I'm also interested in try this out, from what i understand (i could be wrong) microsoft had dx 9.0L in the works for windows xp, which will add dx10 support? While dx10 will still be a vista only version, the newer dx 9 for xp will allow games to use dx 10 featuers (until windows 7 and dx 11 soon as well). The simple fact that MS is intentionally crippling a previous operating system instead of focusing on making vista look more appealing speaks volumes about microsoft itself. I don't want to start a troll war so I hope I didn't offend anyone with being anti-MS, but this directx 10 thing really brings my piss to a boil.
I like windows xp. It almost never completely crashes, the OS is responsive, have never seen a blue screen since I built this computer 2 years ago. Vista on the other hand I installed for about a month, tried to give it time to adjust, tried everything i could possibly imagine to speed up games, the os, etc.. (4gb ram 2.4ghz quad core cpu, 512mb 8800gt video, a typical low end gaming computer) and nothing could speed it up, i lost around 15 frames per second minimum when playing WoW. Now I gave it the benifit of the doubt since vista was running dx 10 features (on wow and crysis, not aoc at the time) but i also had every feature that took up resources in vista disabled in the services setup. I basically turned off any service not needed for gaming, which helped a slight bit, but not enough to make want to us the latest version of windows and having it look like windows 95 ! (with the IE 4.0 desktop integration ^.^)
So I reinstalled XP and tried out crysis in directx 10, there is a patch for crysis that allows you to use dx 10 features in that game specifically (crysisunlocker.exe try megagames.com). I tried it, it works and it also gives me a whopping 30 FPS gain over vista... And thats with a stock xp install, no services disabled or anything tweaked what so ever. I understand that microsoft is developing this technology and the money for vista helps cover their efforts and they don't want to support an old OS forever but maybe they could just go ahead and give us the features until windows 7 comes out then cripple xp with dx 11, at least there would be the chance that they made a new operating system worth using again. Anyways thats the end of my rant. I'm been smoking the chron all day so my thoughts might not be real collected.
Now while it is possible to get crysis running in dx 10 quite easily in xp I haven't figured out how to get the rest of the games to work. I'm assuming thats because I'm using xp 64 and i need to compile the drivers from source but it also could have something to do with the games individually checking the OS version number and allowing dx 10 to only be selected if you're running >= windows 6.0 or whatever.
Here are a few links I'm checking out now hoping to get AoC working w/dx10 in xp 64 I'll post again if it works. Again the Crysis Dx10 unlocker is called crysisunlocker.exe google it if you're interested.
http://tinyurl.com/lt7qlz
http://tinyurl.com/nfvzbo
http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/
^^ The alky project is the main group involved in getting dx10 working on xp so definitely check them out
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