Early graphics card drivers have been blamed for that and for the overall slight framerate toll Vista takes on most games, but as NVIDIA and ATI's software becomes more mature as the months go by, it's increasingly hard to claim that Vista's resource hunger and general inefficiency doesn't play a part. Company of Heroes (thanks to a recent patch)? Again, no really significant difference.Īt the very least, performance in DX10 vs DX9 for supported games should have been better. World in Conflict? Nice lighting, actually. Awesome, if more traditional than hoped b) The water looks a bit better and the shadowing a little sharper in DX10. Lost Planet? a) A bit shitty b) Didn't look or perform any better in DX10. The slim catalogue of DX 10 games thus far has only made the people who did splash out on Vista and a DX10 graphics card feel more ashamed of themselves. It smacked of artificially creating reasons to make people who otherwise wouldn't bother upgrade to Vista, and hopefully the megabrains working on hacking it out to work in XP will soon accomplish their grand goals, thus throwing egg on the requisite stern corporate faces. XP may have been over half a decade behind it, but that doesn't mean there's any concrete justification why it can't do the most pertinent parts of DX10 (plenty of non-concrete ones were given). A colossal balls-up, what? The idiocy began when Microsoft announced that the next iteration of the software that defines the graphical capabilities of Windows games would be available in Vista only. Otherwise, don your finest head-fitting tinfoil and read on.ĭirectX 10, then.

Skip to the end if you can't be bothered with me waffling on about Microsoft conspiracy theories and just want to find out how to make the Crysis demo look way better under hoary old Windows XP. I've compensated for our tardiness by adding several hundred words of bonus ranting to it.

Yes, we know we're horribly behind most of the rest of the internet in this (and in fact didn't bother to mention it previously for just that reason), but hell, if we ever want to be the biggest PC gaming website in the world we should probably make the effort.

Directx 10 xp