Rumor: Windows 8 Launching August 2012; Win 9 in 2014
Windows 8 may see a commercial release in August 2012 followed by Windows 9 in November 2014.
Monday brought reports of a leaked Microsoft road map revealing an August 2012 commercial launch schedule for Windows 8. Prior to that, the beta will reportedly arrive during CES 2012 this coming January along with the WinStore Beta, an online market <ONM> community technology preview (CTP), and the first "Tango" update for Windows Phone. Windows 9 is even slated for a late 2014 reveal.
According to the roadmap, the Release Candidate for Windows 8 (RC) will roll out at MIX 2012 along with the online market beta and the Kinect commercial SDK -- "Apollo" for Windows Phone is also expected to be revealed. By the time E3 2012 rolls around, Microsoft will reportedly unveil the Xbox 360 SDK for creating apps, the Apollo SDK for Windows Phone and third-generation Kinect games. The Windows 8 RTM build is also expected to be released in June 2012.
Once August 2012 arrives, Windows 8, the online market, Windows Phone 8 and the Xbox (App) Store will launch if all goes according to plan. Then in September during BUILD 2012 Microsoft will offer a Windows 8 product upgrade developer preview and announce something called <OSN> along with the XAML+XDE platform.
On the Windows 9 front, a developer preview is expected to go live during BUILD 2013 followed by a Beta during CES 2014. A Release Candidate is slated to arrive during MIX 2014 followed by the RTM build with Internet Explorer 12 during BUILD 2014. It also looks like Windows 9 Mobile will also make its debut, as both the desktop and mobile versions will go commercial in November 2014.
To see the full roadmap, head here. As always, take this forecast with a grain of salt because (1) things change and (2) there's no official confirmation from Microsoft.
jeez, lets focus on supporting 8 for a few months first eh?
Actually quite a few good games are released with DX11 and are pretty graphically intense. Battlefield Bad Company 2, DiRT2, DiRT3, Total War: Shogun 2, Civilization V, Crysis 2, Metro 2033, WoW: Cataclysm, Homefront, and F1 2010 and 2011 to name a few.
Oh and did I forget to mention that Battlefield 3 only supports DX10, 10.1 and 11.
Think before you speak and make yourself look like a moron.
jeez, lets focus on supporting 8 for a few months first eh?
Win 7 is on may machine and it's staying there until the PC industry dies.
Long Live Linux
Actually quite a few good games are released with DX11 and are pretty graphically intense. Battlefield Bad Company 2, DiRT2, DiRT3, Total War: Shogun 2, Civilization V, Crysis 2, Metro 2033, WoW: Cataclysm, Homefront, and F1 2010 and 2011 to name a few.
Oh and did I forget to mention that Battlefield 3 only supports DX10, 10.1 and 11.
Think before you speak and make yourself look like a moron.
*Points out that two out of three consoles don't have a DX SDk, and even on the 360, coding directly to the hardware is more common then the DX SDK due to speed reasons*
1- The unbelievably ugly and un-ergonomic design of the Metro UI; most people will want to get rid of it quickly; not only for it's design but also because it's made simple jobs like clicking an icon on a desktop easier, but the normal OS operations difficult, to nearly impossible!
Say for instance, you want to change your power scheme, or update the OS manually, you will need to do several clicks before you can finally get to update it manually.
Not to even mention it took several minutes for me to find how to turn off the OS (without touching the power button).
2- It is about as fast as Windows XP, is efficient, boots a little faster, but consumes LOTS more battery! It also has tons of annoying background activity! The stuff you DON'T WANT because it's reducing performance!
3- Currently it does not have display drivers of the most simple Intel GMA chipsets found in laptops with integrated graphics cards! I had to download a Windows 7 driver, and run it in compatibility mode, and even then it has some quirks and blits and jitters here and there!
4- Being idle it uses 3-8% of CPU constantly, with a browser and a notepad opened it uses 1.16GB of RAM constantly
5- Disabling the shitty metro UI disables a lot of vital functions of the OS, including finding wireless signals!
6- If you hated the Windows Vista's start bar, and hated 7's start bar, you will hate 8's start bar even more, because it doesn't have any! It takes you to disable metro UI to get a shitty start bar, that's not very useful!
Everything is based on the computer finding files for you, but nearly 90% of the time I don't want the computer to search anything; I want to be the one browsing through the directory structure of the start bar that I KNOW where my program is!
There are times you don't know if a program has been uninstalled, or still resides on your HD, and you don't want WIndows to waste several minutes of your time searching for something it can't find anyway!
In these cases Win 8 is a total fiasco, a disaster, a flop!!!
Although it's in a beta phase, I believe unless MS focusses on reducing automatic 'unintelligent' background activity, and focusses on reducing Win8's footprint by at least 50%, windows 8 will be a big FAIL!
Nothing more than an overglorified Windows 7!
Windows 7 is still $200 for the retail version of Home Premium (I know, $99 for OEM). If W8 and W9 are the same cost, your talking about a $100 per year OS "tax" if you're an early adopter.
Oh you must mean adding DX11 to a PC game as an afterthought, dunkoff.