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Indeed however if the games you want start requiring DirectX 10 you should consider  upgrading to Vista (Home Professional or Ultimate). I'd go OEM with that too.

ScifiterX wrote:

Indeed however if the games you want start requiring DirectX 10 you should consider  upgrading to Vista (Home Professional or Ultimate). I'd go OEM with that too.

Ultimate is an expensive waste, with a number of (so far) non-working features. I'm curious about this 'Vista Home Professional,' tho...

Booksley wrote:

ScifiterX wrote:

Indeed however if the games you want start requiring DirectX 10 you should consider  upgrading to Vista (Home Professional or Ultimate). I'd go OEM with that too.

You wouldn't want to run DX10 games on a 2600 Pro. The 8800GS might be acceptable though...

Indeed


...

(Got a PSU for you and those 3 4870X2s, Books: Silverstone Zeus 1200W: Designed for the Power Hungry )

====

Yes, the iMac is rather power-shy for DX10 with the possible exception noted. Sci would be meaning Vista Home Premium if you do go that way.

Vista Super Duper Class II Home Business Ultimate SP4.

I don't think Microsoft knows much about what the 5 or 6 different versions of Vista do either. Except allow them to charge more for various normal and expected functions.

SP3 now

Chickenhawk wrote:

SP3 now

Yeah. Haven't seen any XP SP3 discs, tho, and 6/30 was the cutoff date for XP sales excepting low-power units like the Eee PC. If you can get one, do, and install SP3 and perhaps the latest (June) build of DX9.0c. That should do it for XP and most gaming within the iMacs' graphical capabilities.

ScifiterX wrote:

Honestly I play games to maintain my sanity so I've no interest in installing Windows to play them as using it drives me crazy. As a result, I've no clue what version of Vista is worth it past it having certain features. For gaming Home Basic & Business don't cut it.

Even the 8800GS is barely adequate for DX10 gaming framerates, tho it supports the featureset.

Even Home Basic, tho not supporting the Aero GUI, supports DX10 gaming AFAIK, but Home Premium is likely worth the small difference above Basic. Business and Ultimate are simply a waste of money for gaming as well as overpriced, period. Vista pricing is goofy.

Cool. Thanks.

The way I was reading it

                      -> Home Premium----------------
                    /                                                \
Home Basic -                                                    -> Ultimate
                    \                                                /
                      -----------------------> Business -

Direct X 10 only games are pretty rare at this point aren't they. If so it'll possibly be a little while until the games he want require that (he might want newer hardware by then) and if you read what I originally said that's the point I specified for said upgrade to Vista.

Well, this is timely (to find). Haven't read it yet tho.

Gaming Performance: Windows Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3

ScifiterX wrote:

The way I was reading it

                      -> Home Premium----------------
                    /                                                \
Home Basic -                                                    -> Ultimate
                    \                                                /
                      -----------------------> Business -

Direct X 10 only games are pretty rare at this point aren't they. If so it'll possibly be a little while until the games he want require that (he might want newer hardware by then) and if you read what I originally said that's the point I specified for said upgrade to Vista.

Speaking of DX and the future, apparently DX11 will be announced earlier than many expected.

DirectX 11 to be announced this month
Launch in late 2009

Microsoft will start talking about DirectX 11 in less than two weeks. Sources have confirmed that Microsoft game technology conference, previously known as Meltdown and now renamed to Gamefest 2008, will be the place where Microsoft plans to officially announce DirectX 11.

This conference takes place on the 22 and 23 July in Seattle, Washington and it will set you back $550 if you register online. You can find some more details about the conference here.

The big feature of DirectX 11 is Tessellation/Displacement while we also heard that Multithreaded Rendering and Compute Shaders are part of it. DirectX 11 also brings Shader model 5.0 but we don’t know many details about it.

It looks like DirectX 11 will stick to rasterization as there is no any mentioning of Ray tracing support.

Nvidia will also talk about DirectX 11 at its Nvision event / conference in late August 2008.

Compute Shaders... Stream Computing/GP-GPU stuff by the sound of it. Extra support in SM5.0 for things like F@H on the GPU?

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?optio … ;Itemid=34

Crysis is the toughest game out there, and the 3xx0 architecture isn't very fond of it for some reason. But its successor has been out for a bit already and does better.

Crysis is a game that can beat down all cards. We're once again using the high settings with the shaders at very high, and even at a fairly tame resolution of 1680x1050 only 8 cards manage to get past the magical 30fps rate, with nearly half of those are just squeaking by. Crysis is particularly punishing on the HD3000 series cards at these kinds of settings, where only the HD3870 X2 was competitive without resorting to Crossfire. This makes the placement of the HD4000 series all the more important.

What we see with the 4870 is very promising. Here it leapfrogs the $100 more expensive GTX 260 and delivers 7% more performance at the same time, delivering manageable framerates.

OCed versions are on the way... anyway I'm holding off on Crysis for the foreseeable, and the 3870 is good enough for what I need it for. If/when $ improves, upgrade; 'til then its good enough.

Point here is, the XP/Vista performance gap is gone.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc. … 1&p=13

i think he was saying that os x is the only operating system that anyone will ever need.

there is nothing wrong with OS9 other than no support for an up to date web browser and the latest version of flash.