Hope you guys have read up on this one. Read the following

Microsoft has announnced that vista service pack1 will contain D10.1 an update to the much criticised API that has already brought the £500 gfx cards to there knees with frame rates a shadow of those achieved under DX9

However the new version of direct3D 10 the gfx rendering component of DX10 doen'st make cards such as Nvidias 8800 series and the ATI's HD2900xt huff and puff; it makes them obselete. Yup you read it right the latest DX10 hardware won't actually be compatible with the update.

And its an update that the 2 crucial parties in the game industry developers and gamers will care little about. Among other things, it actually enforces x4 anti-alisiaing which is crazy talk if you concider that many people are now running 8600GTs and the like. These are gfx cards that can barely deal with full screen anti aliasing at decent resolutions as it is, simply because they just don't have the memory bandwidth to handle these kind of demands.

It's quite insane. Developers already face a difficult choice-why should they pour cash into developing games in DX10 as it stands?
Bizarrely, the update is relatively trivial as far as coding goes with just a few lines of code involved in initialising DX objects.

So its not the coding that is dictating whether or not dev's go for DX10, its based primarily on the paltry uptake of Microsofts latest OS. There are many gamers out there with DX10 ready cards running on XP than on Vista, in fact its worked out to 4 times more..

In fact Valves latest Steam hardware statistics show that just over 2% of all systems that use steam are DX10 compatible. Gamers haven't been fooled into buying into a unnecessary and expense-incurring operating system and API

Think of it this way to get DX10 working you need vista £178 and a high end DX10 card as the mid ranges don't cut it. So lets say you get a 8800GTs £180 thats already £360 just to be able to play games in DX10 which offers no appreciable visual upgrade and demolishes your system performance.

It' already a old joke in gaming circles bit if you want to get DX10 performance on your machine all you need to do is plaug and old Nvidia 6600gt in your machine and remove at least half the RAM you'll get about the same experience as DX10 at the moment..

So instead of letting DX10 bed itself in and grow to a point that its actually desirable to spend this amount of money they now slap, DX10.1 on us. Do us a favour Microsoft start learning to keep your loyal customers.
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