Real Life DirectX 10 Performance

AnandTech has a look at the performance PC gamers can expect see under Windows Vista with DirectX 10. Unfortunately, it isn't pretty. Despite the power of the new 10-compliant graphics cards, the choices made in developing this technology have resulted in a significant gap between what is possible and what is actually obtainable from commercial PC hardware. What's worse, the article starts off by pointing out that much of the shiny effects exclusive to DX10 games would have been possible with DX9, had Microsoft been inclined to develop in that direction. From the article: "[Current] cards are just not powerful enough to enable widespread use of any features that reach beyond the capability of DirectX 9. Even our high-end hardware struggled to keep up in some cases, and the highest resolution we tested was 2.3 megapixels. Pushing the resolution up to 4 MP (with 30" display resolutions of 2560x1600) brings all of our cards to their knees. In short, we really need to see faster hardware before developers can start doing more impressive things with DirectX 10."

Comments

Summary so you don't have to RTFM:

[gardyloo]

It's just way too early, and there are many different factors behind what we are seeing here. As the dust settles and everyone gets fully optimized DirectX 10 drivers out the door with a wider variety of games, then we'll be happy to take a second look.

Re:Poor PC gamers...

[Pharmboy]

By today's standards, TFC has crappy graphics but great gameplay, which is why there are still a couple hundred servers still running it, after 10 years.

I am not talking about the gaming "experience", I am talking about gameplay: how fluid the controls are, how intuitive the action is, how the game can offer something new each time.

SimCity 3000 has marginal graphics compared to SimCity 4, but it has better gameplay.