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I'm hearing things about patches that allow you to run DX10 games (i.e. Halo 2) and I recently watched Bioshock on XP and Vista, and can't tell the difference. I also notice that Bioshock needs to download "graphics drivers" and DX components.

Many people are saying that DX10 is just a marketing strategy to get users to buy Vista, but actually offers nothing that XP can't do.

Any opinions and do you think DX10 will make any impact on the demoscene?

The demoscene will die before anyone will dare to do a demo for DX10 class hardware.

Well, it offers geometry shaders but I don't think those will be popular in demos any time soon, as some retarded people still whine when a demo needs ps 2.0... :p

Personally, I don't care one bit. I already upgraded, but not to Vista..

I heard that you have a class for creating ribbons automatically now. Ah shit, the Wednesday rule.

yes. btw: DX10.1 specs are already out...

... and all DX10 cards in existence can't do 10.1.

I like that part.

you can always use openGL for geometry shaders and a lot of other stuff, but you'll surely limit yourself to one generation of cards rather than Vista.

You don't need Directx 10 for Sprites and rotozoom.

dx10 looked quite interesting for demos to me, although i'm not a coder. The thing is, at the moment it's probably the only real reason to upgrade to vista, and from what i've seen nothing is using it well enough to make it compelling.

It's like XP.. one day, you'll upgrade. Not because of any real reason, but more because xp is starting to feel old.

Also:

You don't need GPU for shader effects :)

Halo 2 is *not* a DX10 game, it's a DX9 game that just stubbornly refuses to start on XP for no technical reason whatsoever.
Bioshock comes with two rendering paths: one for DX9 and one for DX10. The latter can only be used if both Vista and a GF8/R600-class graphics card are in use, and even then the differences are said to be minimal (I haven't seen it myself, though).

WAS ?

Stuff like reading the depth-buffer from the fragment shader can be used for some really neat effects, I'm sure it can be useful. Personally, I don't want to move to Vista yet though, and I've got even less of a desire to rewrite my engine to DX10 at the moment :)

What's nice about DX10 is the unified API and resource handling.
DX10 is also _very_ nice for deferred rendering for example.

It takes time to get used to a new technology and exploit it's full potential.

Ok, I guess I'll stick with XP for now!

I hope to avoid Vista for as long as possible. I've seen how it eats memory and resources and I want nothing to do with it if I can help it....well until Alan Wake is released, then I might be tempted.

I avoid it mostly because it's crippled by DRM shit.

You can see some differences between DX9 and 10 on Bioshock at: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6177688/p-5.html

And I'm definitely switching to MacOS X instead of Vista!

like you did when xp came out back then...

You mean the new utility function, D3DX10CreateRibbon, right?

Oh yeah, and that function D3DX10EmulateDX9OnlySlower(). Great stuff.

Gamecube can to it ;)

switch to gamecube then