Kmarion wrote:
[H]ardOCP published a whole article on this.
XP will not get DX10. The only way to game in DX10 is with DX10 hardware and DX10 software on Vista, only Vista, and nothing but Vista.
You can (for now) still install DX10 games on DX9 hardware/XP, but they will run in reduced eye candy mode. I'm not sure how long that will last though, with the new shader model and physics stuff on the way. Surely at some point there will be a DX9 cut-off, same as <DX6 is no longer supported, and most games require DX7 hardware (or higher) to even run in crap mode.
Can you put a DX10 card or software in an XP system? Yes. Will it run in DX10 mode? No.
You're not listening.
The only official way to play DX10 games will be through Vista. But with a DX10 API on XP there is no reason DX10 games will not work in XP.
Once a fully working DX10 API is released for XP you will be able to use a DX10 card to run DX10 apps with all features. It can already be done through openGL, but no games due for release support openGL.
Wine are remaking DX10 for Linux and XP. It will have all the features and a similarly constructed pipeline.
I'd be interested to see a link to this article, because I'd bet that it doesn't make any claims about 3rd party solutions. DX10 can work in OSs other than Vista, just not the way Microsoft made it. It needs to be totally remade.