Vista or XP

I resent that. It has a fuckload more functionality than Mac OSX. Macintosh computers barely win in the graphic design Field.

Having a stable operating system normally means having a VERY restricted computer. Having one that requires more user input means for more functionality and if done correctly, a stable OS.

Besides, we know it 'ain't mimicking all of the Mac's OS's. It didn't mimic Mac 8, as that didn't look cool.

I concur. Macintosh's have the functionality of a dyslexic 5 year-old. Windows XP was the pwnage, and as we well know, Mac is infamous for not being able to run more than half of the programs that come out for computers.
Verdict: Windows pwns Mac. End of story.

Mac OS X is the Macintosh Operating System: X, Leopard (Version 10.5), Mac is basicly the line of computers published by Apple.

IE: iMac and eMac.

I'll be honest with you, i really dont think there is much of a difference between the two. Its not worth dumping more money to buy the new OS and in upgrading RAM. And the games would probably run slower even though it looks nicer

I agree with that, however, I've decided I will need to install Vista sometime, even if it's just for testing. Dual boot ftw. Who knows, perhaps it will be like Windows ME, which epic failed when everyone was like "Woh! Next gen!"

I prefer XP over Vista. Although Vista does look really good, it needs too much ram to actually work good in my opinion. My cousin bought a laptop with 1gb ram that was running Vista and to me the Vista bootup was really slow.

I'm waiting to try Vista till a sort of "sp 1" will be released for it, considering the fact that all the new OS released from Microsoft was full of big bugs when they were released (well, they're full of bugs even after the fixes but it's the price to pay to play every sort of 3d videogames)

it was bad enough for me when XP couldn't run some old Win9x programs...

Vista (which I am now running due to some seriously advanced technical difficultys with my latest and greatest hardware, that XP could not handle) has its service pack scheduled for around the same time as SP3 for XP and Windows Server 2008 releases, early-mid-late next year (knowing Microsoft).

Currently Vista shows no bugs to me. I have been running it for around a week, and have done some serious tests to the architechture of the OS. Apart from it being the biggest memory hog since... forever, it functions correctly. Yes, it is pretty usless (in some ways), but some of its new design allows for better performance in games and GUI (provided you have the comptuer)

jonsmth, I still have my 98SE computer for that kinda thing. <3 98SE.

Well after reading this I'm a little curious to try it, even if I readed that in games like Crysis you can simulate dx10 quality (only for Vista) using dx9 (Xp) with a minor ammount of RAM used (= less stress on hw).

I've to try this after the game is released, and probably I'll try it on Vista too to see if these differences exist

You can't "Simulate DX10 Quality". DX9 is a less advanced technology, and therefore is missing some of the requried... bits, to put it in simple terms. DX10 has a whole bundle of things that you can't do in DX9 because of it's coding limiations. Yes, you can put the SDK of DX10 into XP, but that doesn't work well, and would never reflect the quality of Native DX10 in Vista. But remember, this DX10 quality will only show in DX10 games, so don't expect massivly improved features in your older games.

They just happened to release Crysis with DX9 support, so that it could be played on non-Vista machines, therefore a wider sales market.

Summary: Go to Vista for the DX10 shinyness. But don't do it if you don't have the machine build. Most graphics cards don't have Pixel Shader 3, so can't run DX10 anyway.
Stay on XP if you had a mid-low end computer and still wanna play games. (IE: 512MB of RAM will not scrape by in Vista if you intend to play Crysis, etc)

PROTIP: unless you have 4GB of RAM and think you can notice the difference between DX9 and DX10 don't move to vista. None of your shit will work.

I've just assembled a new pc with Q6600 Quad Core G0, Nvidia 8800 GT 512 ram (it was released on 29 October here, I bought it that day ^^),2xWD 160GB in Raid 0 and obviously 2Gb DDR3 RAM, so I think I'll not have problems with dx10.

Anyway I wrongly used the verb "to simulate", it is more correct to say "to imitate" dx10 using dx9, and it's only concerned the game Crysis. I've already tried to do this on the sp demo, you've just to edit some cfg lines, and it seems to works fine excpet for the fps that obviously collapsed using the DX10 quality, and someone say that you'll have better fps using this trick than using the real DX10, but I've not tried yet.

VISTA IS THE DEVIL!!!!!!!!!!

damned thing is so full of bugs and microsoft bullshit its not funny, i'll be waiting as long as possible before i'm forced into using it

I don't use either. I use mac OS 10.4. Ever since I switched I really never wanted to go back to windows.

PROTIP: 4GB of RAM will not function correctly under x86 (32Bit) editions of Windows! (Vista, XP, anything) Use 64Bit.



Have you used the operating system for more than 2 days? You'll find that their patches (a grand 51 of them in Vista Ultimate) have fixed all the initial problems that users ran into. And the annoing features people talk about can be totally disabled. Don't critisie things you haven't tried. (not that I'm a solid Vista advocate yet)



Again, I stress the fact that Cryengine2 (the game engine that Crysis uses) can run in a DX9 mode. There isn't an imitation of the DX10 mode, it IS the DX9 mode. Meaning, it does not mimic DX10 in any way, instead it uses all of DX9. You will still be missing all of DX10's shaders and features!

Simple version: THERE IS NO SIMULATION OR IMITATION INVOLVED, THE ENGINE RUNS IN DX9 or DX10 DEPENDING ON ITS ORDERS. Blargh. You will always miss out some of the true DX10 features.

Also, it should detect that your graphics card is DX10, and that you're running in Vista or XP so will switch modes accordingly. The .ini or .cfg file change is just to bypass auto-detection for troubleshooting (or testing, as the case may be)

Well... I received a free copy of Windows Vista Business Edition 32-bit from a Microsoft promotion earlier this year, but I hadn't installed it until a few weeks ago. My rock-solid install of XP started throwing fits about a month and a half ago, with random errors and crashes. Finally, I threw in the towel and decided to reinstall... but I thought I might as well try a clean install of Vista while I'm at it (I had a long weekend off, and felt like messing around -- it had been a while). My hopes weren't that high, but it went surprisingly smoothly.

I'm still running Vista, and haven't run into any problems yet. The UAC is a bit annoying, but I've learned some quick ways to get around it for programming/administration purposes (such as launching a administrator-level command line). Except for a recent mess with an ATi graphics card (which was part due to hardware issues, and part due to driver issues with ATi), things have gone swimmingly.

I still enjoy XP, and think that it's the most stable OS that Microsoft has developed so far (especially now that it has had time to mature), but I think that Vista is heading in the right direction. Different OSes fit different people, but I'm currently happy where I am.