Back to the drawing board

Vista, as has been widely reported, will throttle network performance rather drastically while playing sound or video. Mark Russinovich has an excellent indepth analysis of why this occurs. This is a very visible and very embarrassing issue for MicroSoft, not bettered at all by initial responses that this was “by design“.

BioShock, it turns out, is not a reason to go Vista at all. The image quality differences between DX9 and DX10 renders are minute, while the performance difference between the DX9 and DX10 renders is very noticable, and does not favor DX10 in the least. Stay with XP for this one, folks.

The BioShock DRM/activation shocker is being handled by 2k. Apparently, we’ll see “5×5″ activations (5 times per PC, on 5 different PCs), and we’ll see a way to “revoke” an activation, thus completely uninstalling BioShock and allowing the activation to be used again elsewhere. This is good news for enthusiasts who swap hardware and reinstall Windows not infrequently. I’d still have preferred BioShock without DRM infection.

The Crysis Demo release date has been announced. Will it be the DX10 killer app that makes us all go Vista? I’m starting to get cynical, here, as much as I want to be a MicroSoft fanboi.

On a very self-indulgant note, the EvE corp I am part of is going to fight in the “6th Alliance Tournament” to be held during the next two weekends. We fight on the 1st at 20:20 GMT, on the 2nd at 20:20 GMT, on the 7th at 20:00 GMT, on the 8th at 20:20 GMT, and on the 9th at 17:00 or 17:20, 19:00 (assumed, could be any time from 18:00 on), 20:30 (assumed, could also be 20:00) and 21:30 GMT. GMT is -4 to EDT, +1 to BST, +2 to CET (CST? I get confused), and -7 to PDT.

It’ll all be streamed for free at EveTV.

The best for last: Researchers in Belgium and Israel have found a huge weakness in “KeeLoq”, which is used by all (or only almost all?) car manufacturers to encrypt the remote entry and remote start systems in cars. This means that a determined “bad guy” with about 20k to spend can set up with a system that will sniff the data sent from your key to the car, then, using the cracked manufacturer master secret, indicate to the car that it is being operated by its rightful owner, and just drive it away. Rather than making car jackings more difficult, it now appears that the immobilization tech makes it even easier.
Which is why ciphers need to be peer-reviewed and solid, not concocted in some corporations lab in secret by self-styled “crypto experts”.

Vista, monthly update

I am still putzing around with Vista, though I am not using it for daily tasks due to performance issues with my 7800GT graphics card. I may do monthly “state of Vista” posts, as filtered through my gamer-centric view.

I installed the performance and compatibility packs for Vista. Can’t say I noticed a huge difference, though file copying is somewhat faster now.

The leaked SP1 “private beta” has been analyzed. It’s a good read. Apparently, SP1 speeds Vista up noticably. No release date for SP1 has been announced as of yet, although the author of the linked piece speculates that there will be a public beta towards the end of the year, followed by a release “sometime in 2008″.

EvE Online performs like a dog under Vista. For starters, instead of 40-50fps, I get around 30fps. This is actually behavior that others have noticed with older cards, too. The suggested workaround is to use (non-signed) XP drivers. No, thanks. Also, that wouldn’t work on Vista 64-bit, as driver signing is mandatory there.

Another odd thing that EvE Online does under Vista on my machine is that after flying around a bit, blowing a few things up, what have you, I get “sawtooth” performance. Every half-second or so, the screen freezes for just a moment, and an FPS graph shows a classical sawtooth. Really weird. I am speculating that this has to do with texture memory. One of the things Vista introduced is the idea of “shared” texture memory. Therefore, my aging 7800GT now shows 256MB of “dedicated” video memory (what’s actually on the card) and 768MB of “shared” video memory (that’s main memory). Apparently, Aero is quite hungry when it comes to video memory, hence that requirement. Somewhere in the shuffle between EvE’s aging engine, my aging graphics card and less-than-stable NVidia drivers, EvE comes to believe that it has more than 256MB of memory to shove textures in, which would then lead to textures being swapped back and forth over the PCI-E bus between graphics memory and main memory, leading to the sawtooth performance I see. That’s my current working theory, anyhow.

The driver situation continues to be less than ideal. I already detailed the performance issues with my graphics driver. Some driver is causing a BSOD upon (almost) every shutdown, though I haven’t bothered to check whether that’s sound, graphics, or the ramdisk. Creative is making noises about releasing updated Vista drivers for the Audigy series, but so far they have not done so.

The first reason to actually shell out monies for Vista (and hardware) is to be released tomorrow: Bioshock, which, if metacritic is anything to go by, is a masterpiece.

On the hardware side, the NVidia G92 65nm graphics refresh looks to be released in November. Intel’s X38 chipset should hit in October, and Wolfdale, Intel’s new 45nm dual-core desktop CPU, well, should “launch real soon now”. Initial benchmarks are promising for graphics / video creation apps that support SSE4, such as the Adobe suite or DivX.

Not Vista-related at all, but hardware-related, my PSU died. I took the opportunity to buy something a little more state-of-the-art (no more PCI-E and SATA adapters to molex), a Corsair HX520. I chose it over a Corsair VX450 because of its better support for multiple PCI-E (graphics) power adapters. In the end, a VX450 would likely have done fine – but given that I have to buy a PSU now, instead of waiting until I know which components my 2008 PC refresh would use as I planned, I chose to go with a little more oomph to be on the safe side.

I also took the opportunity to order a replacement for my Thermaltake X-Controller, which died shortly after having been installed. The replacement I chose is a Sunbeam fan controller. We’ll see how well that one fares.