[PLUG] XP or Vista?

[Mike Neal]

>
>>The DRM crap in the drivers is eating resources even if there is no 
>>need for DRM. Happy gaming!
>
>Every release of Windows has shown lower performance gaming 
>benchmarks than the previous as driver support in general gets 
>caught up.  So I'm not sure how you conclude DRM is the source for 
>it this time.  I would like to see your sources for this as it 
>interests me.  I do feel your comment has an air of irony on a Linux 
>list though. ;)

You are right, DRM is the symptom. The source is the MS philosophy of 
adding value for MS, not the customer. DRM is just the latest 
contributor to bloatware as Bill makes his play to own the channel 
for high definition entertainment content.

 From http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

/snip/
As part of the bus-protection scheme, devices are required to 
implement AES-128 encryption in order to receive content from Vista. 
This has to be done via a hardware decryption engine on the graphics 
chip, which would typically be implemented by throwing away a GPU 
rendering pipeline or two to make room for the AES engine.
/snip/
Needless to say, the need to develop, test, and integrate encryption 
engines into audio/video devices will only add to their cost, as 
covered in 
<http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/%7Epgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html#hardware>Increased 
Hardware Costs above, and the fact that they're losing precious 
performance in order to accommodate Vista's content protection will 
make gamers less than happy.
/snip/

Also see http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0702.html#8

and thanks Michael, but I just follow the links offered here by you 
and others ;-)

Cheers,
Mike