Gaming PCs Now With Power And Performance

IBM recently announced that the next version of its 32-bit PC operating system, OS/2, code-named Warp, will provide users with a new level of high-performance building a gaming PC game play currently not available in the DOS or Windows environments. By fine-tuning special settings for more than 100 software game titles and adding new features such as improved audio/video synchronization and enhanced memory management, Warp will deliver unprecedented speed and improved realism to today's popular arcade-style, simulation and strategy games.

IBM also announced a new development tool designed to make it easy for developers to quickly build exploitive native OS/2 games, with the DIVE (Direct Interface Video Extensions) programming tool, game developers have direct access to the video drivers needed to perform high-speed animated graphics that are critical for action-based games. A Game Developers Toolkit for OS/2 will be available in Beta in early 2008 to provide additional development support.

“Warp will deliver top-notch multimedia functionality that appeals to both novice and expert gamers,” says the director of marketing for IBM's Personal Software Products division. “Although games represent the most resource-intensive software on the market today, Warp's memory management and synchronization features lessen the complexity of game configuration and operation and promote higher performance play.”

Since most games run on DOS, gamers are faced with the limitations of the DOS environment. Common problems include lack of adequate memory, system configuration issues and the inability to run more than one application at a time reliably. The new OS/2 will eliminate most memory problems, make system configuration easier and allow multiple application processing in a reliable environment. OS/2 will easily enable gamers to take full advantage of the memory they have by supporting most popular standards, such as EMS, XMS, DPMI and high memory.

To boost ease-of-use, IBM has identified over 100 of the best-selling DOS, Windows and OS/2 game titles and incorporated settings for each game into the base Warp operating system (see following list). Gamers no longer have to navigate system configuration and AUTOEXEC.BAT files - the new OS/2 automatically chooses the proper game setting. Gamers gain easy access to their favorite games with drag and drop speed. Should gamers wish to manually change settings, OS/2's multiple VDMs (Virtual DOS Machines) will allow session configuration without having to reboot the system or maintain separate boot diskettes.

The VDM technology also takes advantage of OS/2's Crash Protection(a), multitasking and memory management - gamers can play while running print jobs, faxing documents or accessing a communications session, without disrupting performance.

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