Specular Reflection and Windows 7

[HumanDrone]

I really didn't know where to put this, so feel free to move it if necessary. On another forum, someone noted that they were going to build a new computer and wanted to run CFS3 "maxed out" but stay with Windows XP, SP3. Supposedly this and an NVIDIA graphics card allows one to use specular reflection; though NVIDIA still supports this feature in their drivers, Windows 7 does not.

 

So I took to the skies on a reasonably clear day, plenty of sunshine, in a nice, shiny P-38. Sure enough, no bright flashes from the polished aluminum fuselage. And I'm thinking, "Blast it!" My old computer could hardly run CFS3 at all, so I had everything dialed back; now my new one runs CFS3 ETO and OFF HiTR flat-out no problems at 60 FPS, and apparently there is a consensus that it would look even better if I was running Windows XP! Now for OFF aircraft, I can imagine that specular reflection isn't such a big deal, with fabric not being real shiny. But they say it makes the scenery look better, too! And I was already enthralled with how nice the OFF scenery was!

 

So what the heck? Did I jump right over the best graphics combo that I could have had? Should I think about dual boot? I sure don''t want to use a 32 bit operating system that will soon be unsupported on a 64 bit machine like this! So if the answer is "Go dual boot", then what about XP 64 bit versions? any problems there?

 

And further, is this real? Did you guys find a way around this? I googled and found entries for implementing specular reflection in DX10 on MSDN, so what happened? I've written quite a bit of code, but I don't know much about what's under the hood on CFS3, but it has something to do with files of the *_s.dds type.

 

Best to all, & thanks,

 

Tom