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DirectX 9.0L

Cyber-Mav said:
how silly are you lot? look at call of duty 2, it can drop all the way back to direct x 7 mode. i really doubt that crysis will have as many sales as they plan to have if they release it for dx10 only. and same goes for all other games. if thye dx 10 only then chances of them selling will be very slim.
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Well considering its supposed to be coming out this year, and DX10 isnt being released for about another 4 months, then if it was DX10 only they would be making 0 sales, as no one would be able to play it for another 4 months, so every copy would just be sitting on shelves, in warehouses etc... collecting dust. :D

All DX10 games will work in DX9 on DX9 cards and under XP, there is no need to shell out your £500 for a DX10 card (rumoured price of G80), and your £200 for Vista if you have a high end DX9 card now, as it will still run fine, and look exactly the same as it does on a £500 DX10 card, and £200 Vista. :p
 
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ernysmuntz said:
Someone said earlier that Dx9 might be emulated on vista because its so different to Dx10?

No way this is true, emulation is so slow it wouldn't work.
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Afaik, MS emulate 32 bit apps on xp64 and haven't noticed much difference in performance.
 
LoadsaMoney said:
and look exactly the same as it does on a £500 DX10 card, and £200 Vista. :p
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Agreed, the G80 will look exactly the same as your DX9 card in DX9 but it will be faster (we've yet to see how much faster but it definately won't be slower), therefore if you buy one on day of launch you will be buying the fastest single card solution for DX9 and also be able to play any DX10 when they become available.

As most of here are enthusiast I would imagine quite a number of us will be upgrading to Vista anyway, it is fair to say that probably by the time the first DX10 game hits the streets the G80 will be old hat, but as enthusiasts we know this is the nature of the beast!

There are plenty of games that don't support SLI or don't really work that well under SLI (Company of Heroes comes to mind), I would rather just have a single card with plenty of grunt than rely on SLI.

HEADRAT
 
Jack Hoxley is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for DirectX.

As you could quite rightly expect, Windows XP and DirectX 9 are still going to be around for some time yet. Officially Windows XP will cease to be supported at the end of 2006, but that doesn't mean it'll just vanish off home users machines (it may well vanish very quickly off corporate networks though). Application compatibility is a big factor in a new OS such that DirectX 9 applications built for Windows XP will still work under Windows Vista, and there will even be an updated version of DirectX 9 to take advantage of the new driver model in Vista ("DirectX 9.L").
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Most of the 'corporate' networks I've worked on stay with proven software, especially when it comes to microsoft :(

When windows 2000 came out loads of the networks I worked on stayed with NT until 2000 was a more established and proven platform. The same with XP & server 2003.
 
The big difference is DX 9c cards don't meet all the req' of DX9c, some cards don't work well in video rendering or some opengl technologies, by the other hand DX10 will push manufactures to meet ALL the req' and spec given by microsoft.
By the way,Bill Gates on an interview refers to Vista like a TV, a fast machine, that can be tunr on like a tv, also on reference to the media center PCs.
Most cards, with their technologies sucks at video rendering, ATI VIVO and Nvidia Purevideo are just a joke, the help the processors on about 20-30 percent. Pretty lame for microsoft and they are right.
An example, I have Purevideo on a 7900GT with all the patches and crap, and I use about 40% CPU, I have a multimedia card (Personal Cinema) FX5600 but with a generic Mpeg encoder and I used only the 20%CPU, so a dedicated chip for encoding is the best solution.
 
"UNFORTUNATELY, we were wrong about DirectX 9.0 L.

We managed to confirm the existence of DirectX 9.0L but it won't be a DirectX 10 for Windows XP. It will be the other way around. It is a faster version of DirectX 9.0 that will run under Vista only.

So I have to disappoint all of you who expected to run DirectX 10 games under Windows XP (and apologise, huh, Fudo? News Ed.) as there won't be an API to supports it.

DX9.0L is a special version of DirectX 9 for Vista only that allows DX9 games to run with Vista's new driver model. It's not possible to run D3D10 on XP without running in pure software emulation.

The D3D10 API was designed around the new driver model in Vista. In addition, Aero Glass runs on DX9.0L. Aero Glass is one of the main reasons DX9.0L exists on Vista.

Our sources also confirmed that L in DirectX 9.0 L stands for Longhorn. So we are back at the beginning - you need to buy a new graphic card and a new OS to have the hardware DirectX 10 acceleration on an API that supports it."
 
Thanks, kind of disappointing but at the same time I am glad they are not making DX 10 backwards compatible. Starting from a clean slate without old code and compatibly code should provide a nice speed boost.
 
Cob said:
"UNFORTUNATELY, we were wrong about DirectX 9.0 L.

We managed to confirm the existence of DirectX 9.0L but it won't be a DirectX 10 for Windows XP. It will be the other way around. It is a faster version of DirectX 9.0 that will run under Vista only.

So I have to disappoint all of you who expected to run DirectX 10 games under Windows XP (and apologise, huh, Fudo? News Ed.) as there won't be an API to supports it.

DX9.0L is a special version of DirectX 9 for Vista only that allows DX9 games to run with Vista's new driver model. It's not possible to run D3D10 on XP without running in pure software emulation.

The D3D10 API was designed around the new driver model in Vista. In addition, Aero Glass runs on DX9.0L. Aero Glass is one of the main reasons DX9.0L exists on Vista.

Our sources also confirmed that L in DirectX 9.0 L stands for Longhorn. So we are back at the beginning - you need to buy a new graphic card and a new OS to have the hardware DirectX 10 acceleration on an API that supports it."
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Yeah we knew all that anyway. :)
 
It just wouldn't have made sense after all MS have been saying about DX10 to all of a sudden have a version in XP. This doesn't surprise me, but I'm really not bothered because by the time I upgrade my graphics cards again, there may be some titles worth getting DX10 hardware for.
 
Pottsey said:
Thanks, kind of disappointing but at the same time I am glad they are not making DX 10 backwards compatible. Starting from a clean slate without old code and compatibly code should provide a nice speed boost.
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Speed boost??

Vista is currently around 15% slower in games than XP!! (Micro$oft's own figures) :(
 
“Speed boost??
Vista is currently around 15% slower in games than XP!! (Micro$oft's own figures) ”

I thought it was clear I was talking about DX10. If you code two engines one for DX10 and one for DX9 with the same effects DX10 should be faster as it’s not got all the old legacy code in.

Sure DX9 games on Vista are slower but once all the drivers get optimised and stable we should find DX10 engines to be better and faster then Dx9.

Right now lots of beta drivers are slowing down the system. Think how slow XP was at first then over time it got much faster.
 
Basically says 'Bugger off an buy DX10 card and Vista'!!!
Only way you will get DX10 to work.
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Yes and when most people will still be on xp well after launch who be laughing then.
I for one don't want to beta test it,it took them long enough to sort out xp.
 
man_from_uncle said:
Actually I think it's less improbable and more staggeringly inefficient. As far as I understand the new hardware will allow for things that just aren't practical for today's equipment. That's not because it can't be forced to process it, it's because it would use an extremely inefficient method of doing the processing. It's actually like ATI being able to do HDR and AA at the same time. It can do this because the archetecture doesn't get raped when running both at the same time. An nvidia GPU don't have a method of sharing the workload evenly, you'd either get stopping and starting or, as we experiance, just one or the other.

The Voodoo case is a good example though. The cards weren't exactly pound for pound THAT much less powerful than the competition, but they weren't designed for the direction the games industry went. The result was trying to do things the hard way.....which, as the Doom 3 case clearly showed, was too inefficient to viable.

I'll try and think of a metaphor.
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Doom3 requires vertex & pixel shaders. The Voodoos don't even support T&L. Thats why its such an impressive feat ;) DX9 class cards physically can't process DX10 shaders, its not a case of it being slow/inefficient, it can't do it :p

There are units within the GPU that process certain instructions, since they're a collection of static transistors they can't change their function no matter what. So when they come across my_dx10_func, they don't know what to do and just reject the instruction (good hardware design) or freeze (not so good hardware design). The Voodoos are running Doom3 by forcing the CPU to perform all the calculations.
 
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