Windows Vista Beta 1 Review & Screenshots

[Asher]

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_beta1_01.asp

Great read, looks like it's heading in the right direction. As expected, all the hysteria a short 3 months ago about it being a "trainwreck" were a bit off.

The most surprising part of the review:

Surprisingly, Windows Vista Beta 1 is a speedy performer. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see statistics showing that it's already faster than XP on the same hardware. This is somewhat confusing to me, since early betas are generally not tuned for performance. Plus, Vista has an incredibly dense UI compared to UI. I'll be interested to see whether this changes over time.

That's inline with MS' claims of 50% faster boot time and 15% faster application load time.

Some screenshots (many more in the review):

[BeBMan]

Photoshopped

[Az]

I've heard it's about to go real anal on DRM. Is it so? :/

[Richelieu]

Aren't you a Beta tester Asher?

[Asher]

Nope.

Though I'm considering installing the 64-bit beta, as I meant to upgrade from WinXP to WinXP x64 anyway.,

[St Leo]

I like the breadcrumb address bar. It's a nice idea.

[Nostromo]

About Windows Vista and gaming:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1841219,00.asp

As Microsoft set out to build its next-generation operating system, it first set about collecting data. What exactly do people spend all their time doing on their Windows PCs? The numbers are pretty surprising. 35.5% of the time spent on a Windows PC is browsing the net, but the No. 2 activity—by a wide margin—is playing games. 18% of a Windows user's time (and this is all Windows users here, even grandma) is spent playing games. Granted, this includes casual games, not just multi-million dollar AAA blockbusters that cost $50 at the store. The third and fourth highest- activities by minutes of time spent were using the shell and doing email, at just over 9% each.

There have been many reports in the news lately about the "decline of PC games." Microsoft thinks that is due almost entirely to lazy reporting and bad numbers. Worldwide, retail sales of Windows games have been flat, at about $2.3 billion a year. The press looks at these numbers and compares it with console sales of over $6 billion (and rising each year) and says that Windows games are being marginalized. To begin with, why lump all the consoles together against a single platform, the PC? Shouldn't we compare the PC individually to the Xbox, PlayStation 2, and Nintendo Gamecube? More importantly is that worldwide online sales have increased to $2 billion a year, and those numbers are never included in the typical NPD industry tracking reports.

That $2 billion figure includes online sales of games, digitally distributed games, online game subscription fees, and sales of online digital objects, extras, and add-ons. This is projected to grow to about $7 billion over the next 4 years. So if you total up all the actual money being spent on Windows games, not just retail sales, it's a very healthy and steadily growing marketplace. Still, that's not enough for Microsoft. The company is working on initiatives with retailers to drastically improve the "brand" of PC games, turning the Windows PC into a platform with the same retail recognition, consistent packaging, and shelf space as the Xbox or PS2. Trials will roll out at some major retailers later this year, with a major marketing push to increasing and improving the PC game retail presence next year.

The long and short of it is this: Microsoft intends to use both marketing and technology improvements in Vista to turn Windows into a "platform" in the minds of retailers and consumers—a platform equal in every way to the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. And it's not just marketing. In Windows Vista, gaming will be a first-class citizen, no longer stuffed five levels deep in the Start menu. It will share top-tier status with Documents, Music, and Photos.

If you open the Start menu in Vista, you'll now see "Games" listed right there with Computer, Pictures, Music, and Documents (Microsoft has thankfully dropped the "My" prefix). Clicking on it will bring you to the new Games Explorer, a much easier way to find and launch the games on your system. No longer will you need to head to All Programs, then the publisher name, then the game name, and then pick out the launch executable from a list of items.

The Games Explorer functions much like a media player. Microsoft is working with a company that collects metadata (title, publisher, box art, ESRB rating info, etc.) for games and will automatically pull down the box cover art and data for any game you install. These are stored in game-definition files, which the system can also use to check the version you have against a master server to see if there are any patches or updates to download.

The Games Explorer is also where you'll go to set parental controls for games. You can limit each user account to only playing games with a certain ESRB rating, but you can get a lot more granular if you wish. You may want to let your child play games with brief nudity, but not realistic blood and gore, for instance. There's a long list of descriptors that fit in with the ESRB content descriptors that accompany the ratings. When a game is locked out, you won't get any information other than its title, and even the box art is hidden.

The games built in to Windows will also be updated. Classics like Hearts and Minesweeper are getting major visual upgrades, with new 3D effects and hi-res artwork. Expect to see more games thrown in: Chess has already been added, and there's a possibility of seeing slightly more "premium" titles, or at least demos, bundled in. OEMs are already talking about it.

WinSAT

Vista will ship with an interesting bit of tech called WinSAT (the Windows System Assessment Tool) that could be a huge boon to game developers and players alike. WinSAT is a function that analyzes your PC's performance and stores the data in a protected system file, so that the OS and applications can enable or disable features appropriately.

Here's how it works: When you first install Vista, after the entire install but before you first log in, WinSAT runs a series of tests to determine your system's performance and feature set. That includes processor features (like the no-execute bit) and speed, amount of RAM and RAM performance, video card functions and performance, size and speed of the hard drive, type of optical storage drive, and more. The tool actually runs the functions most common to Vista, as well as a few other bits of code (like determining rough game performance of your 3D graphics card). The point of this, fundamentally, is so that when you first log into Vista, it has enabled all the nifty features that your system can handle—and none of the ones it can't. If your CPU isn't fast enough to decode high-definition video, for instance, video playback may default to something a bit more manageable. If it can't handle the high-end Aero Glass interface, it will back off to the basic Aero mode. These settings can be overridden, but the idea is to get the best experience your machine can deliver out of the gate.

The key thing about WinSAT is, it's exposed to developers via an API. Game developers can use it to help zero in on optimal game settings, for instance. Here's an example of how a game could use WinSAT:

You're installing the game, and while files are being copied off the disc, the game asks WinSAT to perform a number of behind-the-scenes tests. These can be specific algorithms that will help it determine how many computer-driven A.I. characters to allow, or what level of physics to enable (Do you have a high-end multi-core CPU? A physics accelerator card? Or are you squeaking in with the minimum supported spec?). It can even have your 3D card run some performance tests—not rendered to the screen—to see how fast it runs the kinds of shaders the game uses most. This data will be recorded in the WinSAT performance file and can be accessed by other applications or even web pages with the right API calls—a potentially huge aid to comparing performance or shopping for new parts. The game, now knowing exactly how well your particular computer performs, can set the best visual settings, game settings, and even resolution to give you the absolute best experience without requiring you to fiddle with obtuse in-game knobs and levers. Of course, games will still have all those settings for advanced users to play with.

WinSAT doesn't continually run in the background, it just fires off a new set of tests when Vista detects major changes to your system—when you add a lot of RAM, a new CPU or video card, for example. If you download, say, a new video driver that promises new features and improved performance, there will be an option somewhere in the Control Panel or the like to force WinSAT to run again. Vista will include a very lightweight background agent that records all kinds of real-world performance data—start up and shut down time, how long it takes for windows to open or resize, how long it takes applications to launch, things like that. If it detects a marked decrease in performance, it can look at the software that has been recently added to the system to help you zero in on the apps (or spyware/viruses) that are costing you performance.

DirectX 10

With all the talk of next-generation consoles—and some very impressive screenshots floating around the web—fans of PC games are naturally wondering whether these powerful new systems are going to "kill" PC games. In a word . . . no.

The upcoming Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are based on DirectX 9 technology, in the case of the 360 it's "DirectX 9 and then a little more." But DirectX 10 is a whole different animal. It's a major revision to the API, almost a complete rewrite that requires substantially different hardware than the stuff we've seen so far.

To start with, let's clear up a few naming misconceptions. Over the past year or more, the graphics "stuff" coming in Windows Vista has been referred to by many names. DirectX Next and Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0 are two of the most prominent. The names have been changing internally at Microsoft, and it seems that they've all but settled on actually calling it DirectX 10. Contrary to some reports, it will ship with Vista, along with DirectX 9.L, a version of DX9 altered to fit the new LDDM driver model used by the OS.

DirectX 10 started by fixing what was broken in the previous APIs, like some stability problems and small batch performance, and then removing old unnecessary parts of the API (like the fixed function transform and lighting calls). This served as the foundation for a graphics API that could radically change the way games look and really take PCs to that next quantum leap, even over next-generation consoles.

The new graphics API will have much more stringent requirements for graphics cards, with a very particular guaranteed feature set. There should be no more "cap bits" needed to determine if your graphics cards can perform certain functions. The behavior of DX10 cards will be strictly defined, so developers can get the expected output from their code with no tweaking necessary for the eccentricities of different graphics cards from different vendors.

It also requires several new features of the hardware. The first is a new "geometry shader" function, which operates not on single vertices like today's vertex shader units, but on entire primitives: dots, lines, lines with adjacent vertices, triangles, and triangles with adjacent vertices. The huge performance penalty imposed by too many state changes should be a thing of the past as well. Render states are grouped into five different objects that can be cached by the hardware, with up to 4096 state objects of each type cacheable at once. DX10 also introduces a common shader core between pixels and vertices. Granted, this does not mean that the hardware itself needs to have ALUs that operate on either pixels or vertices, just that the language and functions have been fused into a single shader set.

The net result of these things should be games with an absolutely unprecedented level of detail, including a dramatic increase in "clutter," or the hordes of random and different stuff that exists in the real world but not in games. Obviously, rendering quality will shoot way up, too, with improved masking functions for antialiasing. It will also mean better object sorting, the ability to algorithmically generate content entirely on the GPU, and ultimately memory virtualization in the LDDM driver model to reduce bandwidth costs and provide more granular access to graphics data.

Right now, it's all a bit too much to take in. Some of the specs are still in flux, and you need an unabridged programmer-to-English dictionary to even comprehend the scope of the changes and their ramifications. Suffice it to say: When DirectX 10 games hit us, they're going to be of a quality that next-gen consoles can't touch.

[Asher]

bump

[Wiglaf]

http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html

Beats hi-res minesweeper and 115% startup times anyday. No wonder nobody buys Windows off the shelf.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Apple sucks ass. What is their markershare again?

And wow, if no one buys Windows off the shelf, Bill Gates must be a pauper!

[Wiglaf]

Manufacturers will eat it up. No one else will blow $300 on this garbage.

[Imran Siddiqui]

What is it, like 5% of the market now? Wow... people really think Apple is so much better

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Wiglaf

http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/over200.html

Beats hi-res minesweeper and 115% startup times anyday. No wonder nobody buys Windows off the shelf.

That's because it already comes installed on their computer, doofus.

[Wiglaf]

What is it, like 5% of the market now? Wow... people really think Apple is so much better

Don't cry for apple, cry for innovation. You're the one paying the big bucks for 3D minesweeper and a games interface...that no one but manufacturers will buy to "stay current", whatever that means.

http://news.com.com/Windows+XP+sales+lag/2100-1001_3-277211.html

"Retail sales are like gravy for Microsoft," said Howard Dyckovsky, an NPD Intelect analyst. "It helps them get their name out there and keeps them in front of the consumers. But the overwhelming majority is going to be on new computers or client licenses."

[Imran Siddiqui]

Don't cry for apple, cry for innovation. You're the one paying the big bucks for 3D minesweeper and a games interface...

Is it even 5%? I mean, man , if it wasn't for the iPod, would Apple even be in existance, really?

You are a market sort of guy. When the market relegates your product to the side like that... well, I think they are trying to tell you something.

"Retail sales are like gravy for Microsoft," said Howard Dyckovsky, an NPD Intelect analyst. "It helps them get their name out there and keeps them in front of the consumers.

So... there actually are a lot of retail sales of the product.

And wow... most people get their Windows when they decide to buy a PC. How... stunning and stuff.