decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
Nah.. | 397 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Nah..
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 19 2012 @ 12:48 AM EST
Microsoft can limit it to Windows 8 if they want, but that just means game
developers will mostly ignore it until their metrics tell them that a big enough
chunk of gamers have adopted Windows 8.

Most Windows gamers are currently on Windows 7, with a smaller contingent of
Vista users (and a dwindling population of XP users). The vast majority of
Windows gamers now have DirectX 10.1- or 11-class graphics cards, and their OS
supports both of those well via DirectX 11.

So game developers will just target DirectX 11 for Windows PCs for now. If
Microsoft releases updates to DirectX that are available on Windows 7 and have
benefits with the existing 10.1- or 11-class graphics cards, then developers
will take advantage of that. If they restrict it to an OS that few players
actually have (Windows 8), either for sound technical reasons or because of some
business or marketing reason... then developers will not bother targeting it.
So there won't be many games that need it, so most gamers will not see any
reason why they should upgrade.

I expect Windows 7 and DirectX 11.0 to be the de-facto standard in PC gaming for
the next 2-3 years, by which point either Valve will have stolen the show with
some sort of open linux game console initiative, or Microsoft will have come to
their senses and buried Windows 8 in the desert and put out a Windows 9 that is
a genuinely-improved desktop OS, along with DX13 or something, which
standardizes great new features for a whole new generation of ever-more-powerful
graphics cards which all the gamers will want anyways.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )