[PSI-KILLER]

Guys,
I was woundering about the future of hardware and TBP.  If say in a year or a little longer I upgrade to say Vista Premium with a DX10 card, and like a quad core processor, Will TBP still be playable or should I keep around an XP machine to play TBP?

[Knarfe1000]

AFAIK Microsoft currently announced an XP-Version that´ll be compatible with DirectX 10. So there´s no reason for me, to buy/install Vista.

[IceFire]

Guys,
I was woundering about the future of hardware and TBP.  If say in a year or a little longer I upgrade to say Vista Premium with a DX10 card, and like a quad core processor, Will TBP still be playable or should I keep around an XP machine to play TBP?

Vista runs two versions of DirectX.  One is the aforementioned DirectX10 and the other is DirectX 9L for compatibility.  So DirectX9 and previous games should still work.  The biggest problem with older software at this time seems to be games and other applications that think they should have administrator access when they really shouldn't.

So far, their neat little compatibility wizard has taken care of any office applications I've put it through.  Hopefully that will be true for most games.  I'm sure the SCP coders will take care of any serious problems.

[taylor]

There is a very good chance that all DirectX support will be dropped after 3.6.9 is released.  There just aren't any coders available to support it, and the rest of us don't care.  So it won't really matter whether you have DX10 support or not.  Graphics wise it will be OpenGL, or nothing.

[Herra Tohtori]

I think that more important question is will Vista be truly OpenGL compatible.

I would expect it to support OGL. But considering we're talking about Microsoft, you can never be sure. One thing is sure - if MS chooses to alienate itself from OpenGL games, they are shooting both us and themselves in the leg. If OpenGL would not be supported on Vista, the SCP crew would definitely either have to learn to code for D3D, and I think fixing all D3D issues would take forever, unless some D3D apt programmers suddenly emerged from some moist hole under a stone in a ground to do that herculean job of bringing D3D code up-to-date. Unless that happens (which is, suffice to say, highly unprobable) I suppose the SCP would actually have no other choice but to drop Windows support (for Vista, that is) and keep supporting NT Windows versions, Mac OS X and Linuxi (Or Linuxes, but Linuxi sounds more like the corect plurar...).

I have no actual information how OpenGL support is/will be executed in Vista version. But considering that SCP crew writes almost exclusively for OpenGL, I very much hope the game will run in OpenGL with Vista.

If it doesn't, I suppose I'll be switching to Linux/keep XP around just for keeping FSOpen running. In fact I may move completely to Linux side anyway, and keep Windows versions around just to play games with them.

Hmm... I'll be seeing if I can make Grand Prix 2 run in Vista...


...drat. Taylor said the same in four sentences... Does anyone have first-hand information about OpenGL and Vista, or even better, about Freespace Open on some beta/RC Vista?

[taylor]

OpenGL will work fine in Vista.  The big video card makers (NVIDIA and AMD/ATI) will continue to make their own full OpenGL drivers so Microsoft won't really be an issue there.  A benefit will (hopefully) be better OpenGL support for the video cards which don't have decent OpenGL support already.  Those cards, the low-end stuff that doesn't ever get good drivers, will use the OpenGL wrapper that is part of Vista and will translate the OpenGL stuff to DX10.  That won't be as good as the full/true OpenGL support that NVIDIA and ATI have obviously, but it should be better than what those low-end video cards would have had otherwise.

So, don't worry about it.

[Herra Tohtori]

Goody. I can sleep my nights peacefully again.