Windows 10 free for Windows 8.1 & 7 users for first year after release

[GSkid]

Windows 10 free for all Windows 8.1 and 7 users for first year after release

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/01/ ... irst-year/

Confirmed! Love it or hate it, it's now an option. I for one will upgrade. Doing so also extends your OS support window even further into the future. Though we will likely buy a new computer long before that. Nice gesture on their part.

[mrennie]

Apparently it's to get people to start using the HoloLens and to encourage developers to make apps that use it.

[GSkid]

Here's the performance difference they showed with DX11 vs. DX12 using 3Dmark...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=8 ... 1421828030

Notice the DX11 side bogs down to a halt as scene complexity increases while the DX12 side keeps chugging along...both used the same hardware. All Nvidia GPUs that are based on Fermi, Kepler or the current Maxwell architecture can use DX12. AMD GPUs currently require they be GCN-based to run DX12.

I'm looking forward to the speed improvements in DX12 games.

[Bananarama]

I would be very interested in hearing from those who obtain Win-X on what performance they're able to squeeze out of Railworks over their previous OS.

[GSkid]

I would be very interested in hearing from those who obtain Win-X on what performance they're able to squeeze out of Railworks over their previous OS.

I'm guessing that is a joke? Cuz DX12 isn't gonna help a DX9 sim. Further more... I haven't read of any other major improvements in Windows 10 that will help Railworks in any way performance-wise. In a lot of ways...Win 10 is to Win 8.1 what Win 7 was to fixing Vista.

I could see Epic Games possibly upgrading their UE4 to DX12 to take advantage of the performance increases that could help DTG's next-gen Railworks in a couple years.

Microsoft has admitted that DX11 is poorly multithreaded and that certain assumptions the standard makes about its underlying hardware are particularly inefficient. According to Microsoft, one of the key problems in DX11 is thread utilization.

http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/17890 ... pabilities

DX12 aims to remedy that. They expect about a 50% performance improvement over DX11. They also expect power consumption to be reduced as much as 50%, which is really good news for laptops. I haven't heard the details yet on how they accomplish that.

[Bananarama]

I'm guessing that is a joke?

I'm sure you didn't intend to come off as snarky. Why would I be joking?

Performance not only includes legacy/current Dx-apps, but also how the OS handles memory (and the release thereof). I'm still on XP - the memory leaks in RW are painfully obvious, and fairly ignorant on Win7/8 (but have been told memory handling is far superior to XP). Oh I'm sure everything will be golden, but I just picked up an OEM copy of Win7 and curious if taking advantage of the upgrade is worth it or not.

[GSkid]

You are right...I wasn't trying to be snarky. I was genuinely confused as to if you were being serious or were joking. The emoticon also added to my confusion as to if you were serious or not. No disrespect intended.


As for memory leaks in XP with Railworks? I haven't used XP in years and have only used Railworks in Win 7 & 8.1 so I don't know how the memory leaks manifest themselves. Maybe their better memory management has shielded me from witnessing the effects of leaks in this sim.

As for getting an OEM copy of Win 7 and the decision on whether to upgrade to 10? I say upgrade to 10 and if you don't like it, revert back to using 7. The other option is to have a dual boot arrangement and have 7 & 10 on their own partitions if allowed.

My hunch is that 10's memory management will likely not be much different than 8.1's. Maybe a few tweaks that we will not notice in comparisons with 8.1 performance-wise. I know boot up, shut down and especially entering and exiting sleep mode is faster in 8.1 than it is in 7. But my guess is (other than DX12), we won't see much of a difference in 10 over 8.1 from a performance angle. I could be wrong, but MS certainly haven't been hyping that aspect beyond DX12, so I suspect it's because they aren't really a factor.

Win 10 from what I'm reading is more interface tweaks, a new browser called "Spartan", ....better integration with the following.....mobile Windows (universal apps), OneDrive cloud, Xbox One, the mobile OS's "Cortana" voice/search features (similar to Apple's Siri) in the desktop/laptop realm now and with the new holographic headset.

[BNSFdude]

The memory leaks you are experiencing are mainly because of the poor programming of the current RW engine. My Windows 7 PC experiences it too. I have 12GB of Ram and only Railworks manages to eat up 10 of it in some situations.

[buzz456]

How do you detect a memory leak? Does it ooze out onto the floor or what?

[peterhayes]

BNSF

The memory leaks you are experiencing are mainly because of the poor programming of the current RW engine. My Windows 7 PC experiences it too. I have 12GB of Ram and only Railworks manages to eat up 10 of it in some situations.

There is something very wrong here - The RW engine when running Ts2015 is very stable otherwise every simmer would be reporting frequent crashes. TS2015 is a 32-bit app and can only address a MAXIMUM of 4GB RAM and IMO is not responsible for your RAM leak. On 3 machines the maximum RAM usage I have seen by TS2015 is 2.5GB in all conditions. Here's an easy method to check a RAM leak start a scenario press F2 walk away for a couple of hours and if the scenario re-starts then there is NO memory leak. If windows is recording this RAM usage by the time that you got to 10GB it would have issued a warning asking you to change your settings or look at your paging file. This leak is probably being caused by something in the background and may be hardware related (faulty ram, etc). When did you last defrag the paging file and how big is it? Have you run sfc /scannow and chkdsk /r (at boot). Does the leak occur if you run TS2015 in CLEAN BOOT mode?

I agree with Hack re the OS impact on something like TS2015. The only increase in performance would be if the OS became more efficient in transferring data from the VAS to the cpu and RAM. In FSX for example I never saw any increase in performance per se when running Vista 64-bit SP2 and changing to Win 7 64-bit on the same hardware. Since the inception of Win 7 - hardware improvements (and possibly video drivers) have been the biggest key in improving performance. Some cynics say if you get an OS that covers every eventuality you run the risk of it becoming bloatware and actually decreasing performance.
pH

[GSkid]

I'm with Peter on this one. I can't see how the 32-bit Railworks can take more than 4GB tops. I too have about 2.5GB memory usage when using the sim. Other than working on a huge HD video file in a video editor, I don't know why 10GB is being used. The X-Plane 10 demo with all settings on max had my memory usage at 6.5GB on my Win 7 laptop. The biggest usage by any game/sim I've seen. Something is seriously amiss.

Have you opened up Windows Task manager to see the memory footprints?

[BNSFdude]

I discovered the RAM eater, its the Blueprint Editor I leave open while editing sounds!

[mrennie]

I discovered the RAM eater, its the Blueprint Editor I leave open while editing sounds!

That explains why Norton pops-up a message about the BE causing a high CPU load.