Entroper on 10 December 2007
| vux984 said: "That's all well and good, but the point of buying a high end graphics card is to enjoy games." Perhaps at the 'high end', but a lot of people buy a midrange card (say $180-$280) so that their desktop runs at a reasonable clip. Especially in Vista, which uses hardware acceleration heavily if its available, and do that properly it needs directx10 and a directx10 card. A directx9 card in vista might play games well enough in vista, but its a seriously weakened experience in vista overall. GPU multitasking is crucial for an optimal accelerated desktop experience. And to the guy who said "It also doesn't help that things like the "very high" settings in the crysis demo can be enabled in xp by tweaking config files - forcing many to wonder "then what is directx 10 for?" directx10 is for: 1) gpu multitasking and virtual gpu memory - letting you have a complete accelerated desktop experience in Vista. While it doesn't affect games much, affects the whole desktop experience though, because the rest of the desktop doesn't run like a dog in labour while you've got an accelerated application running. 2) support for the drm bullshit foisted on us by the media industry which enables bluray/hddvd playback on Vista. whether its a good thing or not is your choice, but that is an significant part of directx10. 3) a couple minor new graphics features. woo. 4) the end of capability bits. a directx10 card must do everything in the directx spec. this is mostly a feature for developers because now they don't have to worry about using a directx9 feature only to find out a significant number of directx9 cards can't actually do it. |
I don't know where you're getting all this stuff about Vista running like crap on a non-DX10 card. I have a 6600 GT, which was a mid-range card three years ago -- not even close to high-end. There's nothing slow about my desktop experience in Windows Vista. I have all the accelerated features enabled and they all run smoothly, no stuttering, no pausing, etc. So I wouldn't say it's a "seriously weakened desktop experience."
