DirectX 10 question

Do I have to have Vista to use directX 10. I just tried to run the cascades demo from the nVidia site and it said unable to start b/c d3d10.dll was not found. I googled the problem and ppl say that the demos only run on vista. Does that mean that only vista may run Dx10?

 

Apparently there are DX10 emus or something but technically there is only official DX10 support on Windows Vista

 

The only DX10 support in XP is via hacker programs that do not work well (at the moment at least).

Officially, yes DX10 is Vista-only.

 

Yep, Vista and DX10 go hand in hand. Of course like Greg said, there are always going to be people trying to do that kind of stuff. Just look at Shadowrun and Halo 2....cracked to work with XP.

 

vista is a performance killer for gaming. think they plan on making dx10 compatible with xp?

 

Officially, no. By the time DX10 becomes mainstream, XP usage will start to deteriorate anyway............

 

Yeah, Dx10 and Vista do go together. I think its kind of annoying; the fact that i could only play halo 2 on vista.. but hey im sure eventually people somewhere will figure out a working hack for xp.

 

They only did those things to help sales of Vista. Seriously, we all know Vista isn't made for gaming and DX10 is garbage as of now.

However, as time goes on that might change.

 

Quick note: DX10 isn't "garbage", patched-on DX10 support in existing games is garbage.

 

I think Halo 2 is a separate issue since Halo 2 doesn't use DX10. I'm pretty sure it only uses DX9. (I guess DX9.0L to make it more Vista-y than DX9.0c) Microsoft just chose to make it Vista only, which makes the marketing ploy all the more blatent.

Microsoft seems to be moving to tie future DX versions to specific Windows versions to force (supposedly encourage) people to upgrade. DX10 requires Vista and the upcoming DX10.1 requires Vista SP1 (and new GPUs as well).

 

Nah the gap with xp vs vista framerate is slowly closing. Its not vista people its drivers mainly. I don't understand why people think vista drastically affects their gpu.

 

..............That's what I meant. Notice I said that may change as updates come out.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3044&p=2

One interesting effect of Vista is that it actually penalizes GPUs with more VRAM. Vista seems to cache the VRAM into system memory, which means that the amount of RAM a game requires actually goes up depending on how much VRAM you have. This is starting to become problematic as games and applications are starting to reach the 2GB limit of what a single application is allowed to allocate itself. In some cases with the certain modern games and large amounts of VRAM, performance actually drops or crashes because it runs of of memory. Adding more RAM won't help since in 32-bit Windows, an individual application can only use up to 2GB of memory. This problem will become more frequent as games get more complex and large and VRAM size increases. (Probably another reason why ATI didn't release a 1GB HD 2900 into retail).

 

I've seen vista drop my ram usage directly after gaming to 300 from using 400-550 while ideling. Also like I said slowly getting better. The world in conflict beta saw very small fps difference compared to before. I think the max drop between them that was noticed was 10-12 but mostly less then that.

 

Well dropping RAM usage after gaming really isn't a good thing since that means that Vista had to swap out stuff from RAM to make room for the game and just didn't swap it back in when it was done. Seems the corporations are all waiting for SP1, which should hopefully be out by the end of this year since it's already in beta, that and progressing drivers should improve things.

 

No no it did. Whenever I alt tabbed my ram usage was down and whenever I quit the game and vista realized I was not gaming anymore and did things like browse with firefox it went back to regular ram usage. I find vista's ram usage very efficient. Prefetch is nifty.

 

So far DX10 is also a performance killer for gaming! (well, on the one game truely
made for DX10 that is out now)

Someone did tests on Lost Planet, the first "real" DX10 game, with all the highest end PC video cards, and essentially his results were that enabling DX10 mode crippled frame rates with only a negligible increase in graphics, meaning that it was much more beneficial to run in DX9 mode and turn the graphics options higher then have to turn the graphics options DOWN to get the pretty much unnoticeable benefits of DX10 mode.

Of course, this is just for Lost Planet, hopefully newer games will take advantage of DX10 in a way that doesn't kill FPS, or makes it worth the huge FPS hit.

 

I dont THINK vista affects my gpu, i KNOW it does. It only stuttrers in Vista and not in XP and Ubuntu Linux.