With the announcement that DirectX 10 will be Vista-Only, and that there will be signifigant hardware requirements for Windows Vista, I forsee that PC gaming is going to be hurt, and hurt badly, by this fact. PC gaming has always been one of the more expensive gaming platforms, it’s just been worthwhile because there’s more versatility in it than a console platform. However, I’ve tested Vista, not in any official capacity, but mainly through work at Intel and friends who have a ‘borrowed’ copy of it. From what I’ve seen there’s no reason why I would trade up from Windows XP to Vista. I’ve been wanting a gaming system where the operating system is faster, more streamlined, and overall simpler to use. If I wanted all the extra fancy features, there are tons of 3rd party programs that I could use. For instance, I happen to like the OS X-style dock, so I use ObjectDock.

Vista not only will be late to arrive, as seems prone for most Microsoft products these days, but the first version will probably be buggy as ell (Windows XP pre-SP1 anyone?). DirectX has been on the forefront of PC gaming for a while now, and that’s because M$ has been pushing a lot from the development side of things. I have no doubt that DirectX 10 will be equally as brilliant, when I finally get around to using it. I’d really like to see people return to OpenGL as their source of graphics goodness. That could open up a lot more options for Linux gaming and gaming on OS X.

Microsoft is really trying to push people to upgrade to Vista, I think mainly to justify all the time and money they’ve sunk into the product. There are just too many bells and whistles in it to really seem beneficial and worth the upgrade. The fact that they’ve taken one of the major fanboy games and already announced it as a Vista-only title (Halo 3) disappoints me greatly. Surely that alone will be enough to make the most rabid of fanboys upgrade to Vista and make that leap in OS suckage. However, I just view it as a desperate attempt to increase the early adopter base.

I’d rather see Vista completely flop out of the gate, ad have people switch back to Windows XP, or even better, have a strong implementation of Wine built into a release of a linux distro that supports most of the games that are popular at the time. Microsoft needs to realize that sometimes we don’t want that extra innovation that adds 60,000 lines of code to Vista. Maybe WinFS is a better filesystem, so that makes sense. However, to put in the code that makes Vista Mobile require hybrid drives, that’s rather pointless. The clock on the sidebar and the ‘pretty’ UI that requires a 3-D accellerated card? Not really the best use of programming time in my opinion.