Do i have this right: DX10 and Vista/XP

[Speciale]

So DX9 will be the last version for windows XP...thus in order to use DX10 i'll need to upgrade to Vista??

[Jimbob7]

Thats Correct

[CGR]

Unfortunatly yes.

Not to mention and games created for DX10 wont play nearly as well in DX9 as they are totally discontinuing DX9.. Its a total scam to get you to upgrade your video card to a DX10 card as no cards on the market atm can be upgraded to use DX10..

I have to wonder how much Nvidia and ATI celebrated when they heard this..

[Kurz]

Read how the new DirectX 10 works to see why they are doing this.
In the new API there are no Pixel or Vertex specific shaders, its a unified system. Meaning all the shaders can do both. Games will HAVE BOTH CODE for a few more years. (It took a couple of years for XP to become the norm)

Vista isnt going to be out for a few more months, G80 is almost out.
R600 is out around the corner.

Seriously take some time to read up on Directx 10 you'll see why its not easily compatible with previous verisons of Windows. Still it could be done but hey XP is 5 years old time to upgrade.

[Ageeb]

Read how the new DirectX 10 works to see why they are doing this.
In the new API there are no Pixel or Vertex specific shaders, its a unified system. Meaning all the shaders can do both. Games will HAVE BOTH CODE for a few more years. (It took a couple of years for XP to become the norm)

Vista isnt going to be out for a few more months, G80 is almost out.
R600 is out around the corner.

Seriously take some time to read up on Directx 10 you'll see why its not easily compatible with previous verisons of Windows. Still it could be done but hey XP is 5 years old time to upgrade.

That's not correct. That evolved from Xbox's unified shaders, but nowhere have they included that same architecture into DX10 (yet). They plan to leave up it up to the hardware developer instead.

Unified shading in DirectX 10

Because the Xbox 360’s Xenos GPU utilizes a unified shader architecture and ATI/Microsoft have been promoting unified so heavily in comparison to PlayStation 3’s RSX GPU which isn’t unified, it has generally been assumed that DirectX 10 also requires a unified shader architecture. However, it turns out that this is not the case. In fact, we’ve poured over numerous DirectX 10 documents and none of them even discuss a unified architecture!

Microsoft leaves this aspect of the DirectX 10 API entirely up to the hardware developer.


Article here: DX10 Preview (http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/directx_10_graphics_preview/default.asp)