Gabe Newell: DirectX 10 for Vista was a mistake

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Gabe Newell, the Valve Software supremo, has said that he believes MS were wrong to limit DX10 to Vista and should have opened it to XP. Click here for the full story.

I agree with him, I know MS are trying to push Vista, but they have shut off a huge part of the market. Given that PC gaming isn't in exactly rude health, the decision seems even more baffling.
 
Without DX10 being exclusive there's no reason to buy Vista. All the other potentially worthwhile features went missing in an attempt to get it on the market and refill Microsoft's coffers.
 
So they force people to buy their new OS if they want to play something in the future.

I am not paying for something they are forcing you to buy.
 
So they force people to buy their new OS if they want to play something in the future.

I am not paying for something they are forcing you to buy.

but its always been that way. Newer games need newer OS's to run (most games now need either win 2000/xp or xp/vista).
Anyways, as with XP, most of the people complaining will probably be running vista within about 2 years anyway.
 
In two years nobody will be bothered about Vista, Vienna is due Xmas 2008
 
In two years nobody will be bothered about Vista, Vienna is due Xmas 2008

and you really think MS will really hit that date? (remembering that vista was originally planned to launch in 2003!!)
 
Of course Microsoft won't issue Vienna on time but I still won't be buying Vista.

"That's sort of the Microsoft way. They start with a piece of crap, then over a number of versions taking a lot of people with them over the route, they get to something better than what they're competing against"

John Carmack, id founder on why the next id engine won't be DX10
 
and you really think MS will really hit that date? (remembering that vista was originally planned to launch in 2003!!)

Exactly what I was going to say.

The way I look at it is this. Vista is only £60 and yes it has had its problems but so did xp and at the time of xps release most people where complaining about that OS and how they would never change to xp. Many years on and the same thing is happening with vista and it will probably happen again with the next OS.

I have vista running on both machines as so far its been fine and i actually like using vista and wouldnt like to go back to xp. At least if you upgrade now you will be getting the most out of your £60 as you will be getting longer use out of the OS and you will also be able to play DX10 games. :)

£60 aint bad for a whole OS, console games retail (in shops) can cost £49.99. So is it really that bad?
 
I have a working operating system, even giving "only" £60 to Microsoft for DX10 (Vista offers nothing else to me except problems with Creative soundcards) just encourages that rapacious company. If Vista had had the features promised when it was Longhorn it might have been worth buying but it was disembowelled to get it on the market, we might get those features in Vienna so I'll wait
 
(Vista offers nothing else to me except problems with Creative soundcards)


Each to their own. :)

BTW there is a fix for creative sound cards (its called alchemy). :smashin:
 
alchemy is far from satisfactory and would not have been necessary in the first place had it not been for Microsoft incompetence.

Anyway we're off the subject, Newell (and Carmack) are against Microsoft's tactics with Vista and DX10 and their opinion counts for more than mine
 
Anyway we're off the subject, Newell (and Carmack) are against Microsoft's tactics with Vista and DX10 and their opinion counts for more than mine


Your opinion is still valid. :)


Yes MS should of made DX10 xp compatible. All new pcs will be carrying vista and they are going to stop selling xp soon so there was no real need to push it so hard. Everyone will be using vista in time.

Personally I just didnt mind upgrading to vista due to its low retail price and the fresh new look. After a time you can get bored with the same OS. Vista actually made my pc feel like a new machine. Every build I have done over the last five years or so has always had the same OS. So although the pc was new and quicker than the old, it always looked the same. :)
 
but its always been that way. Newer games need newer OS's to run (most games now need either win 2000/xp or xp/vista).

But wasn't the DX versions always backwards compatible with the older operating systems. Making DX10 ‘Vista only' seems a bit desperate to me. Regardless, I will still be buying into Vista within the next year or so but for the mainstream it can't be a good thing for the PC gaming industry overall.
 
Personally I just didnt mind upgrading to vista due to its low retail price and the fresh new look. After a time you can get bored with the same OS. Vista actually made my pc feel like a new machine. Every build I have done over the last five years or so has always had the same OS. So although the pc was new and quicker than the old, it always looked the same. :)

Get board with the OS? its like saying you get board with a dvd player and buy a new one because you are sick of the way its facia looks (and possibly performs worse until a firmware is released), who really cares what the os looks like other than mac fan boys. I use the os for the applications that are built on top of it, browsing the web, watching videos, listening to music and playing games, how could any of those be enanched by the look of the os especialy the latter thats in full screen mode (taking out of the eqaution any potential visual improvement dx10 may bring for this paragraph).

If dx10 was on xp even less people would have upgraded to vista,but forcing people is in the short term knock credibility from dx10 in both users and developers eyes. And its not helped by the shoddy dx10 hardware, with dx10 ment to make devleoping easier, and the hardware more efficent it looks to be doing the reverse. DX9 and all that went before it were backwards compatable so developers made one game regardless of the dx version the hardware supported (latest or ancient), now they need to make 2, or 3 if they want to port it from xbox 360. Looks like the whole XNA idea went down the poo shoot just to stisfy some ms statistics with bolsterd vista sales. From the games that have came out dx10 support so far have had either dire dx10 results compared to the apparently less efficent dx9 or required heavy tweeking from the developer to bring it upto par. The visual results so far are practicaly invisible to the gamer who's actuly playing the game and not got two machines side by side to compare the difference between dx9 and 10.

So far we have dx10?:
on one os, and one thats not exactly renowned for its stability, support or general robustness.
the removal of backwards compatability, meaning that games on a tight deadline are gonna have to implement dx10 and 9 seperatly and so reduce other elements of the game.
Lack of uptake on the hardware side (mainly due to pap midrange admittadly).
In general a poor first showing for the revolutionary dx10 graphical euthora.

No doubt one day vista will be as rock solid like xp, it'll have all the driver support it needs and once developers get used to dx10, the games with the big budgets might start to show some real promise, and obviously hardware will get better. But if the majority of users stay with xp and/or non dx10 cards then the vast majority of games will have to be dual compatible and this might just kill dx10 or at least stick it in a comma for a year or two as game developers will go where the money and thats dx9 for the forceable future, at least till the next uprade cycle.

On a technical note it'll be interesting to see what dx10 can do that dx9 can't.

Back to vista in general over xp/2k, its much like ms office, they keep bringing out a new version but one from the 90's will have all the functionality your ever likley to need.
 
On a technical note it'll be interesting to see what dx10 can do that dx9 can't.

Back to vista in general over xp/2k, its much like ms office, they keep bringing out a new version but one from the 90's will have all the functionality your ever likley to need.

I agree. I've not seen anything so far which has made me think I need to upgrade. The enhancements seem visual more than anything. Yes, I know it's also meant to be more secure, but tbh I don't have problems with XP.

Regarding the technical points of DX10 vs DX9, hopefully we'll see some tangible proof of the difference when Crysis is released, given it's a 'made for DX10' game.
 
Get board with the OS? its like saying you get board with a dvd player and buy a new one because you are sick of the way its facia looks (and possibly performs worse until a firmware is released), who really cares what the os looks like other than mac fan boys. I use the os for the applications that are built on top of it, browsing the web, watching videos, listening to music and playing games, how could any of those be enanched by the look of the os especialy the latter thats in full screen mode (taking out of the eqaution any potential visual improvement dx10 may bring for this paragraph).


I hear what your saying but its how I felt once I had upgraded. I normally buy a new pc every 18 months to 2 years and every time I do the one thing that always remains the same is the OS. This time this was different and it did feel like I was playing with a new machine. As you say its the applications on top of the OS which makes a big difference and visuals appearance isnt greatly important. Just some thing I observed once I upgraded to vista.

If I could sum up vista it would be like this:

It looks nice, its very polite, very plug and play.


For the most part it is the same as xp, just a more polished appearance and approach. :)
 
Eurogamer had an interview with Gabe Newell, here's what he said about this issue:

Eurogamer: Speaking of technologies with a lot of utility for gamers, or not, what's your view of DirectX 10 been so far?

Gabe Newell: The thing that we struggle with - so, we use Steam to look at what our customers are actually buying and what they have installed, and right now there's far more DX10 hardware on XP than there is on Vista. About 2 percent of our customers have Windows Vista and DX10 hardware, so for us the investment strategy is to access DX10 hardware functionality - like the tessellater - using the DX9 API, and we can get what we need, we can get access to that hardware functionality, maybe in a non-optimal way, by going through DX9. Until we start to see a much higher percentage of our customers flipping over to Vista, that's the strategy we're going to use.
 
Thats fair enough Razor, personaly i'd be happy with win95 if it was stable (not had a blue screen for many years), although xp does have some features that it did not, but i have no doubt they could have been added and even the look could have been changed. Before win95 though there was no multi tasking, and the windowing system was quite different not to mention the start bar and desktop and winG for games :p, so i'd say that would be my base line but more on a fuctionality/ergonomics senece.

This is something that linux is leading the way, they have totaly customisable and interchangable gui's while always been build onto of the same rock solid foundation. The windows way is always to build from scratch, pretty poor and the reaults aren't all that considering the man hours.

XP is the perfect melding of the home user and business users operating systems stability with multimedia functionality, what 2k should have been but didn''t quite reach especialy when it came to games and ms refusal to alow certain multi media functions. Vista feels like an xp rehash with added drm but a pretty face, and it'll cost you more memory and clock cycles to run happily.

There have always been windows blinds ect.. that added more than themes to windows, and gave control over the os look. I don't think many of these companies did very well though, but if they offered areo glass style effects form xp who knows they may do well these days. Even nvidia had a driver out many many years ago for transparent and semi transparent windows.

Back to the vista/xp and dx10 thing, i think they screwed us and they'll get screwed back.
 
Back to the vista/xp and dx10 thing, i think they screwed us and they'll get screwed back.

The only way MS will get screwed is if everyone switches to Apple or Linux and I don't think thats happening in the near to distant future.

I have both Vista Ultimate 64bit and Xp Pro running on PCs side by side and Vista is more stable by far for me than XP.

In the end you'll switch to Vista because once support is abandoned for XP, hardware and software manufacturers will also stop supporting XP.
 
I never hear such a fuss when Apple release their new OS
 
What you say is true Kwman, but i leapfroged Windows ME so i could do the same here. If the linux community are sucesful at creating a direct x clone then i'll be off, I have no desire to buy vista and the only thing keeping me on windows are the games. If I have to move to anything and it won't happen for a long time, i'll be deciding not the monopoly guy.

The only reason your vista is more stable than your xp, is either you have dodgy hardware or copy of xp on that machine. I've had the same installation of xp for about 4 years now, everytime I upgrade I just migrate the partition to the a new hard drive and re-activate. Even doing that I've not had any stability problems, except for when I tried to update my nforce drivers, but I simply re-copied over the partition at that time with the slightly older drivers.

The drives are also usualy bigger each time, but using partition magic its easy enough to make a clone and then expand the partition to the full size of the new disk.

As for the apple boys, they will buy anything and if they lose functionality well they got some pretty new feature that will "like, god simply change their lives".

My comment on them getting screwed was more to the point that dx10 will not take off and the numbers of people upgrading to vista for that particualr reason (rather than buying a new machine and being forced upon them) will deminish.
 
What you say is true Kwman, but i leapfroged Windows ME so i could do the same here. If the linux community are sucesful at creating a direct x clone then i'll be off, I have no desire to buy vista and the only thing keeping me on windows are the games. If I have to move to anything and it won't happen for a long time, i'll be deciding not the monopoly guy.

The only reason your vista is more stable than your xp, is either you have dodgy hardware or copy of xp on that machine. I've had the same installation of xp for about 4 years now, everytime I upgrade I just migrate the partition to the a new hard drive and re-activate. Even doing that I've not had any stability problems, except for when I tried to update my nforce drivers, but I simply re-copied over the partition at that time with the slightly older drivers.
.

I believe ME was done to cash in on the year 2000. It was virtually the same as Win 98, so missing ME wasn't a big deal TBH. Only suckers bought it and I was one of them !

My XP pro PC isn't dodgy, the only thing thats installed is EQ2 (an online game). I find that if I leave the PC on days at a time, the XP PC becomes sluggish, whereas I watch video files, browse and play eq2 on my vista PC and it doesn't seem to have that problem.

I admit they did make a hash of not releasing dx10 on XP though.
 
Of course Microsoft won't issue Vienna on time but I still won't be buying Vista.

"That's sort of the Microsoft way. They start with a piece of crap, then over a number of versions taking a lot of people with them over the route, they get to something better than what they're competing against"

John Carmack, id founder on why the next id engine won't be DX10

It won't be DX10 cos hes almost finished or finished it !

I bet his next one will be though.
 
bet most the people bitching about not getting vista because they don't want to be forced to upgrade are running xp and before that either 98 or 2000. People clearly will upgrade like always otherwise we'd all still be running an older OS. Your soon upgrade when M$ stop issuing updates for XP and hardware/software manufactures stop supporting it.

Don't see all the people complaining that everytime the top new game comes out people need a new graphics card, more ram or a better cpu which will probably mean new motherboard as well.
 
bet most the people bitching about not getting vista because they don't want to be forced to upgrade are running xp and before that either 98 or 2000. People clearly will upgrade like always otherwise we'd all still be running an older OS. Your soon upgrade when M$ stop issuing updates for XP and hardware/software manufactures stop supporting it.

Don't see all the people complaining that everytime the top new game comes out people need a new graphics card, more ram or a better cpu which will probably mean new motherboard as well.

No your wrong there mate on pretty much every account.
I have used most version of windows (just nothing less than windows 3.1), but each time its brough useful functionality, (actualy usable applications in win 3.1 and networks in 3.1.1)
Windows 95 was a complete revelation and brought with it a load of features and functionality over previous operating systems and direct x. Windows 98 brought true support for usb and much better plug and play plus some more stability (in the SE).
Windows 2k brought true stability but wasn't as 'consumer' friendly as 98 missing multimedia and true direct x support.

XP was like a merging of 98 and 2k so produced a fantasic xp, the only real bad thing about it? telly tubby style gui. It also had better support for home networks and wireless ect over the previous ones.

Vista doesn't bring anything positive to the table over eye candy, but instead they are using dx10 to bully people into upgrading.

On the hardware front, when i upgrade i know i'm gonna get something for my money. E.g. i wouldn't buy ddr3 over ddr2 as its doesn't provide any advatage at the moment it just costs more. I haven't upgraded my 7800GTX as i will not see any substantial gains at the resolution of my monitor and will be taking a step back with a mid range dx10 card. Games don't demand a new graphics card, they would just run better. If a company brings out a DX10 only game (and only ms would do this) thats blackmail for what would be little if any advantage over what a dx9 one can do.

Why would manufacturers stop supporting xp, the majority still support windows 98! and what does it matter if ms stop providing updates I have a good firewall and virus protection.

Having the option is nice, but being forced to upgrade when there is no techincal need, rather simple greed is just :thumbsdow:nono:
 

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