Do You Think DirectX 10 on XP is Possible?

[purplerat]

I'll never rule out if actually be done on some level, but I highly doubt it will ever be practiacally implemented. From what I heard the way Falling Leaf was going about it was to translate DX10 function calls into comparable openGL, DX9 or in some case directly to machine language. This would be very different then from patching XP to be able to use DX10. If XP was able to straight up us DX10 then any DX10 app would just work. However the way the Alky Poject was supposed to work it would require making each app compatible on an individual basis. I don't think we'll ever see a very high % of compatibility with something like this.

 

[swamoe]

I see what you mean.
However, I think we can expect certain 'patches' to be developed by some and shared over the web. I also heard about certain Dx10 features could very well be emulated, if not, redirected (to be ran by) OpenGL 2.1. This could very well be done by patching Dx9 files to use OpenGL technology to render Dx10 graphics, supported by official MS hotfixes/patches or not.

But reading over this topic I'd think "Why bother". You're probably right about Vista becoming the new OS choice for gamers. Right now Vista just seems to eat away a lot of resources just to decorate itself with smooth-looking visual effects. And i'm sure that if there's still a majority of gamers who want their systemresources spent only or mostly on getting their games to run smooth, there will probably be a buckload of tweaks for vista to get the job done...
But for now... I'm keeping my eyes open for a way to get dx10 on XP. At least til Vista becomes a bit more stable, reliable and perhaps looses some weight on the right spots.

 

[purplerat]

But reading over this topic I'd think "Why bother". You're probably right about Vista becoming the new OS choice for gamers. Right now Vista just seems to eat away a lot of resources just to decorate itself with smooth-looking visual effects. And i'm sure that if there's still a majority of gamers who want their systemresources spent only or mostly on getting their games to run smooth, there will probably be a buckload of tweaks for vista to get the job done...
But for now... I'm keeping my eyes open for a way to get dx10 on XP. At least til Vista becomes a bit more stable, reliable and perhaps looses some weight on the right spots.

Here's an interesting article.
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/

This shows exactly what I've been saying all along. With current hardware, updated drivers and newer games Vista's gaming performance matches XP, and this article is a few months old. A lot of the "Vista Sucks for gaming" information is myth or misinformation. If you try to play Counter Strike on Vista with the same hardware that it would run on XP(512MB RAM, P4 and 3-4 generation old GPU) it probably will suck. And if you just throw together a Vista machine with good specs but don't bother to get all updates and current drivers (which can take a few hours) you're going to get poor performance - the same as if you intsall an original XP (pre SP1) version and don't spend hours updating and configuring everything. I wish there was more new information like this. I spent this past weekend extensively benchmarking gaming performance in Vista (I just got a 8800GTS 512MB G92 on Thursday). I've taken my benchmarks and compared them to various XP results with similair specs and I'm coming to the same conclusion as the above article.

 

[zachthurston]

Before some of you convince yourselves that Microsoft is always looking for ways to take more of your money, lets first consider the following. A. Microsoft is a business and employs people. In order for them to pay those people, they have to make money, so when they change the OS they charge for it. Simple enough. If you think MS is a money grabbing monopoly, also consider this. IE7, Office 2007, Windows Defender, WMP11, and Windows Live Mail Desktop, were originally slated to be Vista-only programs, but MS catered to the popular demand and released these products for XP as well. Obviously if they were REALLY wanting to push you into Vista, these would be Vista only apps. Another thing, the time between the release of XP and Vista is about 6 years, which considering the history of major releases of Windows is really long. To compare, Apple released five flavors of OSX in this time period. Another is that MS decided not to do a similar thing to 98 Second Edition with XP SP2. They had originally planned to CHARGE for SP2, and they had great justification as SP2 is a major overhaul of XP. BUT THEY DID NOT, which proves that MS is not all about making money (although what business isn't?) as they did not charge for something that was well justified. I'm sure the same type of people that complain about DX10 would be just as angry at that. Which brings me to the point of this post. I would like to tell those of you who think MS is giving you the short end of the stick on DX10 that they have MORE than bent over backward to back port stuff to XP which would have made Vista MUCH more desirable. This ONE little thing that they didn't back port to XP pales in comparision to what they did. Even if they wanted to, I still don't think they could have justified it given the immense differences in Vista's WDDM model. I use Vista on my laptop and I must say, the feature differences make the negligible performance difference more than worth it. XP may use less RAM, but you don't expirence window erasing or other glitches in Aero. And my thoughts on the whole OMG Vista needs 2GB of RAM!!! are: look on newegg you can EASILY get 2GB of DDR2 800 for $40. With RAM so cheap, who cares? I just read an article on some website, and it said that in performance tests, Windows 3.1 did better than Vista. Well, why don't people use 3.1 anymore? THE FEATURES! I don't care who you are, you aren't going to sacrifice your features you get in XP or Vista for a NEGLIGIBLE performance gain. Enough said. Vista is the way of the future, just buy it with a new computer, don't upgrade.
Just my $.02
Zach Thurston

 

[purplerat]

And my thoughts on the whole OMG Vista needs 2GB of RAM!!! are: look on newegg you can EASILY get 2GB of DDR2 800 for $40. With RAM so cheap, who cares?

Thats one aspect that people don't consider. How much Vista has helped drive down hardware cost. With so many people buying up RAM it's reduced the cost enormusly. I'm looking at buying 4GB or high performance DDR2 800 RAM, and it's going to cost me less then $100. When I wanted 2GB of DDR for XP it cost me over $200 because at that time having that much RAM was not very common.

 

[swamoe]

Seems to be that an app released by Falling Leaf enables a bunch of Vista applications to run on XP. I'm not sure how it works and wether it's safe or not (let alone, why one would need vista apps to be ran on XP, since the most valuable vista apps will need it's vista-core).

Also a friends seems to have upgraded to vista to make use of the Dx10 features. According to him it still 'feels' like vista is eating his system's resources but so far he has no real complaints about games running on it. He also told me about a programmer who was able to exclude a lot of rubbish that came with his copy (premium) of vista, keeping the essential gamers-needed features of vista and without making vista visually any diffrent. He told me this programmer released his little tweaks somewhere on the web but I'm still looking for it...
Perhaps someone here has heard of it..

 

[Deth]

if you want more shineys on the screen, its gonna cost you more cpu/gfx power. doesn't take a genius to understand why you get more fps in dx9 than you do in dx10. blame it on the more shineys.

 

[M0R0NI]

Yes! Microsoft just wants to you buy VISTA. The crappiest thing since the language of french.

I am with you on that!

 

[spoonboy]

There you have it. You don't want to spend the money. It has nothing to do with the way vista actually performs, which is very good, actually. You see, the trend I've noticed here on these crappy forums is that there are two camps.

1) Idiotic fanboys who have never even seen the operating system, much less given it a fare shake. They will spout drivel such as "Vista sucks 50% performance hit DRM all over blah blah blah" then they retreat back into the shadow from whence they came.

2) Those that have used it and *gasp!* use it on their everyday home computer! Without xp dual boot! OMFG you rebels! These people will tell you nothing but good things about the software. The look and feel of the desktop, the ease of use to get to your programs, and yes, the performance is actually very good. They've even included multiple emulation layers incase you run across older software that isnt' compatible with native Vista.


To answer the topic at hand, no, you can't run DX10 in XP. The actual reasoning behind this is the way that the new kernel in vista is locked down for security. DX10 accesses the main windows kernel far differently than any previous version of DX. Infact, when you are running an older version of directx software on Vista, it's actually still running the DX10 software package that is then inturn emulating back down to previous versions of DX. That's why you see a slight performance penalty with comparing older software between Vista and XP. You always lose performace when you emulate anything.

Ive seen vista, it runs slower than xp and makes a case for more than 2gb ram, which is a bit cack to say the least. Add in that dx10 equals a big drop in frames for not a great deal more/has general performance issues, then vista seems a bit duff, at least until sp1 and g100 & r700, which should make a better go of things.

 

[darzil]

I'm not convinced that there is anything badly wrong with Vista, it takes time for drivers to get updated and optimised.

I am convinced that I'm not going to change anytime soon. Not one of the business applications on this laptop is currently supported on Vista, so every system my company use will have to be upgraded first. I'm a Vista MCP, but that's hardy a qualification, I've never touched Vista, and the exam was just a sales promotion (Ah, it'll be answer B, the new feature in Vista - I swear you can pass it easily just knowing the names of the new features and nothing else).

I'm sure, like XP, it'll mature and take over.

Darzil

 

[purplerat]

Ive seen vista, it runs slower than xp and makes a case for more than 2gb ram, which is a bit cack to say the least. Add in that dx10 equals a big drop in frames for not a great deal more/has general performance issues, then vista seems a bit duff, at least until sp1 and g100 & r700, which should make a better go of things.

Get a little perspective before complaining about "Vista needs sooooo much memory". When I bought 2GB of RAM for my XP machine 2 years ago it cost $200, and that was durring a time when prices where down (6 months earlier or later it cost $300). A couple years before that when my laptop was near the end of it's life I wanted to try and get another year or so of use out of it. Do you know what 256MB of PC100 was going for? Buying 512MB would have cost a pretty good chunk of a new laptop. Last Saturday I bought 4GB for $90. $90!!! I can't remember RAM ever being so affordable, either per MB or per the average amount needed. A big reason for that is Vista. Two years ago PC manufactuers could get away with selling PCs with 256MB of memory. Now the PCs in the same price range have 1GB (Best Buy flier this week had a $399 laptop with 1GB). Combine that with the CPU price wars and it's awsome per enthusiasts. It's so cheap now to build a PC that far exceeds what any OS will ask of it. Sure if you use 3 year old technology on Vista it will probably run like crap (HP is still using nForce 4 motherboards on their 'new' Vista machines), but considering hardware prices today, thats a pretty poor excuse.

 

[Guest]

I thought I'd mentioned it before but Oblivion, Crysis, Bioshock, FEAR, WoW, Madden 08, COD4 are a sampling of the types of games I've played on multiple Vista systems. In my experience Vista's impact on game performance is minimal and often none at all.

Well Well Well, if this is TRUE, then why even bother to upgrade to Vista / D3D10 ?
The visuals on DX10 are hardly worth the upgrade either, so everyone save your $$$ and buy a hardware upgrade if anything.

I've tried Vista, I honestly can't say I hated it, but I didnt love it either. It was ok. So that isnt enough reason to upgrade to it.

 

[purplerat]

Well Well Well, if this is TRUE, then why even bother to upgrade to Vista / D3D10 ?

I upgraded because I both love to game AND do other things on my PCs. My initial reasoning for upgrading was just on my HTPC for Media Center. When I saw that I could have live TV running and recording WHILE my son played games on it (despite the specs on that system not being very good at the time) I thought "that might be nice". I like the fact that I can have VS2005 open along with any of the games mentioned above and easily flip back and forth between the two. Last night I was actaully gaming on the HTPC(lower spec'd) while it was shrinking over 1000 pics with a custom program I designed which is pretty resource intense regardless of OS. Maybe I just over looked it with XP, but I never would have considered running a game on XP in windowed mode, nevermind with one or even several other pretty intense apps running and switching back and forth.

I've tried Vista, I honestly can't say I hated it, but I didnt love it either. It was ok. So that isnt enough reason to upgrade to it.

Also like I said above, have a little perspective. For most people over the past year and moving forward the option isn't to spend more money for Vista, but rather to spend more money to continue using XP.

 

[Guest]

Strong statements, however you're lacking anything to back it up. I'm guessing that you probably have no clue as to what DirectX actually is or does. What DirectX does is to allow software (specifically the OS) to communicate with hardware. DX10 was designed specifically for Vista to allow it to commincate with hardware more efficiently by taking advantedge of the core inner workings of Vista. XP is not the same as Vista so many of these features would either be impossible, useless or would tax performance too much. This is exaclty the same reason why DX9 games often run poorly on Vista. Vista was not designed for DX9, but in order to maintane backwards compatability Vista must use a sort of emulation at the cost of performance. This of course lends it's self to ignorant statements like "Vista is that it's slow, it has problems, and it sucks". First of all software does not have speed. If it did what would you say is faster, DOS or XP? Hardware on the other hand does have speed and since Vista allows for more RAM, more CPU cores and practicle 64bit processing it actually has the capabilities to operate much faster then XP. As far as problems go Vista is very stable and the most common complaint is a lack of compatability back and forth between Vista and XP. And of course that issue actually nullifies your original assumtion that DX10 could easily be achieved in XP

lol

and btw vista is pretty nice, i have xp and vista on dual boot and i havent had to switch to xp to run anything for a long long time now. The performance is great and i never even come close to maxing out my machine. Some things about it annoy me, much longer initial login time, doesnt work well with some networks running various types of servers, the home edition is limited in security options you can change. Its not perfect but it is nice and I use it much more than XP nowadays.

 

[purplerat]

yup, my initial dual boot was a waste of space. Ended formatting my XP partition to use as storage.

 

[spoonboy]

Ive seen vista, it runs slower than xp and makes a case for more than 2gb ram, which is a bit cack to say the least. Add in that dx10 equals a big drop in frames for not a great deal more/has general performance issues, then vista seems a bit duff, at least until sp1 and g100 & r700, which should make a better go of things.

Get a little perspective before complaining about "Vista needs sooooo much memory". When I bought 2GB of RAM for my XP machine 2 years ago it cost $200, and that was durring a time when prices where down (6 months earlier or later it cost $300). A couple years before that when my laptop was near the end of it's life I wanted to try and get another year or so of use out of it. Do you know what 256MB of PC100 was going for? Buying 512MB would have cost a pretty good chunk of a new laptop. Last Saturday I bought 4GB for $90. $90!!! I can't remember RAM ever being so affordable, either per MB or per the average amount needed. A big reason for that is Vista. Two years ago PC manufactuers could get away with selling PCs with 256MB of memory. Now the PCs in the same price range have 1GB (Best Buy flier this week had a $399 laptop with 1GB). Combine that with the CPU price wars and it's awsome per enthusiasts. It's so cheap now to build a PC that far exceeds what any OS will ask of it. Sure if you use 3 year old technology on Vista it will probably run like crap (HP is still using nForce 4 motherboards on their 'new' Vista machines), but considering hardware prices today, thats a pretty poor excuse.

Please, enough of the cost of ram these days lectures. I remember paying 30 quid for 8mb of dram, and the years before that when that would have cost 399 quid. Yeah memory is cheap, but i just upgraded to 2gb a few months ago, and it feels huge after gaming at 1gb for more than 2 years before that. Why make it seem small again? We will all move to vista eventually, but inside of the next 12 months, why bother? end of.

 

[purplerat]

Why make it seem small again? We will all move to vista eventually, but inside of the next 12 months, why bother? end of.

What would make 2GB seem small? Unless your running some serious workstation/design type software, nothing today is going to saturate 2GB. Also the why upgrade to Vista question seems to ignore that for more and more people the question is why downgrade to XP?

 

[spoonboy]

Oh I dont know lets say, ...games! 1gb gaming meant long loading times, long recovery times after exiting a game, and so on, 2gb means games load faster, and end much faster. Adding another 100mb or so worth of windows processes into the background by moving to vista would eat away at that. So why upgrade? and yes my machine was configured well, msconfig'd when gaming, turn the crud back on for internet surfing. 116mb commit charge at start-up.

The games moving from 1gb to 2gb most benefited, in order:

Stalker
bf2
bf2142
supreme commander

Going back to task manager and looking at commit charge after gaming, stalker surprisingly was the most hungry. all on high, 1400x900, it was 2.1gb. If I gamed on larger multiplayer maps in supreme commander there would be a case for more ram, and oc'ing to 3.0ghz. Point being, why eat into performance with a hungrier os? The upside is frankly just dx10, and its not all that better than what dx9 is capable of. That wont stay the same of course, and eventually dx9 will become old and tired and legacy stuff, but that wont be for a while. And after that 'while' vista will have matured alot, which can only be better. (Might be cheaper then too *cough* *cough* microsoft u.k.!). Hell we havent seen DX10 only games yet! As far as general windows applications go, a machine with xp sp3 will be viable for years to come.

...but then again.....

I'll switch to vista eventually, but that wont be before sp2 or 12 months from now, whichever comes sooner. Switching from vista to xp would be dumn imho, switching from xp to vista though is not the most compelling idea at the mo. Momentum will eventually be irresistable, and you'll have to do it if you wanna carry on gaming properly (name your time frame on that one though lol). Well, anyway I hope your catching my drift, Im just of the opinion that vista doesnt quite have enough 'reasons' to be adopted by xp users right now. If a machine comes with it, hooray youve saved yourself some money that you'll have to spend eventually, but for those who would have to go out and by the disk, well, why bother quite yet?

 

[Chazwuzzer]

I use both Xp and Vista. Frankly - not a huge difference to me. I'm not a big fan of either OS. I was a little excited when I heard, early on, that MS was going to implement an entirely new file system with Vista, but they wound up scrapping that idea.

My beef with Xp and Vista centers around the idea that improved functionality = more crap. I like stripped-down OSs and the trend has been in the opposite direction. A modular approach would be great - buy an interface and a file system and then add those components that you will use. I know, I know, its a fantasy, but still... if I wanted an OS that looked like OSX, I'd just buy a Mac.

 

[KingLoftusXII]

Forget the RAM, forget DX9 vs DX10. All i know since I switched to Vista 64 from XP Pro slightly over a year ago I've not had one blue screen. Nuff said.

As for RAM, at idle XP was slightly over 500mb, Vista is 650 for me. A non-issue.

 

[purplerat]

Forget the RAM, forget DX9 vs DX10. All i know since I switched to Vista 64 from XP Pro slightly over a year ago I've not had one blue screen. Nuff said.

As for RAM, at idle XP was slightly over 500mb, Vista is 650 for me. A non-issue.

Yes, Vista's handling of errors is much nicer then any previous version of Windows, not to mention such errors being almost non-existant when compaired to ever other version of Windows since 95 within they're first year. I still occasionally have an application lock up or crash, but I honestly can't remember the last time Vista either completely locked up it's (where task manager couldn't be opened to shut down what ever's causing the problem) and the ONLY time I've ever had BSOD type of issues where Vista just shuts down or restarts has been imeadiatly after installing drivers it didn't like. Even when that did happen simply popping in the install CD and running a quick repair made for a very easy fix.

 

[parkardbell486dx2]

You know how Fox News is the mouth piece of the White House....... after reading these threads that you have made it seem like you are a mouth piece for MS. Now, lets focus what's on hand. DX10 on XP can it be done??? I say yes and a thousand more after. MS is able to do it, the Resources are there and the demand is there. Only problem is......VISTA. You put DX10 in XP what was the point of vista?? Sure there are some other bits in Vista that do not exist in XP. This talk about dx10 not working XP is exactly what MS us wants us to think. I for one will not. Shiney screens and nice search bars wont fool this hard working boy. Xp works just fine. To me buying Vista is just as bad as buying a time share in mexico. But hey spend your money on useless crap, its no wonder why the home Foreclosure rate is so high in the states.
people be smart with your money, you worked hard for it!

 

[purplerat]

I got Vista Ultimate for free. Guess I really wasted my money. You're a perfect example of all the Vista haters who just make up non-sensical arguments because you have nothing of any substance. Vista is a waste of money? Hum, lets see buy a perfectly good new PC with Vista only to then buy XP and downgrade. Yup that makes perfect financial sense. Hey, stick with your 2001 PC for the rest of your life. That will save you a lot of money. I'm not here to tell anybody they should upgrade, but Vista is what's out there and there's really no reason not to use it. People like you who just make up what ever story fits your agenda (hey that sounds like Fox News to) make absolutly no sense. You're constantly contradicting yourselves. "It's a waste of money to get Vista" - but what OS is packaged with almost every new PC, not to mention that Vista is generally cheaper to buy itself. Then you say "DX10 and everthing else Vista will work on XP because there's no difference between XP and Vista" - then why do you care which OS you're using if they're practically the same. "Oh well not everything is compatible with Vista" - Don't you think if backwards compatability is not 100% (this would be beneficial to MS) between the 2 OSs that forward compatibility would be harder? But I guess you might just be right. It's all EVIL M$ out to get your hard earned money (hope you earned more then $150 since the last time they tricked you into buying an OS - 6 years ago). How about you save even more money and go with no OS at all? Just stair at your BIOS all day.

 

[jaguarskx]

Almost anything is possible. It all depends on:

1. Effort.
2. Time.
3. Dedication.

 

[imposslimbo]

One thing I have found out about software and computer programming, most of the time when they (being companies/corporations) tell you that you cannot do something, someone somewhere figures out how to do it. Its a matter a the right person or right group of people wanting to do it bad enough. That is most of the time, I would say all of the time because in every case I've ever witnessed, the rules have been broken. I only say most of the time because all is an absolute and I'm sure somebody somewhere can find an instance for which the rules could not be broken no matter how genious the group of people and no matter how hard they tried. That is what I feel about this DX10 business and whether it will ever work for Windows XP in full or in part.

As far as Vista, I have it and paid for it. I do not use it. It is a personal choice and a personal opinion. It is not worth the hardware upgrades to get the same performance that I get on Windows XP. Even if I did pay for the hardware upgrades, I would always know in the back of my mind that my new hardware would yield even better performance if I uninstalled Vista and reinstalled XP. With that said, I have no doubt that I will be using Vista in the future. It is just a matter of time. When the performance gains of using Vista outweigh those of using XP, then I will make the switch. Guess what, I already have the DVD right here at home for when that time comes. In my opinion, that time is not now. It could be next year, could be next month, could be tomorrow for all I know. But right at this moment, XP yields much faster results for the same or comparable hardware installed. Add to that, that Vista requires some tweaks to not get on my last damn nerves. I made those tweaks upon installation of Vista and still decided to use XP because of the faster performance. The only reason I am even slightly inclined to move to Vista right now is because of DX10. Even that does not persuade me at the moment. I would like to reiterate that I am certain I will be switching to the Vista in the future when the time is right. I did the same thing with '98. I held onto '98 until I felt the change was needed and to my benefit. At that point, I switched to XP. Same thing here.

So, my reccomendation? Do what works for you. Vista or XP, its your personal choice. See what works best for you. Don't let message boards or giant corporations alone dictate what OS you use just based on words, hype, propaganda, intimidation, etc. Judge based on your mileage with the OS. Have a nice day.