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What Game Developers Think about DirectX 10
mikemuch writes "In the last of his series of interviews with the stakeholders in Microsofts upcoming DirectX graphics API, Jason Cross speaks with the developers of Hellgate, Crysis, Flight Simulator X, and Age of Conan. They seem pretty stoked about the new technology's ability to get visual detail to a much higher level of realism, and to offload physics and AI to the CPU." From the article: "Without hardware, it is hard to evaluate which features will really make the biggest performance impact. The geometry shader looks pretty full of potential. So does the fact that you can write to buffers from any shader and then read them into another shader. Texture arrays look like they will make a big dent our batch count, which should lead to much better frame rates. At this point I feel like I'm looking at a shiny new toy through a shop window: I can't wait to get my hands on it and play with it, but I don't really know what it can do."
"From reality: It will require Vista. That's all Microsoft needs it to do."
From what I've read, technically it doesn't. I was reading an interesting article in PC Format (UK Magazine) today, and them trying to find out why DX10 will be restricted to Vista - the best answer they were able to come up is that the structure in Vista (eg. usermode rather than kernal mode) is slightly different and therefore it would require modifications to make it work with XP.
In fact, the article states that ATI are working with DirectX 10 under windows XP (with a few modifications to make it fit Vista). So the question is - if they can, and it's obviously possible, why can't we we?
If anyone has a better explanation as to why it's Vista limited, I'd be very interested in hearing it (as would many others, from the impression I've got - even ATI, Nvidia and Microsoft, who PC Format contacted, were unable to provide much of an answer.)