Scriptionary

So today marks the first week of Windows 7 RTM usage and I have to say that I like it. As I said before, Vista’s gaming performance was sub par but it looks like Windows 7 has picked up the slack.

It simply seems like the same system performs better with Windows 7, it’s definitely not simply a Vista update/Service Pack. And I’m happy to report that Fallout 3 (for the players) works OK on Windows 7 although there is the occasional crash and Alt-Tabbing is out of the question it seems.

Another very good thing thing I’ve noticed is the lack of UAC pop-ups, the only ones I’ve seen are when I try to run downloaded software – which is the same as in Windows XP.

Maybe in the long run some quirks will show up but for now I’m a happy camper indeed.

Windows 7 RTM was released for MSDN subscribers today so I’m taking this chance to upgrade to Windows 7 early on. I’ve been using Vista fulltime a bit over a year now and have been a bit disappointed in the long run with its performance when it comes to gaming and other intense apps.

Although I’ve been disappointed with Vista’s gaming performance, everything else has been smooth sailing. In fact a bunch of features that are apparently introduced in Windows 7 (Start Search), were already available in Vista.

Anyway, I’ll soon find out if the Windows 7 talk is all hype or if there’s some truth to the claims I’ve been hearing.

This weekend I took some time out to reformat my development computer in preparation for Windows Vista. I used Vista before but switched back to XP x64 in less than a week’s time. But heck, after a year and a Service Pack, I was willing to take the chance with Vista.

I wanted to take advantage of the DirectX 10 features Vista exposes since they’re not available on XP but was kind of disappointed with the performance of the API in Vista. It seems to me that the samples provided in the DirectX SDK simply run much slower than on XP.

Granted, I bought the most budget oriented GPU that supports DX10 (Geforce 8500GT 512VRAM) but that was simply because of the reason that I want my projects to be able to run on the lowest budget hardware possible while still being able to access DX10-like features. Dell, in fact, offers the 8400 on their laptops and budget desktop PCs, which is a fair share of the market and should be targeted.

Vista itself seems pretty solid so far; it certainly responds better than a year ago and supports all of my hardware and development tools (VS 2008, AQTime, Intel C++ compiler, etc). The big test will be OpenGL: Will it also have performance drops or stay the same? I’ll see tonight.