Editor’s Note 4/49/08 12:36 PM: OK, I’ll admit it. I got HAD by this article. It was based on an April’s Fools joke and made it’s way to PCMech well after April Fools. I’ll leave it up here since people have already commented on it. I’m not sure if Nathan (the author) knew it was a farce, but one thing is for sure: I need to pay much better attention when I’m publishing guest posts for PCMech. Sheesh…

–START OF THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE–

It has been announced that DirectX 11 will include a completely new type of graphics rendering called ray-tracing. Wait a minute. It’s not new. In fact, it’s been around since the 80’s. How come it took so long to be implemented for public use? How does it work? What advantages does it have over current-gen graphics? These questions are about to be answered.

Continued

With the 9 series of graphics cards coming out from Nvidia, many are wondering what this new kid on the block series has. Here we will look at the new technologies, improved specifications, rumors vs. truth, and the bottom line.

The 9 series of NVIDIA graphics was speculated since at least October of 2007, when it became evident that NVIDIA would not release a 8900 and 8950, as many insisted (the inquirer, for example). New rumors speculated a 30% increase from the top 9-series card, the 9800GTX, over the 8800 ultra. Also to have over one billion transistors, 1GB of graphics memory, over one teraflops of shader processing power, and other features like DirectX 10.1 and a built in audio chip. What does this mean? Quite simply, it’s a beast. Many of this was just crazy talk (built in audio chip?), but some of it proved true. Continued

There is a lawsuit against Microsoft afoot for the misrepresentation of the “Vista capable” designation. The judge in that case got a collection of internal emails. In that collection of emails comes an interesting statistic: that almost 30% of logged crashes of Windows Vista were caused by Nvidia video drivers.

According to the story on Ars:

Microsoft’s data strongly indicates that the problems were real. Damon Poeter at CRN dug through the documentation to find that on page 47 of the PDF, NVIDIA drivers were identified as the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or just under 29 percent of all the crashes Microsoft logged. Microsoft’s own drivers follow, at 17.9 percent, and the “Unknown” category takes third place at 17 percent. ATI is in fourth place (9.3 percent) and Intel in fifth place (8.83 percent).

We have been hearing about problems with Nvidia under Vista from PCMech visitors. In fact, I personally had issues using Nvidia in 2007 under Vista. I had to actually go out and spring for an ATI card just to make my video system work under Windows Vista. Needless to say, I was pissed.

So, these emails pretty much confirm what we informally already knew: Nvidia was (and perhaps is still) problematic under Windows Vista.

Even Microsoft VPs got “personally burnt” by the Vista-capable stickers.

It really is hard to imagine how Microsoft could have so royally screwed up with Windows Vista.

Two words: Save XP.

Source: Ars Technica via Engadget