mythbustersExtreme Tech gathered together a few common tech myths and went to work researching and debunking these myths. Unfortunately they didn’t use the Mythbuster testing methods of blowing things up but they did a good job.

Games for Windows Live: Must Pay Micro$oft $$$
It is true that Games for Windows Live is a premium service, and has an annual fee associated with it. The confusion revolves around what exactly you get with the free (Silver) version, and what you get for extra cost (the Gold version.) As GfW Live evolved, Microsoft kept updating us on the features, and some of the stuff that Redmond initially suggested would cost money got moved into the “free” column.

I still see people post that they’d never pay money just to get voice chat. Please, let’s just stop. Voice chat is something built into the free GfW Live Silver account. What you get with the premium $50 per year version is matchmaking services and game achievements.

I also need to note that if you already have a Xbox Live Gold account, then GfW Live Gold is folded into that at no extra cost.

Now, if Microsoft would stick with this and not change their story again, maybe this meme will die out.

DirectX 10 on Windows XP
This one pops up occasionally still, usually offered by people who really don’t understand what DirectX 10 entails.

One of the key features of DirectX 10 is that it’s built on the Windows Vista graphics driver model (sometimes called LDDM.) It’s a radically different driver model that lives in user space, as opposed to the kernel mode driver used in Windows XP. That’s one reason why a graphics card driver failure can occur in Vista and Vista restarts the driver and keeps going.

It’s not so much that Microsoft couldn’t back-port DX10 to Windows XP, but that would require extensive rewriting, and even to the point of rewriting the kernel of Windows XP to support a user space driver like LDDM.

But Microsoft has already done that. It’s called Windows Vista.

By the way, you may have seen reports of people who have cleverly enabled gamers to run Shadowrun or the PC version of Halo 2—both Windows Vista only games—on Windows XP. Those hacks work, after a fashion. You don’t get multiplayer, which kind of defeats the purpose of Shadowrun. And neither use DirectX 10, so these hacks don’t mean someone’s figured out a way to run DX10 titles on XP.

That could theoretically occur: Clever programmers could create a translation layer allowing DX10 titles to run on Windows XP in DX10 mode. Performance, however, would most assuredly suck.

My DirectX 9 Games Won’t Work on Vista
It’s certainly possible that games originally written for Windows XP might not run on Windows Vista. But that’s not because of DirectX 9. Windows Vista, in fact, incorporates both DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. In fact, newer games will even update the version of DX9 on Vista to later versions, to take advantages of bug fixes and enhancements the boys in Redmond continue to make in DirectX 9. But the majority of DX9 titles work under Vista.

By the way, one reason some Windows XP games don’t run under Vista is because of driver-level content-protection schemes, such as Starforce. We’re certainly not fans of Starforce, but we need to note that drivers for it are now available for Vista, so if there’s a Starforce-protected game you’re burning to play, you can find those available at the Starforce web site.

My TV has a Resolution of 1080i
Robert Heron of DL.TV and who reviews HDTVs for PC Magazine gets this one fairly frequently from readers.

Except for a few old CRT projectors and CRT direct view HDTVs, no HDTV supports native interlaced resolution. They’re all progressive scan TVs. Now, a number of high-definition sources will output 1080i signals, but every single flat panel and digital rear projector will process that signal and display it in some progressive format.

DTS Sounds Better than Dolby Digital
DTS is the second most popular encoding scheme for multichannel DVD audio, behind Dolby Digital. Both DTS and Dolby Digital are lossy encoding schemes, which discard actual data in order to improve compression. The DTS encoding scheme is different, and is typically stored at a higher bit-rate (up to 1.5Mbps for DVD) than Dolby Digital, which is typically below 500Kbps for a 5.1 channel stream.

Early on, people glommed onto that higher bit rate number, listened to some DVDs that had both DTS and Dolby Digital encoding, and pronounced DTS better.

In fact, what they were really hearing was level differences. According to the folks at THX, which is vendor-neutral about audio encoding schemes, quite a few DTS-encoded DVDs were mastered so that the overall audio would play at a higher level than the typical Dolby Digital stream. So when people heard a DTS movie, it sounded better to their ears only because it was louder.

When listening tests were conducted using level-matched signals, no audible differences were readily discernable by most listeners.

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