Entroper on 07 December 2007
| vux984 said: "Realistically speaking right now even DX10 hasn't shown itself to be worthy of the extra fuss and in general I think DX9 is still the consumer preferred standard." The big features of DX10 aren't that relevant to games, but they are hugely relevant and worth the extra fuss. Virtual GPU memory, and GPU multitasking are the big features of DX10. That is why DX10 is Vista only. Because the XP kernel can't support these two features. These two features combine to allow multiple windows to simultaneously make use of hardware accelerated graphics. This is a huge deal. And its absolutely crucial for Windows to keep up with OSX and Linux as a modern OS. It just doesn't really make grass or snow look that much better in Crysis etc so the game-media glosses over it, but trust me, DX10 is HUGE advance over DX9. |
That's all well and good, but the point of buying a high end graphics card is to enjoy games. If DX10 doesn't do much in the way of making games look better or run faster, then DX10 (or 10.1) compliance is not a big selling point for a graphics card, which is what we're talking about. Even a "DX9 card" will run fine in Vista with DX10 installed, it just won't support Shader Model 4 and a handful of other things. Shader Model 3 already nailed down most of the important bits anyway like looping and branching.
