Vista delayed till 2007

lkman

Just read this here: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-03/22/content_4331518.htm

Microsoft blamed the delay on a problem with internal deadlines and on requests for more time from industry partners. It added it will release a version of Vista for businesses in November 2006, and make the consumer version available only in January 2007.

You can read the full detail (although there's not much) at that link above..:cool:
I think we sort of knew this would happen!!

8T8

You can also read the press release right here on Microsoft's site (just in case anyone wants absolute confirmation).

But yeah everyone saw this coming it was always going to be near the very end of the year so I'm not surprised it has slipped into the start of jan 07. However I would rather they do that then rush the thing out the door with glaring mistakes in the OS & the business versions are actually different this time round with less features that matter to home users so it make sense they are the ones first out the door.

projectmayhem

tbh i probably wouldn't have bought it anyway. i'll wait for another year or so and buy a new pc with dx10 and so on.

but it's a good thing microsoft is delaying, as 8t8 said, because it means they can iron out the inevitable issues that will arise

^whitey^

projectmayhem wrote:

tbh i probably wouldn't have bought it anyway. i'll wait for another year or so and buy a new pc with dx10 and so on.

Balls, was hoping to build a DX10 machine late summer for Vista. Can we still expect to see DX10 graphics cards & socket AM2 in August as I'd like to build a rig then.

art

Another year or two delay, even, will do no harm. Vista is going to be mostly looking to the interests of media providers, there's little it brings to the home user that isn't already available.

Judt

It'll be a few months chaps, not years. It's going from November to January for the commercial release, though businesses will start getting the part sooner. The issue is more what they'll miss out on in terms of holidays sales, which could stunt the growth of Vista as the main OS into 2007, which would in turn delay Microsoft getting rid of XP in the longer term, as well as their efforts to roll out digital content and all the new crapzilla coming with Vista.

Still, like the Red Army bearing down on you slowly but surely it's rather inevitable that Vista will do the job Microsoft is setting it out to do in terms of market share.

8T8

^whitey^ wrote:

Balls, was hoping to build a DX10 machine late summer for Vista. Can we still expect to see DX10 graphics cards & socket AM2 in August as I'd like to build a rig then.

DX10 graphics cards won’t be out till the end of the year NVIDIA have stated they plan to launch their first SM4.0 DX10 GPU this Christmas if everything goes to plan as they want to be the first out with one. ATI on the other hand are in a more tricky area having only just launched its first SM 3.0 line of GPU's not too long ago to abandon that so quickly would be throwing away a lot of cash spent on R&D and product marketing etc.

So I don't think ATI's DX10 GPU will be out so quickly I'd imagine it will debut some time after Vista feb-apil 07 maybe even later though I think ATI would be worried about any headstart NV would have so if NV's comes out at the end of 06 they will bring their plans forward.

S3 also said they wanted to go straight to SM 4.0 hardware which is why they never released a SM 3.0 card but as much as I want to see a third player re-emerge in this market I would be sceptical that they would be first out with a DX10 GPU.

^whitey^ wrote:

Another year or two delay, even, will do no harm. Vista is going to be mostly looking to the interests of media providers, there's little it brings to the home user that isn't already available.

I don’t think that is particularly fair MS are damned if they do and damned if they don’t, the content providers hold all the cards and Microsoft is stuck with the unenviable position in having to cater to their demands. Many content providers would be delighted to have no support whatsoever for any form of video playback in computer operating systems. The situation is no different from XP if your video has no DRM on it then you can do whatever the hell you want with it in Vista.

I for one am actually looking forward to Vista though obviously certain things don’t appeal to everyone like a hardware accelerated UI but a lot of the annoying little issues that plague XP are resolved in Vista and if you haven’t watched many of the channel9 videos on Vista’s features this is decent article that touches on many of the improvements.

projectmayhem

8T8 wrote:

I for one am actually looking forward to Vista though obviously certain things don’t appeal to everyone like a hardware accelerated UI but a lot of the annoying little issues that plague XP are resolved in Vista and if you haven’t watched many of the channel9 videos on Vista’s features this is decent article that touches on many of the improvements.

assuming you know a bit about vista, what is microsoft offering in terms of gaming? if you haven't guessed from my comment above, really all i want from vista is dx10... but MS are pushing the "gamer friendly" thing here, but from what i can tell, all they're offering is a folder to store your games in. which is quite pathetic imo.

Stephen

Surely they'll be supporting DX10 on XP too? its not end of life for a good while.

8T8

projectmayhem wrote:

assuming you know a bit about vista, what is microsoft offering in terms of gaming? if you haven't guessed from my comment above, really all i want from vista is dx10... but MS are pushing the "gamer friendly" thing here, but from what i can tell, all they're offering is a folder to store your games in. which is quite pathetic imo.

Well I can only relay what I know so far Microsoft have been cagey about their plans for PC gaming in general just stating that they have neglected it somewhat and plan to rectify it with Vista so here is what they have said.

Quick install of games, the game installs and starts but in the background it is still actually transferring the content to the PC.

A more console like experience when inserting a game, upon inserting a game you won’t be swamped with the usual or so dozen clicks to get it going (like checking for DX etc) it should start as quickly as possible this sort of ties into the previous item.

Proper support for widescreens and 10 foot UI's like games running on a HDTV.

Game rating and management with parental controls so young ones can’t play [insert whatever] if the game has a rating applied to it that is not permitted by the administrator.

Better memory resource handling so after quitting a game the OS doesn’t take ages having to reload parts of itself into RAM, you get the gist whenever you exit a game in XP and explorer loads from the page file on the hard disk and takes forever. "Better" doesn’t mean eliminated though so it could as always depend on the game.

Possible better performance analysis of the system, Vista will ship with an inbuilt system for measuring bottlenecks in the system though this is intended for proper operation of the OS it "could" be applied to games as well and let those less technically inclined know if a game will run on their computer or not. Microsoft already has a more primitive version of this system for XP through a web page plug-in tied to some mini benchmark from Futuremark.

Some ties to the Xbox 360 very cagey on this, better support for the X360 game pad in Windows in short not a hack and all the buttons and triggers will work properly and Windows games can support that unit fully.

Multiplayer, can’t recall were I heard this but it might be tied to Direct-X 10 but better multi player support (like improved voice/headset support) I doubt that means a "Windows Live" version of Xbox Live but you never know...

Online purchasing of games, a seamless integration of digital distribution methods so you can play demos buy games etc. from within a central interface though there may be different stores within said interface (really only saw concept demos of this so I cant say whether this gets off the ground or not).

Direct-X 10, complete rewrite of the DX API with no backwards compatibility for DX 1-9 so free from those shackles, biggest thing is no more vendor extensions like SM2.0b or the SM 3.0 vertex fetch b*llocks from ATI or NV your either compliant or your not with DX10 all hardware will support the same features no wiggle room nada, none, zip. This means it will be easier for developers to exploit the features of DX10 GPU’s and not have to worry about different cards supporting this and that.

Next are the speed improvements the underlying driver architecture has been ripped out and re-written to reduce bottlenecks and I/O overhead which reduce the efficiency of current GPU’s. Games running under Vista will simply run faster compared to DX9 or even DX10 hardware under XP.

A version of DirectX-9 is also supplied for backwards compatibility with previous games (DX9 actually already emulates DX 1-7).

Completely new audio sub system won’t make a huge difference in games but it has been revamped to support HD audio and clear out the bugs in the audio system.

Anyway that’s all I can recall for now if I remember anything else I will update this.

Now this is total speculation on my part but I do wonder if Microsoft will attempt to define PC gaming like the console manufacturers do with their colour coded boxes at retail etc now so you would see “Designed for Windows” logos on boxes with a greenish/blue tint to match Vista (with plugs for Vista on the box as well) take a look at the SiN: Emergence trailers for a glimpse of this logo which I have not seen recently in games, like I said pure guess work on my part and Microsoft have been quiet on the plans they have for PC gaming with Vista.

Could be they plan a renewed push of PC gaming with Vista to drives sales of the OS and new hardware while at the same time putting themselves in more control over the PC gaming market which is very independent and will remain so anyway as nothing can stop you from selling a game just you wouldn’t be privy to the MS logo. Apparently in the USA PC gaming is being side lined at retail outlets so a MS with its own official PC gaming boxes along side X360 would be a much more common affair with MS applying the pressure on retailers (again pure wild speculation on my part).

Stephen wrote:

Surely they'll be supporting DX10 on XP too? its not end of life for a good while.

Okay I'm guilty of this too but it is easier to say DX10 then D3D10 but Direct3D-10 is the part that actually matters here and so far word/rumour is that its not being back ported to XP for the sole reason in that their is no point the performance advantage that DX10 offers is tied to Vista's new driver architecture, without that it evaporates.

If D3D10 were available on XP it would be no different than a D3D9 game now seeing as the vast majority of stuff out their is a mix of SM 2/3 hardware almost all games developers are still going to be making D3D9 versions of their games with the first D3D10 games using DX10 for performance only (with the excpetion of Halo 2). It will be quite a while before the DX10 install base is sufficient enough for developers to start dropping SM3.0 support from games though SM2.0 support will disappear quickly I believe.

DX10 GPU's will of course work under XP they will just act as turbo charged DX9.0c cards.

Now back to the DX10 part Direct-X 10 is a collection of API's that govern sound, 3D control, network etc so it is feasible (but unlikely) that you could see a Direct-X 10 under XP minus the D3D10 segment but I don’t think MS will as they wont want to confuse that matter any more and DX9.0c is the end of the road on XP.

Stephen

Interesting post, thanks.

I'm probably going to upgrade to vista when it comes out anyways.

stevenmu

There was talk of profile management and system optimisation utilities for gamers too, altough I haven't seen them mentioned in ages. Basically when you go to run a game they'll free up memory and other resources taken up by all the fluff you won't be using while playing.