With DirectX 10 upon us with the release of the new Microsoft Windows Vista operating system I’ve enjoyed seeing a few previews of the quality of graphics that this will afford.
The Alan Wake screenshots are especially impressive, as are some of those from Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
It’s just a shame that DirectX is only available for Vista and won’t be made available for such ancient (XP was released way back in 2001) operating systems such as Windows XP or earlier versions.
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Gareth Saunders
I’m Gareth J M Saunders, 50 years old, 6′ 4″, father of 3 boys (including twins).
Enneagram type FOUR and introvert (INFP), I am a non-stipendiary priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, I sing with the NYCGB alumni choir, play guitar, play mahjong, write, draw and laugh…
Scrum master at Safeguard Global; latterly at Sky and Vision/Cegedim. Former web architect and agile project manager at the University of St Andrews and previously warden at Agnes Blackadder Hall.
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Microsoft forcefully making OSs obsolete again.. It’s what companies do when they struggle to compete on innovation, so they force people to upgrade. IE7 was the first part to this, DirectX 10 is the second.
This means that no games writers will actually use DirectX 10 for a fair while, until Vista obtains the sort of adoption XP has now. And in that time, OpenGL can easily catch up.
Fundamentally, DirectX 10 doesn’t mean a game will look any better or worse. It’s just a framework, sorta like comparing two CMSs. It’s perfectly possible to make a far more interesting site in the simpler CMS, it just might be harder.
Thanks Mike, I knew that you’d say something like that so I didn’t have to. In the meantime we’ll just look at the pretty pictures. 🙂