DX10, now DX10.1...

[Ravenus]

Update to DX10 by next year (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2168429,00.asp)


DirectX 10.1 is a series of extensions to DirectX 10
It's supported by upcoming graphics hardware, but not current DX10 hardware
It requires (and will be part of) Vista Service Pack 1

[enfestid]

"It's supported by upcoming graphics hardware, but not current DX10 hardware"

Wow... lame.

[Ravenus]

First-gen casualties, those puir wee DX10 cards. Well atleast the 8800's are good as performance cards.

[BlackBeard]

Sounds similar to what happened with DX9, those first DX9 cards that came before DX9 came ended up being fairly sub-par in terms of performance in DX9. But they did still support it. This is pretty lame...guess I'm glad I've been holding out until Crysis drops. Now I'll wait longer to see how the new crop of cards does.

[kyleh]

Gamers never learn.

[Ravenus]

No no no. That was basically nVidia's sloppiness and deviation from the DX9 specifications laid down by MS. ATI's first-gen DX9 cards (9xxx series) worked fine.

This is actually more like the introduction of SM 3.0 in DX 9.0c, which ATI did not support for one more generation. In most cases it didn't make too much difference but some games had support for either SM 3.0 or defaulted to SM 1.0 (or 1.1?) which was DX8, so ATI cards had only DX8 graphics even if they supported SM 2.0

In most cases one assumes these extensions will be for reducing performance overhead, not features.

[Alaric]

Ah well. I was planning on getting the GeForce 9xxx series when they came out anyway.

[Ravenus]

Heh, me too. My card transitions have always been dramatic:

Sis6326 2MB to i815 onboard to GeForce 2MX 64MB to GeForce 6600GT 128MB.

[Smythe]

I was troubled by all of this as well, so I went to the Microsoft site to see if I could find some answers. I had a chat conversation (see link below) which leads me to believe that we 8800 owners are safe until the release of DX11. According to this conversation, the only way that current hardware will not be able to run a game is if that game was written exclusively for DX10.1, and the differences between 10 and 10.1 are so minor that game developers are unlikely to create a game that will only run on 10.1. However, users of 10.1-compatible cards will get a few more visual bells and whistles than the rest of us.

http://forums.xna.com/thread/19806.aspx

[Ravenus]

Just like how for the next 2 years DX9 owners will be able to run all major games, but DX10 guys will get a few more bells & whistles...but actually, from what I have read, 10.1 is more a tightening of the feature spec of DX10, requiring some currently optional things to be mandatory...(Warning: Inquirer link (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=41577) :p)