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• The performance differences between ATI and Nvidia graphics cards are currently fairly tight and well-segmented—in other words, it’s easy for an enthusiast to hit a site like newegg.com with a budget in mind and, all else being equal, find the best card for the money. Case in point: you tell me you have $160, I’ll tell you to get a GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 and cash in on the rebates. You tell me you can spend $180, I could tell you to grab a Radeon HD 4870 with 1 GB. But all else is not equal, so recommendations aren’t quite that cut and dry. Nvidia preaches the gospels of PhysX and CUDA, with an occasional verse about GeForce 3D Vision. ATI sings the hymns of DirectX 10.1 and Stream. Depending on which company you put your faith in, one of those two messages is going to sound a little sweeter. Right now, the two are in full-scale conversion mode, trying to get everyone they can to pitch in their tithing for a little gaming salvation. Just as PhysX and CUDA are starting to take hold with high-profile titles enabling support, so too are software developers paying more attention to DirectX 10.1. As a superset of DirectX 10, DirectX 10.1 includes a handful of quality-enhancing features that, in some cases, will run on DirectX 10 hardware, but at a performance hit. For instance, the Gather4 function fetches four samples (2x2) where a DirectX 10 part would only be able to fetch one. The result should be more realistic shadow maps and better performance. The Stalker: Clear Sky demo lets us test that theory with a toggled check-box to enable or disable DirectX 10.1. Our first test pits all of the Radeon HD 4800-series cards in this story against each other, without MSAA for alpha-tested objects enabled. At 1920x1200, performance is fairly similar across the board, with all test cases except the Radeon HD 4870 X2 demonstrating small gains by moving to DirectX 10.1. We then turned on 4x MSAA for alpha-tested objects and re-ran the numbers, this time at 1680x1050, in an attempt to maintain somewhat reasonable frame rates. This time, a majority of the test cases show DirectX 10.1 incurring a small performance hit. Is the performance tradeoff worthwhile? For that, we’ll need to make an image quality comparison from within the game itself. Up top you’ll find the screen capture provided by ATI, right up against a wall, demonstrating that the DirectX 10.1 shadows are softer and arguably more realistic. I ran all over the opening area of the game trying to find a clear example of the difference made by DirectX 10.1 shadows and just couldn’t come up with an indisputable best-case scenario. Even by reloading saved points, it was impossible to generate the exact same scene twice. Nevertheless, given the option of enabling DirectX 10.1 and not seeing a significant performance hit, you might as well turn the feature on. With the Game Developer’s Conference recently past, ATI had a handful of DX 10.1 titles to discuss during its briefing, besides Stalker. Tom Clancy’s HAWX looks like a fun title with DX 10.1 screen space ambient occlusion and accelerated Gaussian shadows. There were two other lesser-known titles, plus the UNiGiNE game engine, on which several upcoming titles are purportedly based. As of right now, DirectX 10.1 isn’t making a huge impact, but because it will become a subset of DirectX 11, you can expect the extra features being enabled right now to work moving forward in Windows 7. The same couldn’t be said for the disruptive shift from DirectX 9/XP to DirectX 10/Vista.

• In most of the comparisons we’ve seen, Ion has been pit against either a low-cost Intel G45-based desktop setup or a 945G-series Atom configuration. Given the strength of its IGP, we took it as a foregone conclusion that this setup would outperform Intel’s own mini-ITX D945GCLF2 Atom board (which incidentally costs $80 to the Ion’s $180). So instead, we built a platform that cost the same amount of money, but relied more heavily on desktop-oriented hardware. We used a Gigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H micro-ATX motherboard (AMD 780G chipset with 128 MB side-port memory), AMD’s recently-released Athlon X2 7850 dual-core CPU, and an Enermax ETK405AST 405W power supply—all of which add up to $187, matching the CPU/motherboard/PSU combo being offered by Zotac. Now, the contention from mini-ITX purists is going to be that our micro-ATX build can’t go into the same places. This is true. And we have a recommendation for the folks who just have to have mini-ITX coming up. It’s more expensive, though, and doesn’t make for an ideal performance comparison to Ion as a result. And just to be clear, we would not recommend our AMD-based build as a better HTPC solution. Its lack of multi-channel LPCM audio (we haven’t even been able to get it to pass-through DD or DTS in Windows 7 with the Reaktek HDMI driver) precludes it from most semi-serious home theater efforts. Test HardwareProcessorsIntel Atom 330 (Diamondville) 1.6 GHz, 441-ball FC-BGA, 533 MHz FSBAMD Athlon X2 7850 BE (Kuma) 2.8 GHz, AM2+, 1,800 MHz HT, 2 MB L3 Cache, Power-savings disabledMotherboardsZotac ION-ITX-A-U Nvidia Ion Graphics Processor, BIOS N0508WZTGigabyte MA78GPM-DS2H (AM2+) 780G/SB700, BIOS F4MemoryCorsair 4 GB (2 x 2 GB) DDR2-1066 5-5-5-15Hard DriveIntel X25-M 80 GB SATA 3 Gb/s Flash SSDGraphicsNvidia GeForce 9300ATI Radeon HD 3200 w/ 128 MB Side-Port MemoryPower Supply Enermax ETK405AST 405W ATX12V v.2.2System Software And DriversOperating SystemWindows Vista Ultimate Edition x86, Service Pack 1 / Windows 7 Release Candidate x86DirectX DirectX 10Platform/Graphics DriverGeForce/Ion 185.85 for Vista/Win7Catalyst 9.4 for Vista/Win7 Benchmarks and Settings3D GamesLeft 4 DeadQuality settings set to Low, 1280x720/720x480, latest Steam version, timed demo.World of WarcraftQuality settings set to Fair, 1280x720/960x600 (Ion) and 800x600 (780G platform), Patch 3.1.1, Ironforge circuit, Fraps (120 seconds).Audio EncodingiTunesVersion: 8.1, 32-bit, Audio CD ("Terminator II" SE), 53 min., Default format AACLame MP3Version: 3.98 (32-bit), Audio CD ""Terminator II" SE, 53 min, wave to MP3, 160 Kb/sVideo EncodingMainconcept Reference 1.6.1MPEG2 to MPEG2 (H.264), MainConcept H.264/AVC Codec, 28 sec HDTV 1920x1080 (MPEG2), Audio: MPEG2 (44.1 KHz, 2 Channel, 16-Bit, 224 Kb/s), Mode: PAL (25 FPS), Profile: Tom’s Hardware Settings for Qct-CoreApplicationsWinrar 3.80Version 3.80, Benchmark: THG-Workload (334 MB)Winzip 12Version 12, Compression=Best, Benchmark: THG-Workload (334 MB)Synthetic Benchmarks and Settings3DMark VantageVersion: 1.02, GPU and CPU scoresPCMark VantageVersion: 1.00, System, Memory, Hard Disk Drive benchmarks, Windows Media Player 10.00.00.3646SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP3CPU Test=CPU Arithmetic/MultiMedia, Memory Test=Bandwidth Benchmark

• Now you should have Windows XP set up as a guest inside VirtualBox on a Linux host. With Guest Additions, XP should now be in some form of fullscreen with mouse and keyboard integration. You can share files to and from the XP guest and Linux host. Your USB devices are available to the XP virtual machine. Heck, even cut, copy, and paste functions bi-directionally between the OSes. Unless you do really heavy 3D gaming, this setup should cover any straggling Windows-only apps that you absolutely need. It essentially does the very same thing that XP Mode does in Windows 7. Is there really a need to shell out extra money to get that functionality from a new version of Windows? If you decide to keep this setup, then this How To guide saved you money. But how much? In a worst-case scenario, at least $90 assuming you already have a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium from a new PC purchase, in which case you'd need to pay that much to upgrade it to Professional in order to get XPM. In the best case scenario, $170. If Windows 7 Home Basic or Starter edition came installed on your new PC, you need to pay another $80 to upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium, before paying the $90 for Pro or Ultimate. Add in the fact that you probably have more than one PC (I have seven). Now you can really start to see how Windows 7 could end up costing serious cash. Even if you already pre-ordered the new Windows for your primary machine, you could still use the Linux/VBox/XP-combo on your others. And unless you're a hardcore gamer, go ahead and run Windows 7 in VirtualBox, too! If it's the glowing Windows orb, the transparent windows, or gossamer reflection effects that are enticing you to go out and buy Windows 7, stay tuned for our upcoming coverage of Linux Preferences. There, we'll walk you through all the ways to customize your GUI, from panels to widgets and everything in-between. Don't worry, there will be a ton of transparency effects for those interested in cloning the Windows 7 GUI. There will even be some effects, like expo for Compiz Fusion, never before seen on a Windows machine.