about a year ago a few sites was saying dx11 only for win7.
good to see vista getting it....
tbh there isn't really any point in releaseing win7 then
Theres not much point AVG/Norton etc having new versions either, theres no real need for COD 6, we can all just continue to use the same thing for ever with no improvements. Of course, Win 7 is a fairly different beast to Vista, they don't feel like the same OS at all and theres no reason MS should constantly update old OS's for free forever, because thats just crap business. Improvements = cost.
Clarify one thing for me. When you say you have 18% more power is that due to dx11 graphic libraries or extra hardware real estate (so to speak) in the graphic card?
Its a bit of a hard question in so much as, generally with new DX version cards you do get increase hardware power anyway, but for instance the 5770(assuming it is 800sp's) could eventual match or surpass a 4870, despite being on a lower memory bus, this will be down to optimisations in DX11 games rather than raw horsepower. DX11 simply doesn't = higher IQ or quality anything, the progression of DX versions simply help it become easier to utilise the hardware more effectively aswell as offer shortcuts, optimisations on the code side to make it easier to program for aswell.
Quality of a game is entirely at the programmers whim, or more realistical, time, man power and complexity, if you can add shortcuts and accelerations to the process cutting down the time one effect takes or the power it uses, it free's up resources in both man power, and hardware power.
Maybe you could say, an encoding can be done to the same quality on a P4 with sse3, but it take a heck of a lot more power, time and effort than doing the exact same work on a C2d with SSE4, added tricks to speed things up, aswell as raw horsepower upgrade
I still don't know why people are going on about DX10 being used to entice users to Vista, more than anything its the inability to see how big the gaming sector is, in comparison the world sales of computers. If every single person who wanted to use DX10 on their spanking new hardware upgraded to Vista, it wouldn't have made a noticeable dent in Vista sales. LIkewise if DX11 was only in Win 7, it would have negligable impact on sales even if every gamer bought Win 7 just for it.
Gamers, high end who give a remote monkeys about what DX version their game is running, who even know what DX is, is a miniscule percentage of PC users in the world.
It was on Vista because it was more difficult than necessary to add to windows XP, but mostly, they were building a new OS, which was very late and they employ X amount of people, why divert people to getting something working on an 8 year old OS. They are a business, they want people to buy their new product, they would't think a huge number of people would buy Vista for DX10, but if you want people to buy new software, why would you spend time upgrading your old OS to the same level, ever.
Every version until the next fundamental change of direct X will be available on Vista. DX9 and DX10 are entirely different packages, completely incompatible with each other, DX9 was built over 8, which was built over 7, they are compatible and installing DX9 would let you play past DX versions. Installing DX10, doesn't let you play DX9 games, its a fresh ground up build. DX11 though, is built ontop of and including DX10, DX11 is fully backwards compatible with DX10 and we'll likely have several versions at least offering the same compatibility. Every now and then you need to start from afresh.