World in Conflict, Bioshock, Unreal Tournament 3, Crysis comes out two months later.
And that's BS saying a game is DX9 just because it runs in DX9. All the above games are DX10 games scaled down to run in DX9 to boost sales. How do I know this? Because all the high-end 360 games that are being ported over (such as Lost Planet) are DX10 games. They simply made a commitment months ago to get it to run on DX9.
ANYWAY... All those games are coming out in the next couple months. I don't even care about any titles coming after those (except maybe Alan Wake... whatever the hell THAT's going to be.)
I'm sorry, but that's just not correct. From the official Bioshock FAQ:
BioShock is being released on PC and Xbox 360. It is not a Windows Vista exclusive game."
"The game will feature some DirectX10 content for Vista users."
These are native DX9 games with some DX10 features patched in. Unreal Torunament 3 uses Shader 3.0, which is DX9, but once again the game does have some DX10 effects in it.
The latest release is the Unreal Engine 3, which is designed around
Microsoft's DirectX 9 technology for 32/64-bit
Windows and
Xbox 360 platforms;
OpenGL 2.x technology for 32/64-bit
Linux,
Mac OS X and
Sony's PlayStation 3; and
Microsoft's DirectX 10 technology for 32/64-bit
Windows Vista.
This is the reason why some people (myself included) are not spending $300+ on a graphics card right now, when some of the <$200 cards will run everything out and coming out this year at great framerates at the loss of a few effects. Native DX10 games are going to be awesome, it's way easier to develop in DX10 than previous versions, and there's lots of cool things that the native engines are going to be able to do. However, I'd rather not spend the money now and instead invest in what will inevitably be better hardware when games come out that are going to effectively utilize it.
That's where the SMART money is. I'll never understand people getting nostalgic about HARDWARE. Computer hardware is the one thing that doesn't get bettter, or increase value, with age. If you've got the first pentium chip ever... then it's probably worth about thirty cents unless you can overclock it to 5ghz.
Who is getting nostalgic? Oh, and anyone who doesn't buy an 8800, despite the fact that it's basically double the price of the alternatives we're suggesting, isn't smart? I guess everyone should just look at your rig before building theirs, because obviously you have the only viable setup that makes sense.
I really wanted a 7900GTO... for basically nostalgic purposes... but by the time I could afford a new video card, I had enough money to get an 8800GTS. I didn't think twice about it. Didn't even look-up what the 7900 series was going for.
Good for you.. not sure why you'd want a video card for nostalgic purposes, but whatever. Then you didn't think twice about the 8800. That's great and all, but some of us skip certain stages of hardware because of price/performance ratio at the time it's released. Sometimes, not to steal your awesome lines, but that's the SMART thing to do.
It really, REALLY frustrates me to see people holding on to, and worse, RECOMMENDING old tech. Because these SAME PEOPLE will be whining, two or three months from now, about how they can't run any games.
I'm sorry that it really frustrates you to see people think that the high-end DX9 cards are still good performance cards at a very low price. Oh, and I've never whined about my hardware, because I always do my homework ahead of time. I'm about to retire this 7600GT, and this has probably been the best card I've ever had when it came to price/performance ratio. Been playing Quake 4, Oblivion, D3, UT2K4, some EQ2 and Supreme Commander at great frames and high quality. But I know that Bioshock and UT3 will be a bit much for it, so going to bump it up some.
. Once you get to the 320 version the 640 is only about 100 some more, and so on. 
