anyway, you have to own a DX10 graphic card to get the game quality above. doesn't mean when you update your system to VISTA, then you will get fully DX10 support, that's not true.
I am not say vista is crappy but the thing MS did is crappy. You could buy a VISTA you like, but dont force me to buy a vista if I've already have the hardware ready to play the game.
For me, the reason I don't update is the money, my computer's cpu is p4 2.53G, since the MB is old, if I wanna run DX10 game, I have to throw my computer. now, it's something like : 1st, do you want to play XXX game? then you need dx10 to run it, 2nd, do you have dx10 installed? then you have to buy vista. That doesn't make any sense, like what I said before, dx10 could run on winxp, the reason MS dont support it is they want to sell vista. sound really bad to me, like a robbery.
DX10 add a geometry shader between vertex shader and pixel shader, it's very good for do effects like displacement mapping which looks more realistic, but my point is this effect is hardware dependent, not OS dependent, if opengl org update their gui to support geometry shader, then you could get totally the same quality game running on winxp. what's the huge difference between winxp and vista? it's the interface, the core will be simplily improved winxp.
Let's say last month, someone buy a brand-new winxp, but cannot support lastest dx10, that doesn't make any sense, MS should do better customer support for previous product. I'm working in game industry, didn't get it why DX10 "suitable" for VISTA, cannot run on winxp. DX is only a API and library.
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