Windows 10 Stuff...
Imagine Bill Gates with a trench coat in a back alley saying.. Hey.. Psst.. pal.. want some Windows 10? The first one is free... Then opens up one side of his trench coat and it's lined with blue thumb drives with white windows logos attached to keychains in rows... XD
My thoughts on the recent Xbox errr.. I mean... Windows 10 stuff..
Much of it I could take or leave.. as it doesn't really blow my skirt up either way.
The UI on there is pretty meh.. the theme looks downright ugly to me still.. like regressing to Windows 1.0.. and I would probably replace it anyhow with third party theming software. I don't like the start menu how it has random photos from ads and news articles in it.
I don't like snapping window functions and prefer totally manual window managing. I don't like windows doing their own thing when I approach edges with them. I tend to quickly shut that kind of stuff off.
I'm glad Windows is finally getting a native virtual desktop manager like other operating systems have had for some time now. I just hope they swipe at least one more feature from OS X and that's having full screen apps create and close their own desktops.
Fable Legends might be cool but it's not really on my radar here.
I wonder where is the wireless adaptor for the Xbox One controllers for personal computer? I'm not upgrading from my custom X360 controller until this happens.
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1) Xbox One streaming:
Before I start and to head off any confusion I'm aware that this is local streaming from an Xbox one already owns in their house.
Do not want... I'm not a proponent for game streaming outside of "let's play" type scenarios.
Some people prefer physical copies of all their games rather than having their install discs in the cloud like with steam or GoG. I didn't have as much of a problem with that because at least those games could be downloaded locally to your hard drive and played even without an internet connection. Yes, even with Steam..
I draw the line at "cloud gaming" where the game is totally remote and all you are doing is streaming the rendered video and piping controls over internet connection. Streaming is fine for videos (movies, TV shows)... However..
Many of us don't have great internet connections and don't want additional latency beyond what's already produced by our hardware. We buy nice hardware to be able to run games at its fullest potential rather than the homogenized settings streaming would provide.
Not to mention Personal Computer gamers like and want mods.
If I bought an Xbox One I'd have the hardware in my hand at which point I may as well hook it up directly to an adaptor to my monitor and play it that way. But I don't want a console.. so there goes that idea.
I also don't care for the idea of having a big great system with a big great monitor and great sound and then spending all my time streaming my local games to a tiny tablet or handheld all the time. I don't need a screen glued to my face in every square inch of my house.
The only usage case I can think of where I might consider it is if I had an internet connection fast enough and I where traveling and I wanted to access my steam library at home from a notebook. But the latency might kill that for me and I'd still want games loaded directly onto that notebook.
What I would dislike is let's say I would say "I'd like to see game XYZ come to PC (& other operating systems, I don't discriminate)". For someone to say "JUST GET AN XBOX ONE AND STREAM IT TO WINDOWS 10!"
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Getting to the REAL big deal in Windows 10 at least for me....
2) DirectX12:
Great stuff. Less power consumption and greater performance than previous APIs? How can one say no to that? This is the future of PC Gaming folks.
Sadly, it also cements Windows lead on other operating systems in the performance arena. Unless AMD can somehow pull a rabbit out of their hat bringing MANTLE to Linux, OS X, and Nvidia as well as the currently supported AMD+Windows.
We don't know if\when the next gen "OpenGL Next" will materialize and what platforms it'll be supported on or vice versa will support it. Hell, support for the most recent version of OpenGL at time of writing is not across the board across all platforms and subsystems like MESA.
Apple has Metal but all indications seems that it's tied to their ARM processors and and as far as I'm concerned OS X users would have to give up much transitioning to that on the Mac in order to get Metal. Like you know.... boot camp, most of their game library except for new ports or patched games.. etc.
Unless what this person says is true "Metal is based on LLVM. It is built upon learning from OpenCL.
It can easily transfer to Intel GPU within seconds.
It uses C++11 and shading language."
But then again people in comments sections tend to trivialize cross platform matters. Like saying... when doing a processor transition all one needs to do is recompile their app and it'll automagically work.
There is also OpenGL's AZDO (almost zero driver overhead) techniques but I'm unclear as to whether it requires the latest available OpenGL and so far I only know of one game that has an option to use it. That is Tux Kart... which doesn't even seem to really need it.
Either way sadly at this point I feel better about Windows future in terms of graphics performance and perhaps compatibility than any other platform.