http://www.crysis-online.com/forum/index.php/topic,11837.0.html http://www.crysis-online.com/?id=449 from what I've just read, apparently you can unlock the very high options in crysis without running dx10 and vista. can anyone confirm if this is true? as I don't have the game. any one heard about this crysis is often touted as the reason to use dx10 but if all the effects can be achieved in xp especially with a smaller performance hit... we've got a problem. oh and can someone point me to a technical paper or article on exactly why dx10 isn't runnable on xp. I know ground up it was coded for vista but besides the obvious money/marketing reasons, it seems bad to release an API that's on a very small percent of PC's with no backwards compatability. Is there some technical reason based on the way either OS addresses memory or some similar function? or is it all marketing driven?
you can run 98% of the dx10 features in dx9 except theres one water effect which the DX9 hacks can't seem to replicate. I have vista and dx10 but I run in dx9 cause it gives me a few more frames but it uses about 2x my ram. Dx10 features can all be done in DX9 technically but the gain of DX10 is that it's alot less taxing to your hardware, so give it a while and it'l eventually be better than dx9
Wasn't there a hacked version of DX10 that runs on Windows XP? (gimme a while and I'll see if I can find the link...silly thing called work is bothering me right now)
No, and it's unlikely that there ever will be - At least not one that runs anywhere close to the performance or functionality of true DX10 on Vista. The only project out there right now is an API wrapper which has been widely publicised, but without any proof of progress, screenshots etc. http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007/06/28/dx10-on-xp-round-2.aspx The 'DX10 Hack' for Crysis just forces the game to use old Dx9-based test-code that was left over in the game from before Crytek made the full switch to DX10 - It essentially emulates DX10 functions for visuals, but with less precision. The differences are subtle, but they exist nonetheless. The visual differences between true "Very High - DX10" and "Very High - Hacked DX9" are mostly negligible for most people, though, and the performance is better in DX9, but the architecture underneath is different and there is a subtle improvement in visual quality in DX10 which is more evident in motion than in screenshots. Right now, if you can't see the differences then you're better off in DX9 with the hack, for performance, but it doesn't mean that DX10 is worthless or some kind of scam, as a lot of people are suggesting. Also bear in mind that the current DX10-supporting graphics cards out now are still optimised for DX9 over DX10, simply because DX9 is a bigger, more practical market to cater for while DX10 is a good marketing tool. How much of a difference DX10-optimisation would make to the performance of a given GPU/architecture in DX10 I don't know, but I'd imagine it'd have some kind of significant impact. Microsoft could technically have made DX10 compatible with XP, but it would have required a mammoth amount of work and time to re-engineer both XP and DX10 to make it so, for which they'd get no financial return. It may seem like a typically dastardly think for them to do, but making DX10 Vista-only makes far more sense, because they can actually profit from it due to gamers buying Vista. DX10 was supposedly rewritten from the ground-up, unlike previous versions of DX which were mostly updated iterations of the same API. Writing an API like DirectX is a massive project even for a company like Microsoft, and especially so for a total re-write like DX10, so they weren't going to spend valuable research and engineering time on just another 'free upgrade' for the countless XP users who haven't been profitable for Microsoft for years, given that most people are working from the same copy they bought years ago. I don't have Vista and I don't have DX10, but I'm not bitter that Microsoft made it Vista-only because I see the sense and justification in it.
thanks zurechial that's the sort of answer I was looking for. I know dx10 has much better code paths for high level shaders and such, and it can run them more efficiently than dx9. I guess it's just a wait approach at the moment, until it's a widely used API and hardware catches up, any advantages is usually bogged down by the higher level graphics and vista, hence decreasing performance into the unplayable level
wine is aparently been ported to windows and will soon have some level of DX10 support.. it will be interesting to see if performance is better with xp+wine than vista.
You've hit the nail in the head, I think. The benefits of DX10 will become more apparent when we're forced into using it. We performance-addicts who can accept no less than blistering performance from our games and hardware are a stubborn lot when it comes to making compromises for the sake of progress.
