Xgl, wow!

[Sean Kelly]

Jari-Matti Mäkelä wrote:
> Georg Wrede wrote:
>> Don Clugston wrote:
>>> I think that the games market is tremendously important to Microsoft's
>>> market share. If it were to lose that, it would be game over. Seriously.
>> This might be something for Apple. They've got a lot of good press and
>> goodwill lately: iPods, Intel-Macs, etc. And they have a user base where
>> folks are used to paying (overprice) for everything. Since they control
>> both the hardware and the OS, there's never a problem with drivers or
>> compatibility.
>>
>> Imagine buying the newest computer game -- and just _knowing_ it
>> _works_!  NO hassle.
>>
>> I'd pay extra just for the peace of mind.
> 
> In that case you should consider game consoles. The semi-old ones (Sega
> Megadrive, SNES, ...) are IMO the best.

Consoles are a lot of fun, but the games they offer are a bit different 
than those for the PC so it really depends on what sort of games you 
like to play.  I like them both, but prefer different platforms for 
different game types.  That aside, I'm hoping that Apple's switch to 
Intel will ease porting concerns a bit and that we'll begin to see a few 
more OSX games than in the past.

> The game-intensive Vista will be the most expensive version and have the
> best DRM-technologies available. Since it's possible to do almost
> everything else with Mac/Linux/BSD, the only reason to buy Vista will be
> new games. I suppose most proprietary business/educational software will
> still run on XP (and a bit later with WINE).

Thing is, Vista doesn't really offer anything for games over XP--all the 
same APIs are supported, etc.  Also, Vista will consume far more 
resources behind the scenes than XP, so you'll need a more powerful 
system just to get equivalent performance as on XP.  As you say, it may 
well be the DRM features publishers will find most attractive, but 
that's obviously not a selling point for users.


Sean