Everybody takes good ideas no matter where they come from. You can't copyright or patent ideas, only the ways you implement them (except perhaps in the US Patent Office, the most incompetent of its type in the world).

Yes, it was such a huge mistake that the IBM PC/Microsoft came to dominate the desktop. If Apple intended to become a bit player they went the right way about it.

No, it was Apple's Macintosh design team that visited Xerox's labs and walked away with lots of ideas that subsequently found their way into the Mac OS. So much so that when Apple sued Microsoft in 1988 over Windows' "look and feel" allegedly infringing on Apple's intellectual property, Xerox sued Apple!

All GUIs are similar. Windows, Max OS, X11/Motif, Gnome, etc... So what?

Vista completely did away with the old audio driver model. Microsoft not only ripped the audio driver out of the kernel and put it into user mode, they also totally rewrote it and in the process broke lots of things like EAX and Direct Sound's 3D hardware acceleration. Creative's "ALchemy Project" restores some things like EAX but it's still in beta and yes, currently only supports X-Fi cards. Then again, both ATI and Nvidia only released decent graphics drivers for Vista the day before its consumer launch. They're all having issues.

What you don't seem to understand is that Vista is 100% new code so it's not a case of just tweaking existing drivers. Audio, graphics, printer drivers, etc, all have to be written from scratch and work within a new paradigm that takes time for the programmers to learn.

XAML's specs were released in 2004! There are even third party XAML development products. It's no more going to "get rid" of HTML than DHTML or XML. HTML needs to be improved, which is why Microsoft, along with a zillion others, is part of the W3C consortium.

Bollocks. Where do you get this drivel from? The WINE guys are already working on porting D3DX10 so, as usual, it all comes down to someone doing Linux DX10 drivers for the cards themselves.

I'm all for giving Microsoft a kick when they deserve it but you seriously need to do a lot of homework.

Yes, it now would require major surgery because it was never their goal to make DX10 XP-compatible. It could have been, relatively speaking, a simple bolt-on job if they´d decided to program DX10 in a different way.

Vista for $150? Great price. Still don't want either but great price.


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You're right in that DX10 was never going to be XP-compatible. Microsoft wanted to move forward and they couldn't do that within the XP model. DX10 is also tied to the WDDM, something that simply doesn't and won't exist in XP. You're wrong to say it could have simply been programmed in a different way. It's not just an API. D3DX10 is intimately tied in with Vista's new driver model (which in turn is tied in with its new security model) and its new graphics model. They cannot be retrofitted to XP without ripping its guts out and rewriting it again - only Microsoft has already done that once with Vista and they're not going to do it again.

They couldn´t? No, they didn´t want to! It was a simple business decision, they want to force people, especially gamers, to upgrade to Vista. I´m not even complaining about that, it´s an understandable decision from a business viewpoint.

That´s because they decided early on not to make it XP-compatible. It´s just a wild guess, but if they´d invested 1000 man-hours and if they had pre-planned it we would already have D3D10 for XP.

As long as Vista has a updated version of DX9 to hold me off having to get a DX10 card il be happy :up:

If you wanna use the DX10 features of a game you need a DX10 card (and Vista). AFAIK there´s currently no game in development that is DX10-only.

So does anyone actualy know yet what DX10 has feature wise over DX9. From what i can see its not doing a whole lot more then DX9 did...

Crysis and UT2007 Both have DX10 features But both were built from the ground up on DX9 and they both look pritty good to me...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX <- Good read there.

Quote from GSpector:
"For those with LINUX, the new DX10 video card WILL NOT WORK. DX10 Graphics Card are not and will not be compatible with any OS other then VI$TA. "

Quotes from Potoroo:
"Bollocks. Where do you get this drivel from? The WINE guys are already working on porting D3DX10 so, as usual, it all comes down to someone doing Linux DX10 drivers for the cards themselves. "

"You're right in that DX10 was never going to be XP-compatible. Microsoft wanted to move forward and they couldn't do that within the XP model. DX10 is also tied to the WDDM, something that simply doesn't and won't exist in XP. You're wrong to say it could have simply been programmed in a different way. It's not just an API. D3DX10 is intimately tied in with Vista's new driver model (which in turn is tied in with its new security model) and its new graphics model. They cannot be retrofitted to XP without ripping its guts out and rewriting it again - only Microsoft has already done that once with Vista and they're not going to do it again. "

Ok, I'm confused. If DX10 drivers or cards are so tied to Vi$ta that they can not work in XP, then how is it that someone can make it work in LINUX?

I know NVidia tries to work with LINUX users but with the new agreement with all DX10 Card manufacturer, they had to agree to have the same capabilities in turn putting M$ in charge of when and what new features will be made. Do you really believe M$ will just give code to RED HAT?

If RED HAT has to hack the drivers to create their own DX10 drivers then what I said was true, M$ has no interest in making DX10 compatible with anything but VI$TA.

If RED HAT can pull it off without getting sued, then I don't see why someone else could not do it with XP. Either way, DX10 would have to be hacked to make it compatible with something other then VI$TA.

I suspect the reason for your confusion is that DX10 has more than one component and unless you're aware of the model then it may not be clear what is being talked about.

DX10 has both hardware and software components. In the case of the question about DX10 cards and Linux the question is about hardware, and the answer is anyone can in principle write a driver for a DX10 compliant card for any OS. After all, that is precisely what a driver is - it's an extention of the OS that takes care of the nitty gritty of dealing with a given device. What you subsequently do with the card once you've got a driver for it is another issue altogether. You don't have to use it with the DX10 software. For example, you can run OpenGL applications on a DX10 compliant card once you've got a driver. However, certain parts of DX10 have been optimised and built-into the hardware because that greatly increases performance, and non-DX10 applications won't necessarily use them.

The main software component of DX10 is DirectX 10 (D3DX10). That's the API that applications use (just as SH3 uses the D3DX9 API). Older versions of DirectX are predicated on the 2D GUI Windows display model. D3DX10 is predicated on the new 3D GUI which is tied in with the new driver model, and that is where you run into non-trivial issues with retrofitting DX10 to XP. The Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) is now intimately tied in with D3DX10 in no small part because of issues with sharing a video card in 3D mode but also because the driver model has been completely restructured (and the security model and everything else - it's all completely new under the hood).

The tighter hardware specs were not imposed unilaterally by Microsoft. Microsoft consults regularly with ATI, Nvidia and with game developers. The thing Microsoft did which Nvidia in particular disliked was imposing the unified driver model on top of it but that's a separate issue. The tighter specs - the "same capabilities" - at the hardware level is a good thing, especially for developers. The third parties wanted it and had a lot of input about what it would look like.

Providing DX10-card drivers for Linux is primarily down to whether Nvidia and ATI can be bothered. They'll do if there's sufficient demand. Third-parties can do it in principle but it's non-trivial.

I have a Asus 8800 GTX (a DX10 card) and it runs perfect on my PC with

1. Windows XP Pro and DirectX9c or OpenGL2.1
2. Windows Vista Ultimate and DirectX10
3. OpenSuSe Linux and OpenGL2.1

Nvidia has all the needed drivers for download :up:

I've been considering that it's time to start building myself another machine. This is the video card I was looking at. Would you mind posting your other specs, like MB, Processor and PSU?

Quick queston, Are any or all of the above 64bit OS.

a guy on the board was saying he could not get SHIII to run on XP64.

I figured at least one of you guys would have this info off the top of your head.:ping:

thanks in advance.

If you can still wait until ATI is on the market with their DX10, do this, because the prices will fall.;)

I bought my new PC last week because I need it urgently vocationally for multimedia productions and it's now a:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
- EVGA nForce 680i SLI Mainboard
- 4 GB SDRAM-DDR2
- Asus 8800 GTX

All Windows Vista's includes both 32 and 64bit versions except the Systembuilder Versions here you can get only 32 or 64bit.

SHIII won't run on 64bit because Ubisoft don't support the 64bit StarForce driver in form of a patch or the removal of StarForce from SHIII;)