Titanicles - I am certainly not a software engineer but I know that for Vista users that have DX10 compliant hardware you'll obviously need to have DX10 installed on your system to take advantage of it's features. I suppose that begs the question: Is it worth it for Chrysis? The answer at this time appears to be 'not necessarily' as we've seen very little difference in playability or visual experience between Vista and XP users. You don't have to have a DX10 card to play the game, I do but I am running XP so aside from my video card being inherently more advanced than my old 7800GTX I am not specifically benefiting from having Shader Model 4 compliant hardware! Also, bear in mind this is the demo, and we have not yet seen the official finished product. The final release and (inevitable) subsequent patches may reveal more about the differences between platforms as time goes on. Personally I think that as games continue to develop we will begin to see more of the benefits of DX10 than we are now. If you recall, games were hardly bandwidth constricted by AGP8X's 2GB bandwidth, but that was never really the reason for the industry switch to PCI-E. The full benefits of PCI-E 1.0 and 2.0 are many but it's debatable whether or any of us are currently benefiting a great deal from the increased bandwidth provided by the pipeline. Does that mean it is a rip off or some sort of industry trick? No, it means that some people's expectation of the technology may or may not be realistic in comparison to the reason why the technology exists. Microsoft really was looking to the future when they implemented DX10 and they say it just wasn't technically or financially feasible to retrofit XP to support it. Undoubtedly will inconvenience some people but that's part of the price PC users pay for wanting to stay on the cutting edge: eventually we all will come to a point where we have to upgrade or you get left behind. However, it doesn't look like there is an urgent reason to ditch your old video card and switch operating systems just yet. My humble advice would be to give Chrysis a shot and if you're happy with the performance that's really what counts. If you're not then of course you'll have to decide whether this is the right time for you to look at upgrading your setup. Just wait until I have squeezed all I can out of my Socket 939 setup and have to shell out for a new MOBO, CPU AND memory! It's all part of the technology game my friend. It's like an addiction.
Daffron - I think you'll be fine dude. I am running an X2 4800 at 2.6GHz with 2GB Corsair RAM at CAS latency 3 with a brand spanking new Nvidia 8800GT - and I can run this demo at max settings in XP quite satisfactorily. Although my video card will slightly outperform yours you appear to be using a somewhat newer setup otherwise than mine. I would expect your results to be quite satisfactory.
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