A compelling argument to upgrade to vista... finally? Interesting...

The big question on gamers minds is will it be worth the trouble?

Step 1:
Buy a copy of Vista. For lots of people this is reason enough not to care.

Step 2:
Buy a DX10 graphics card.

Nvidia offers some cheap DX10 Geforce 8600 graphic cards but this is Vista and Nvidia hasn't had a good track record for it's Vista driver support. The alternative is ATI but their DX10 card is $400+.

Just from looking at the benchmarks and pictures I've already developed a couple questions.

#1 I can hardly see a visible difference from the snapshots. Is the minor visuals really something specific to DX10? Couldn't a similar effect be done in DX9?

#2 Why did the fps drop by 1/2 to 1/3 of DX9? With that kind of performance lost why should I even care?

You know, there's nothing magical about any particular version of DX. They're all just putting pixels on a screen. Any visual effect can be done in any version of DX -- or without DX, using raytracing on the CPU or a pure software renderer or whatever. They'll just be slideshows. But there's no visual effect you can point to and say "that is only available in DX10."

It's about performance. Extrusion and tesselation effects were done in DX9 games (on the CPU), for example, but DX10 enables geometry shaders for that purpose so a game should be able to get them "for free" or (as is usually the case) do more and more of them until it gets too slow. Likewise various other improvements in the pipeline and in the API: it's not that DX10 enables effects that weren't possible before, but it makes them efficient enough that they actually get implemented, or easy enough to implement that you see them in more than just the A-list titles. All while (hopefully) leaving the CPU cores more free to do better pathfinding, or AI, or whatever.

And yeah, most of the features of DX10 hardware will be available through OpenGL extensions sooner or later (and thus available on non-Vista OSes), though that's subject to the usual OpenGL process. Some of the memory management features are Vista-driver specific, but how much impact that may have on games in the real world is unclear.

Those DX10 clips are pretty impressive,the jungle fight has the best graphics I've seen so far....almost movie like in quality.

i'm not sure apple would ever sell a computer like that, they have such tight control over the Hardware, i'm surprised that Intel even got in on that action.

I really hope that this is old footage and they've improved the animations and AI of the opponents. Like in Far Cry, the animations looked hammy enough to open a chain of butcher's shops, and they weren't even moving, just shooting statically like dummies.

Original source for the videos: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_crysis_videos.html

I'd also like to note that this is super old footage, the Hunter is from E3 2006, for example, so it's highly likely that the videos do not reflect the current state of Crysis.

I'm willing to bet that the "proper" comparison videos will be released when Crysis is nearing completion.

"In this case, DirectX 10 brings volumetric light beams and smoke effects"

So you didn't notice the physics of the plantleaves as they fall and wave in the wind? I thought that was one of the most noticeable differences, that and the volumetric lightbeams.

DX9, DX10, either way... that's the best looking graphics I've ever ever seen in a video game. It definitely looks beyond the reach of a 7900GS.

There will be an OpenGL3.0 with DX10 hardware features, so let's hope gamemakers start to code for OpenGL (even) more so we can avoid vista/MS as much as possible.

But they're releasing a DX10 compatibility pack for XP right? I won't have to upgrade to vista right?

It is really the snap

Also up on gametrailers: http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=2509