Direct X 10. What Happened?
Here we are, Almost two years later and virtually nothing has changed as of this moment, the total number for DX10 supported games is only 15, developed by only 10 different publishers.
The DX10 development kit for PC’s was released prior to the launch of windows vista, but because of lack of supported hardware few companies could begin working on “next gen” PC titles, without replacing entire workstations. With the brunt of development for the next gen games, done on the next gen consoles themselves, developers had a hard time adapting to the new buggy software and the outrageous requirements the machines needed to have to be comparable to the consoles, Direct X 10 was fast looking like the final nail in Vista’s broken promises coffin.
Now if you count ports and re-releases of the same titles the total amount of DX10 supported games is actually 19, and two of the titles only added High Def lighting, so they’re not actually DX10 capable.
Microsoft even launched a revision of DX10 (10.1) and an updated Dev Kit, it fixed many of the bugs, yet it still hasn’t caught on.
Although Somehow, there are at this moment, at least 44 Video cards that support this industry standard, 21 for Nvidia and 23 for ATI (these numbers aren’t counting INTEL’s graphic line or any other manufacturer) Each Card is significantly faster than the last, but there is no way the games are taking advantage of this hardware, or any other capabilities that the cards might have.
So what happened? The focus was to get the hardware out first, developers waited for manufactures to play catch-up and then seemingly fell asleep at the wheel, causing the role to reverse.
The last thing to breathe life into this new standard is Microsoft’s announcement to make “Windows 7’s” “Areo 2” theme fully 10.1 compliant, which they hope will be a kick to developers. For now, the most you can do is sit back, relax, and play hellgate.
Ubuntu 8.10!
Finally, the months of waiting are over, the new kernel was released and Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex was born, and although I was very excitied with the release, there are some issues that I have noticed, being a very new build it's not a major problem yet.
The Good: Everything they promised with the exception of one thing was delivered, a rebuildable kernel, advanced hardware support, support for more packages and the like were all included with the release.
Like all GNOME distros Ubuntu is highly adaptable and customizable, in depth highly developed desktop effects are easily enabled to bring an amazing experience while working.
The Bad: The One feature that didn't deliver was the high end support for wifi cards, and on a laptop this is key, the built in atheros drivers don't seem to work despite the fact it was a massive feature, I can get it to work if I jump through the hoops that go along with it, but the key issue is that I shouldn't have to.
That was a major feature that made me decide to go with the upgrade, It was a problem with the last release and it seems to be a problem now. In a way I am kind of disappointed.
The Install was simple and to the point, the live CD did a wonderful job detecting my hardware, Gparted the GNOME partition editor has been streamlined and is much simpler to use.
The Ugly: Still very bad support for ATI video cards, and by very bad I actually mean almost none. which is sad because most ATI users want to use linux for development and have to jump through many hoops to get support.
All In all It is a good release, for a desktop running an Nvidia Chipset and an non Atheros wireless card.
with updates every day I am positive they will fix the issue and what ever other issues that might arise.
for a linux distro I give it a 7 of 10. Check it out at http://www.ubuntu.com
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