Microsoft Q4 financial report

[ERP]

My understanding is that the current plan is going to be you will need DX9 level graphics as a minimum spec to run "Longhorn" games.

The idea is to provide a new "platform" for games. The hope is that they can use this to provide a consistent experience, simplify developement and hopefully reverse some of the shrinkage that's been taking place in the PC games space.

I know of at least one publisher who is pushing to have the bar raised even higher than DX9.

 

[Deepak]

What would help games in Longhorn?

It's supposed to switch to a "light weighted" core while running games, a sort of "Game OS", IIRC. And it will also have Xbox live (or something that use the same formula) implemented, and a better management of the gamepad (for example only one "universal" model of gamepad for the PC (and maybe Xbox)).

That would be great, ideally there should be a sort of "safe mode" for playing games, terminating all unnecessary processes. Will it also mean less RAM required for playing games??

 

[Farid]

Deepak, you 'll never have enough ram to play games on PC... never!

PC developers have "Paging File" tatooed on their arms.

 

[jvd]

By the time longhorn comes out 1 gig of system ram will be the minimum . Right now its maxium. But windows is normaly eating up 64-256 megs of ram depending on how well u have it tuned .

So i normaly get 1.5 gigs of ram .

THe light weight core would hopefully reduce it to 64 megs as the most bloated it can get.

But by then i'm sure 1 gig dimms will be much cheaper and most likely 256 meg dimms will be phased out (just as the 64 and now 128 are dieing) .

So i would think 1 gig of ram will drop down to the 150$ ish range for faster than what we have now ram.

Gamers will want at least 1.5 gigs perhaps even 2 gigs by then.