Why wouldn't AMD and NVidia want to have their most expensive cards supported by what's still the most popular operating system? Unless there are technical reasons for why DX10 can't be implemented under Windows XP, it seems to me the only party that benefits from making DX10 Vista only is Microsoft.

Take a look at Microsoft's DirectX website and tell me pushing Vista is not their main agenda.

Actually I think Geometry shaders et al were going to be available under XP, then during Vistas crash diet, when it lost WinFS, they got made a Vista only feature. It'd be fair to assume that no-one was happy about that but it makes sense from Microsoft marketting point of view. There's nothing intrinsically special about any of the differences between DX9 and DX10.

As for the OpenGL thing, well, when they had the discussion about the new ARB extensions which gave us access to the last batch of, for example; GeForce 8 series extensions. There apparently wasn't the usual wrangling over compatibilities between Ati and nVidia that has usually led to the watering down of those extensions. Both groups could pretty much agree on them since they mostly duplicated features they were both already having to support to fairly high standards for DX10. This is both good and bad; good that it meant we didn't get watered down specs / bad that all they did was duplicate features already being driven into production due to them being required by DirectX. I.e: OpenGL just playing catch up.

I like both APIs and OpenGL isn't going anywhere due to it getting more and more use in commercial games. We've got absolutely no interest from third parties about when we're switching to DirectX 10 but we've got interest about if or when we'll do an OpenGL client to support OSX and Linux.

Really I'd just like to crack open someones skull at Khronos and find out whats happened to OpenGL3.0.

Sorry that turned into a bit of a braindump [grin]

Quote:I'm just sick of the people who seem to think that DX10 on Vista was some vast MS conspiracy to force you to buy a new OS and that "they" (and that also bothers me, the treating of a big company as if it was one faceless person)

sorry to bring this up :)(joke), well "they" - in fact WRT US law a corporation is technically 'a person' (im not making this up), thus in that sense MS can be referred to it such (only in america huh :), which i do love btw )

also, of course MS want to force ppl to 'adopt' dx10 (its good for business + who give a monkeys what US law saiz),

fact - we've seen 'vista only' games (from MS) havent we? true or false?
though technically theres no reason that they cant/couldnt happen on xp (+ are in fact are available on xp with a hack) ergo .... (its not rocketscience), the main reasoning from MS's POV for d3d10 vista only is 'it makes sense from a business point of view' good on MS (i could rant on here about past facts eg MS tying the OS to internet explorer here as well but wont .. ie its certainly not unknown for MS to follow this path for no reason except from a business point of view (+ good on them i dont begrudge them that, what does piss me off(*) is the denial that this is the main reason, you are certainly smarter than to fall for that rob )

ill be sad to see u go, phantom (we would be great drinking buddy im certain, shout me a few pints sometime), certainly better that the new moderator (who is BTW bloody knowledgeable + intelligent ild give him that), but he lacks your spirit (then again get him pissed, who knows, humha )

(*)+ if u know me well, this is one of my major bugbears, be it MS or electricity or supermarkets or oil companies ... whatever. why do we have to hear the BS spin over why they do such a thing (eg to benifit the consumer) when in fact its not, actually its to generate more profits (fullstop) well thats a surprise!