Stardock Reckons You Should Switch To Windows 7

Stardock boss Brad Wardell says that “it would be good if everybody switched to Windows 7 as quickly as possible.”Speaking to Gamasutra, the Sins of a Solar Empire dev seems to believe Windows 7 will assist Stardock’s principle of making games run on as many systems as possible.”We want the game to look incredible on high-end systems, but I want people to be able to play this on their three-year-old laptop on the airplane,” said Wardell. “One of the things that comes up often is ‘How has Stardock made so much money on these niche games?’ Well, because our games run on millions of boxes.”In this fashion, DirectX 10 and 11 aren’t going to be required for a long time. “We’ve taken the view that we’re pretty much sticking with DirectX 9 until Windows Vista hits critical mass,” states Wardell. “The developer can still build the same features into their game […] you just don’t have to write the code to actually make use of those features [with DirectX 10 and 11].”Talking about Windows 7, however, Wardell seems impressed by something called WARP – an acronym for Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform – which, in layman’s terms, allows the system’s CPU to substitute for the graphics card, performing DirectX acceleration even when the video card doesn’t support particular features, or isn’t actually present. More than this, Wardell seems to think that a lot of the problems with Vista have been ironed out in the new iteration – “Apparently, performance is really good.”Wardell is well-known for being honest with his opinions. Windows 7 might be worth paying attention to, although if you really want to find out, you can actually try it yourself.