Is it possible for a game to drop support for XP(dx9)?

I ll be gettings Aliens vs Predator the day it comes out on Steam and i know tht it will have support for XP(dx9). So my question is, if i keep using windows xp, is it possible that in the future the game(AVP) will drop support for dx9 and ill have to upgrade?

 

Highly unlikely, after launch.

 

DX9 is not going to be dropped for a long time yet, especially with PC gaming in deep water enough as it is.

 

As XP still has nearly 70% of the world OS market share, unlikely.

 

Dont forget that Xbox 360 only supports Dx 9.0c and the majority of games usually gets ported from that.

 

It supports all DX9.0C functions as well as some others. It's alot like a "DX9.5" of sorts though to call it that would be completely wrong since some of those functions that are in the API have no place in a PC.

And if a game supports DX9.0c from the get-go, I highly doubt the publisher would release a forced patch/update that forces you to use DX10 or DX11. That wouldn't make much sense on their part.

 

IIRC the GPU is a X1950XT running SPUs rather than pixel/vertex shaders.

But yeah, I don't why they would drop it.

 

Thanks for the replys guys now im not worried

 

I can see developers developing solely for DirectX 11 down the road, considering the high acceptance of Windows 7 and its conversion rate of XP lovers to 7. But yeah, while XBox continues DirectX 9 support, I'm sure developers will continue down that route until the next gen of consoles, at least for the ports.

 

Most games will support both DirectX 9 and DirectX 11. Games will probably be DirectX 11-only when the next generation consoles come out and the majority of PC gamers are running Windows 7 and have DirectX 11 graphics cards.

 

the avp game you buy will always run on xp.

what is possible is that future games in the franchise may not support xp.

that is all.

 

It's a completely custom designed GPU. The Unified Shader engine is a precursor to what was seen in the Radeon 2000 series, however the Radeon 2000s are much faster in clock speed and in capability per clock, I'd say, about another 50% more powerful per clock. Of course, these later GPUs and even later series benefit from a larger dedicated framebuffer, as well as possibly much higher bandwidth thanks to a 256 bit memory bus and even in 128 bit bus parts, much faster operating VRAM in some cases.

Xenos is was the first commercial application of a unified shader GPU. Xenos however, is actually comprised of two chips. The main chip houses all the hardware prior to z-buffering, and the eDRAM daughter die houses the ROPs, as well as eDRAM display buffer. Xenos specs:

Main die:
48 Shaders: "5 Dimension" operation (much like R600 and beyond)
16 Texture Mapping Units

eDRAM daughter die:
8 ROPs
10 MB eDRAM display buffer

The advantage of the eDRAM die is it's ability to process the z-buffering as well as provide 2/4x MSAA in a "costless" manner in terms of performance. Basically the Xenos package and the Xbox 360 is very well optimized to run 1280 x 720p video. 1080p is certainly doable, but 720p is it's forte.

The X1950XT was made to conform to the DirectX 9.0c specification, so it employed the old style dedicated shader system of separate vertex/pixel shaders. While the X1950XT was a monster of a DX9.0c specific card, the Xenos is more flexible was made to do some DX10 like functions. The version of DX that Xenos and the Xbox 360 uses is a superset of DX9.0c. Xenos also benefits from the efficiency of it's unified shader system. However, even older style GPUs on the PC do benefit from having much higher TMU and ROP counts, as well as larger memory buses and faster memory, so they could in turn still do much higher resolutions and in many cases still hold their own versus Xenos when properly programmed for like the Radeon X1950 and Geforce 7900.

 

Two words that will be in the PC business forever. "backward compatibility"

 

But why don't people want to upgrade to 7 instead of sticking with XP?

 

Compatibility fears and just the fact that there is that confidence in XP that when going to Vista or 7, requires a leap of faith. Honestly, I really like Vista and 7. Sure they are memory hogs, but they multi-task alot smoother than XP did when running many intensive tasks at once. When a program screws up, the whole OS doesn't hang up like XP kind of does, that one program will, while everything else is still completely usable. Sure, Vista and 7 run best with hardware with a much higher feature set than XP, but they are nice, smooth, and useful. Despite this, I will always have XP installed on one of my computers to guarantee game/program usability, and as a back up OS in case something happens.

 

For some people it's just a matter of familiarity. Others, like the above poster stated, have fear of compatability issues. That being said, not everything will exist and play well together, therefore companies will drop compatability for some things over time. Generally though, they like to make sure that everything from last generation and maybe even a few generations before will play nice and work together. There are exceptions to this rule, like any rule.

 

The dx9.0c specification doesn't dictate how to implement your vertex and pixel shaders in hardware.

IE. if I was building a custom gpu to conform to directx9.0c, I could build dedicated shaders or unified shaders, what is important is that I have pixel and vertex shaders available.

 

Some simply don't consider it an upgrade [personally I consider it a downgrade, just like vista], imho it's very little to do with "fear of compatability" and "leaps of faith" I mean, come on, it's just an OS, you can live easily with any of the last three MS operating systems, it comes down to what someone likes more for their particular reasons, and I've yet to see anybody convinced by someone else that they are using the "wrong" OS.