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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."
I can't really see bloatware as "feature packed"... If M$ spent more time working on making clean efficient code that wasn't almost designed to slow your machine down, maybe we'd have faith in their products.
I mean, come on, you shell out $5k for a computer, you expect it to be shithot. It would be (and the graphical difference marginal) in DX9 over DX10. If we could compare XP to Vista performance you'd probably see where the issues lay - a bloated OS that is resource hungry vs a bloated OS that's less resource hungry. I know which would turn up better results.
This is impossible to have happen as M$ seems to think we enjoy having to upgrade our OS to have games supported. About the only thing M$ has done well for gamers is the Xbox, and even the latest one is starting to show some massive cracks.