Gaming and WinSAT

Back in Chapter 5, "Vista Performance and Maintenance," I introduced you to Vista's new WinSAT tool (see the "Windows System Assessment Tool [WinSAT]" section). Recall that WinSAT runs during setup and whenever you make major performance-related hardware changes to your system. WinSAT creates metrics for five aspects of your system performancegraphics, Direct3D, memory, processor, and storageand these metrics are stored as XML data on your system.

The key point here for gaming is that WinSAT also exposes an application programming interface (API) for third-party developers. This API enables a game developer to interrogate the assessments to determine the overall performance of the machine and to examine specific performance metrics, such as Direct3D rendering. This enables the game developer to activate game features that your computer can handle and to deactivate features that would run poorly or not at all on your system.