher on my "to try" list.

[HD0087]

Originally Posted by Richard_Rahl

Well, it is a possibillity. Consumers won't necessarilly jump to the shops to buy a Radeon that costs more than 200 euro

Won't necessarilly? Majority of consumers will NOT jump into the shops and buy W7 or a DX11 card... why? because there is no software yet to force their decision.
Rome wasn't build in a day.
W7 will how ever endup being the best selling OS they've shoved to market aftet XP, count my words.

Originally Posted by Richard_Rahl

There are odds that a lot of people will spend that money on their next console. Despite things like "tesselation" and "DirectCompute", of which only true geeks will actually know what that is and actually care for. Most others won't care. They just want to play their games, if possible with nice graphics. But they will possibly (it is likely, but I am not absolutely sure) not buy any piece of new technology that only promises some vague things to them.

True, consumers arn't driven by the technical aspects but the results that arrive from them.
And thats exactly the reason why I'm so sure DX11 will prevail because it gives developers a bigger headroom to go ahead and design games with insane new ideas and scale.
Not the kind of "cosmetic shit" DX10 gave us.

Originally Posted by Richard_Rahl

Conclusion: I hope the game devs make their games compatible with DirectX 10 too (as a "spare tyre"), because it is hugely possible that console gaming is going to hit them very hard if they don't.
PC gaming won't die I think, but it will get into a coma if the developments will continue to be like this.

DX10 was lack buster and so was Vista theres no reason to keep supporting it anymore.
DX9/DX11 support engines would be the most likely scenario.
I'm sick of hearing ppl commenting on PC gaming dying. I'm clad you don't belive it but why even bring it up.
Its not going to die! without pc developers there wouldn't be anymore innovations or a way to go forward and the industry would turn into standstill. It doesn't make any sense.

[Richard_Rahl]

Originally Posted by HD0087

DX9/DX11 support engines would be the most likely scenario.

Interesting combination, but won't those two versions be too far apart to be used in "combined support"?

[HD0087]

Originally Posted by Richard_Rahl

Interesting combination, but won't those two versions be too far apart to be used in "combined support"?

No. Besides DX11 has feature level compatibility with DX9,10,10.1 hardware so even that wouldn't be absolutely necesery tho If for some reason you would like to support DX7-8.1 you would be forced to run those thru DX9 API which is backwards compatible with them.

Slight update for the few techies in GH that might read this:
So I spent some more time toying with DX11 SDK and by the looks of it you could pretty much write feature level compatibility to even older dx version with a "little know-how" and providing an interface to query the caps.
The only problem with this is that the new runtimes would need to be part of the redistributable which you could supply unofficially with your project and find a way to make it work in XP too.

[Gazz]

Originally Posted by Richard_Rahl

@Gazz: is Nautilus opening every folder in a new window, in Mandriva 2010 rc? Because that is the pain in the arse that decided me to avoid that stuff. Additinally, the Gnome desktop is not as customisable as in for example Ubuntu, as it seems (in Mandriva 2009). That I will try 2010 is not likely, GoblinX is much higher on my "to try" list.

I prefer KDE as my graphical enviroment Richard. I simply don't know. Just try a live cd, I am not asking you to install the os on your hdd. Also, just have an entire bottle of wine present. Just like my friends of mr. bungle once said... It's better to have a bottle in front of you, then a frontal lobotamy

[Richard_Rahl]

I tried both the KDE and Gnome version of 2009. Both were not what I look for. They simply didn't give me the same feeling as Ubuntu, I even prefer openSUSE above it. And I don't think the changes will be that drastical in the rc of the next release. So I won't waste time, energy and discs on an OS I simply don't like. It is kinda like Apple or gay sex: no matter how good some people say it is, I know it is not something for me.