I still would like to know what Valve and Blizzard have encountered with Win8 that makes it trouble. I have not had any problems with Steam and WoW. Maybe they do mean drivers though..
1. http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/25/valves-gabe-newell-talks/
On Windows big players like Valve are going to be less willing to play sharecropper.
Windows RT does, but that's like comparing OSX to the iPad.
The point I was making is that Steam doesn't work on Microsoft ARM tablets powered by Windows RT, but that shouldn't be a big surprise considering no desktop software works on ARM computers without being recompiled for that platform. It's no different than OSX vs iOS.
Edit: haha I wonder if this article is true about microsoft abandoning 'metro' in favor of 'windows 8-style ui' Seems relevant.
Maybe it has something to do with the Microsoft App Store and MS being the gatekeeper that decides if an app runs or not there. Oh, and by the way getting 30% cut of the price of the software, all software a la Apple.
No matter what kind of company you are, whether a software or hardware one, if you're doing "well" in the current/status quo Windows environment, then Windows 8 is a threat to you, because it will change a lot of things, and most likely for the worse for regular "PC-oriented" companies.
Not really. FPS readings >= monitor refresh rate give skewed results that may not reflect the actual performance. Despite this, it's still used widely in performance benchmarks.
FPS is the new MIPS.
[1]Dual boot on a Sony Vaio FZ-21S, with onboard ASIO chipset, headphones - Pioneer SE-A1000 (Equivalent to a Sennheisser HD - 595) with no equalizers.
I'd just like to point out that you'll have more variations in your sound by just turning the mini-jack connector than by modifying any driver, who do nothing more than copying a stream of digital audio into the buffer of the sound card to be sent to the DAC.
The only area where I've seen changes caused by drivers is on latency, a latency that matters only in a creative context.
The best way to identify any differences is to run the audio into a calibrated measurement device (at the very top end an Audio Precision box) and check the gain, frequency response, jitter, THD+N, etc.
Edit: Will calibrate and let you know mate. Thanks!
That's a grosse simplification of what the audio driver does. Mixing, leveling, EQ, spatiality and a lot of other details are handled by driver as well. My last Linux laptop, running Ubuntu, had an annoying hiss when the levels were at 100. The fix was enabling SSE2, which got disabled everytime the kernel was upgrading. From that example I know the driver is doing far more than streaming audio to the DAC.
Other than that, it's just valve making linux version of steam and tries to promote it.