Windows 7, DX10, DX9, etc.

[Sporati]

I switched over to w7 64bit recently. Having some issues so I've been doing quite a bit of searching for info and these are some of what I've come across in magazines and on-line publications, if you want a bibliography, tough, I hated that part of english.

Dx9 hit a dead end, there were issues that people were able to work around but the fixes caused more problems and it just couldnt evolve.

Dx10 was a completely new API, created from the ground up to fix the issues that 9 had.

Problem was that most people were still running XP, 98 was being shelved, and x10 was not designed around how XP worked. I'm a little green with this, but read a great article, so dont take this info as gospel. Anyway, Vista rushed or not was a fat pig gorging itself on your systems RAM, eating as much as 700mb just to keep the OS running. And the average person generally only had 2g so basically no matter how good vista might have been, it was too greedy. I personally hated vista with a passion. Even though Dx10 was out there, what company in their right mind would be making a Dx10 based game when only a select few would be able to run it, and they'd have to have some serious hardware under the hood to allow it to run?

So now we have Dx10.1, and Dx11, 11 is allowing nice changes to how tessalation? shaders, other such stuff that I wont go into are handled. With windows 7 coming out, leaks saying around the holidays, XP will go the way of 98, 95....So it will be interesting to see how gaming evolves at this point. Dx9 will become like DOS, fading into the history books and we'll see Dx10+ games starting to emerge with more frequency.

So as someone that doesnt design games, my question is how difficult will it be to bring Lotro in line with the emerging technology? Or are we looking at the fact that like all the other MMO's, a new vessel will be created to house Lotro and the player base is stuck starting over from scratch. I bring this up because it is one of the reasons I despise SoE. New engine or technology comes out, and the original game gets the hand-me-down treatment in favor of a shiny new toy. Can Dx10 and up be integrated into the game as the standard over dx9 in say a year or 2? Or will Lotro fade out as Dx9 is no longer supported by MS?

I hope Lotro continues on and evolves with the technology.

[AubinMagnus]

And there are a lot of tech-heads that can push through the issues without breaking a sweat, where most people would consider them the problem they complain about. So no, people aren't lying, nor are they grabbing their virtual crotches to brag about not having issues.

Disasters like Vista aren't simply popular urban myths.

I've been using Vista since before manufacturers were selling it. That said, yes, I had some problems at the beginning, some big ones, but that's because I was intentionally trying to break it, see which programs would work, which ones wouldn't.

As to compatibility... manufacturers had Vista's changes in hand since XP debuted. They were told this SIX YEARS before Vista came out, and nobody lifted a finger.

So it's not really Microsoft's problem they weren't ready.