- IIDWells55XII
- |
- Exalted Legendary Member
Posted by: Recon Number 54
If it's as simple as Winver, how long before someone is running it on XP? 20 minutes? The game is being coded for Vista.
It's a completely new OS. Not the NT-2000-XP kernel. Hell, I've not even heard that any legacy applications (even your current copy of FEAR) will definitely run on it except in emulation. A new audio, video and network stack. Imagine that the game was being ported to one of your copies of Linux.
Since you're running a multiboot, it would be just another OS to pick from. But I think that your current rig will likely be replaced twice over and that you'll likely have Vista installed before you can even buy Halo 2 Vista.
Call it marketing if you want. I think that it was simply a decision by the team making the port to make the port more efficiently.
Not gonna lie, hearing that recent apps like FEAR are going to need to be emualted is news to me. It worries me performance-wise, because emulation never works 100%. I'm using this as an example, don't take offense: but look at Halo 2 for 360. Here's a system with 10x the CPU power and 8x the RAM and a custom MS emulator built for the system, but it can't run Halo 2 right. I mean, any intense firefight results in catastrophic framerate drops. And we all saw the Backwash issue - apparently emulating the active camo shader along with the Fog isn't fun for the emulator.
On a side note, FreeBSD is not Linux, just so you know. But I did mention Linux as an example.
I honestly don't look forward to breaking my measly 250GB SATA drive (well, small for a media rig) into yet another partition, really. Seeing how I believe we are dealing with a new FS, and it's not even a good idea to run two copies of Windows on teh same partition anyways...
I still call it marketing. I think it's really there to push Vista. But, that's just my opinion. Obviously it won't get as many purchases without XP support. So there'd have to be a financial reason to counter that, and if it drives Vista sale, that would be the counterbalance.
I'm actually rather happy that we could have a nice civil disagreement without flaming or me getting the Banhammer for not completely loving all things Microsoft. Don't get me wrong, my PC's use Windows, but I like to keep myself open-minded to the other OSes available as they often suit my needs better.
[Edited on 5/26/2006]