Do You Think DirectX 10 on XP is Possible?

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Meh, only glanced at the title before posting. My bad.

Anyways since MS hasn't implement DX10 in Windows XP, how do you know it's gonna take a huge performance hit? I have half in mind to try that DX10 for XP thing.

I wouldn't want to argue this topic, after all I know nothing about programming. It be a losing battle for me.

If you could be so kind, purplerat, direct me to some legitimate sites that explains that implementing DX10 in XP would be chaotic?
 

While your question is a valid one it’s somewhat difficult to answer because you’re asking for proof of something’s non-existence. It’s along the same lines as asking to disprove the existence of God, although not nearly as complicated nor as important. Really the only way to prove DX10 on XP would be difficult to run would be if it were available on XP, but at the same time those exact same difficulties may be what’s preventing DX10 from being available on XP. The DX10 for XP thing that you mention, I assume you’re referencing what the Alky Project did achieve, is very limited; Basically allowing you to run simple DX10 apps like Windows Side Bar on XP. The fact that the only achieved that much before giving up leads me to believe that my original hypothesis of DX10 on XP being overly difficult is more or less correct.
While not exactly hard proof, the argument for putting DX10 on XP in and of itself does a great deal to point out it’s own flaws. If I were to ask why put DX10 on Vista the likely answer would be something like:
Now the problem with Vista is that it's slow, it has problems, and it sucks.
Click to expand...
Which so eloquently points out two things; One that Vista requires more powerful hardware and two that it has many compatibility issues with XP. Looking first at the later, it’s well known that with compatibility between different generations of products that backwards compatibility is much more achievable then forwards compatibility. In terms of Vista and XP, it’s much more likely that Vista will work with software and hardware designed for XP then it is that XP will work with new software/hardware designed for Vista. In general this means that if Vista is having trouble working with XP products you should expect that XP would have even more difficulty working with Vista products. Specifically to DX, Vista is compatible with DX9, but with some issues, namely performance loss. Inversely it should follow that XP would have greater difficulties with DX10 including much greater performance loss. This relates to the other large complaint about Vista, that it requires a bit more hardware. However if one were to want to run DX10 games such hardware requirements would be necessary anyways. Thus running DX10 on XP because of lower system specs would be pointless since the game it’s self, regardless of DX version, would kill performance.
Finally my last point. This topic can be argued over forever, or until full DX10 compatibility is achieved on XP (I’m betting on forever coming first), but we simply need to look at what usually happens in similar cases to come to a logical conclusion in the absence of hard data. That is when it comes to porting, emulation, reverse engineering, cracking etc. making software available on a platform other then it’s native one almost always results in vary degrees, though usually significant performance losses. Go play Halo for PC. MS created both platforms and it was in their best interest to make it available on PC, but it’s still utter crap as is usually the case in such things. So why should DX10 on XP be so different?


Here is at least one link discussing why it's not going to work >> http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007/06/28/dx10-on-xp-round-2.aspx
 



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.
 
I think anything to do with computers, software and technology is possible, but, will DX10 be out on XP before it becomes redundant with no support what so ever? thats the real question, the ability is just a matter of time.
 

All the benchmarks for games showed drastic performance drops in Vista compared to XP. I trust in proper benchmarks. Vista may have better security, but that's about it.

And yes, I'm not as rich as you are. You rich people have not a care in the world how poorer people has to suffer to make a living. I would not want to spend $100+ on a OS just for DX10, but obviously you have the money so do what you want.

If you think this forum is crappy, why must you post? If it's crappy, leave it alone, it's not mandatory.
 
On Direct3D 10: Technically, there is no reason why Windows XP couldn't access the functionality provided by Direct3D 10. By using the OpenGL 2.1 API, you can access these (Direct3D 10) features on any platform - given the hardware supports the OpenGL 2.1 API.

Other DirectX 10 functionality besides Direct3D 10, I have no idea what changed in version 10 since I'm not familiar with XInput, XACT and the other APIs.

I have to agree with people who think this decision by Microsoft was founded on the sales of their new Operating System since there is no real technical reason why this wouldn't be possible, WDDM didn't prove itself yet in the performance area.

- Eddy
 
XP is 50 - 100% faster than Windows Vista This test was with a beta of SP 1 on Vista and a beta of SP3 on XP.

What's more, the tests showed that the resource-hungry Vista gobbles up most of the additional RAM added to a computer. By upgrading a notebook running Vista SP1 from 1 Gbyte to 2 Gbytes of memory, "we managed to achieve a 'whopping' 4% improvement in OfficeBench throughput," the researchers noted.
Click to expand...

Regarding DX10, it's simply an API that could easily be adapted to the kernel of XP, since most of the programming behind it is directX 9. As it was mentioned here in other postings, the only reason MS didn't do it was to "encourage" gamers to buy Vista. They've even put pressure on developers to grey out "DX10 effects" that run exactly the same way in DX9, and much much faster. I would never recommend Vista. It's absolute garbage, and should go the same way WindowsME did. Even Microsoft sees that Vista is being adopted extremely slowly by lengthening the support of XP.

If you like eyecandy in your OS, the only reason to get Vista, install Ubuntu 7.10 instead or buy a Mac. If you're a gamer, use XP. If you're in a corporate environment, use XP or buy a Mac. There simply is no good use for Vista.
 


50%-100%? Really? what with 256MB RAM and a P3 CPU? And the quote you give actaully contradicts itself. If Vista was so incredibly memory hungry doubling the RAM would show more then a 4% increase. The reason it doesn't is because Vista utilizes more memory rather then "gobbling" it up. It actaully manages memory much better then XP and gives the appearance that it uses a lot more. If it requires such massive resources please explain how it is that I'm able to play Crysis in windowed mode with media center running AND recording live TV. I can use the 3D tabbing to go back and forth between both the video and Crysis and still maintane 20+ FPS on Crysis along with smooth video and no interuption of my recording. And by the way this is not on the system in my sig. Rather on my sons PC with a PD820 and a 8800GTS 320MB. Not a huge difference other then the CPU; On my PC I can due the same all while recording it all with FRAPS. Unfortunatly I'm waiting for my new video card before I can get that video off that PC and post it - but I'll try the same with the other one. Also why use Vista? Well if you have a quad core CPU, more then 3.75GB of RAM or want 64bit programs the Vista might be somewhat usefull. Before you mention XPx64 or Linux/MacOS as an answer to this just think about how ingorant you'll sound and save us all the time.
 
If anybody cares here's a link to a video I just made with FRAPS on my sons PC, showing just what a memory hog Vista is.

<<--EDIT
This is a new link. Check the bottom of the page for a link to another video.
http://www.purplerat.net/?center=vista_doesnt_suck.php
EDIT-->>
As I suspected with FRAPs there is some slow down in both the video play back and Crysis. Without FRAPS running both are smooth. Also I have another video that I'll upload at some point where both video playback, DVR recording (if you look in the task bar in the video you'll see a red dot by the clock which indicates Media Center is recording), Crysis, and The Witcher also running. I'll admit that that video is somewhat choppier, but without FRAPS running both games are playable and both video recording and playback are smooth. Also notice that Crysis is set to all Very High. Even though the windowed mode is only 800x600 it's still pretty intense; probably even more so on the CPU then if it were at a higher resolution. Here are the specs for this machine:

PentiumD 820@2.8
3GB PNY PC4200
8800GTS(G80) 320MB
320GB Seagate 3Gbs SATA HDD
Intel D945PSN Motherboar

However when I bump this up to my machine (sig below except w/ new 8800GTS G92) I expect even better results.
 


First off, click on the link and actually read it before commenting.

Secondly, Vista doesn't utilize memory better than Windows XP does. It is much more inefficient with most applications, and the operating system itself even with all the GUI eyecandy turned off still eats up much more memory and CPU resources. Vista doesn't optimize cores or memory better than XP does either. Check out any OS bench of say Crysis. It uses the multicore CPUs in much the same manner that Vista does.

If you want to go 64 bit, use Linux, get a Mac, or install Windows Server Edition. None of the consumer Microsoft operating systems can adequately run 64 bit applications in a 64 bit environment. If you put say Photoshop on OSX Leopard in 64 bit mode up against the same program on Vista, the Mac will launch it faster, render filters faster, etc. 64 bit in consumer Windows is more of an afterthought, or a marketing gimmick. XP64 is far worse than Vista64, this is true, but it isn't much of a competition.
 
Well I read the article and may I please have those 3 minutes of my life back? I mean seriously you must be the type of person who thinks Wikipedia is a valid source when doing research. Maybe I'm too needy, but when I read about research or testing that was supposedly done I expect to see some results. The author of this article (which reads more like a blog then actual journalism) only mentions very passingly that tests were done and there were results. This is of course only after he offers up his first piece of evidence of why Vista is no good - a quote in a Mac comercial from the portly "PC-guy". In fact the only links Pat McDougall offers up to support his article are links to other anti-Vista articles on the same site written by... Pat McDougall (I must admit I have no solid evidence that the two Pat McDougalls are one in the same but the resembalance is stunning). I decided I'd look into this my self to see if I could find any of the results that Mr. McDougall based his article on. First I googled "Devil Mountain Software". I couldn't find an actual Devil Mountain Software site. What I did come across is a blog
http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/
which is appearently what his article is based upon. So just to make things clear, this guy Pat McDougall wrote an online article basically re-hashing what some body else posted in their online blog. This is probably why he didn't give any links to support his article; it's borderline, if not blatent, plagerism. Besides that the original blog is so disorganized and hard to follow that it's difficult even there to follow how the tests were done or what the results are. One only needs to look at THG's benchmarks to see how such things should be properly documented. When I googled Office Bench to see what kind of test were being run all I got were links to office furniture. In doing a little more research I found an interesting quote:
"I use Vista every day," said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software. "I'm actually a big fan of Vista from a user interface standpoint." The fact that it is slower than XP is "a trade-off" that Barth said he is "willing to make for some of the additional features" that come with Vista. "In order to get some of the advantages, there's going to be some heft," he reasoned.
Click to expand...
Which begs the question have any of you "Vista sucks" people actually used it?
 

Vista is not slow. It's your system that is slow.

I have a Q6600 CPU OC'ed to 3.2 Ghz, 4 Gig of Ram, Raptor hard drive. I can boot vista in about 30 seconds. Everything feels very fast in Vista for me. All applications run very fast.



 
Now the problem with Vista is that it's slow, it has problems, and it sucks. On the other hand, XP is matured and widely used by many people. MS just wants to make more money, that's it.
Click to expand...
People said the same thing about XP when it was in it's infancy. As for the MS making money part, that's probably true... I can't honestly see anything in Vista that is worth the price tag unless you need to buy an OS for a new PC.

To go from XP to Vista seems like going from a Honda Accord (XP) to an Accord with leather seats (Vista). Others may, and probably will, argue this, but it's just my thoughts on the matter. Don't misinterpret my post, I'm not anti-Vista, but rather I just don't see the point in an immediate upgrade with DX10 in it's current state. (Obviously a gamer POV 😛)
 
I think the real difference between the launch of XP and the launch of Vista is that the marketplace is significantly different. Currently there is much stiffer competition from other products vs. Microsoft's current offering, the biggest being it's own Windows XP. Apple's OSX has come leaps and bounds farther than it was seven years ago. Linux as well has grown substantially. Sure there are some Vista fanboys as evident on this board, however the largest group of "adopters" are those forced to do so when they buy a new machine. The good news is that the backlash against Vista is strong enough to force vendors to add XP options when buying a new machine, and extending the support life of XP from Microsoft directly. Vista has no compelling reasons to "upgrade" to it. The only immediate one is Aero. In all other cases Vista runs applications and games slower. Even with DirectX 10, the framerate drop from DX9 games in XP renders many of them unplayable on Vista with the exact same hardware. It's too bad it takes you 30 seconds to boot into your OS with hardware like that. I get into XP in 10 - 15 seconds, and even faster into Linux on the same machine.

And for the record, I have used Vista. I've got 2 machines at work that run it, and those tests in the infoweek article are true. MS Office runs much slower on the Vista box than it does on an older XP one.
 


Yes they do. Its got nothing to do with the Alky project though. The Alky project seems dead anyway. Nothing new on their webpage since early august.
 


I somewhat agree about your fanboi observation but not about the ease of use or performance of Vista being "very good". Compared to what? a dead hamster maybe, but not XP. Just on comparative performance, XP is WAY better than vista (and yes I have both) because XP has way less complexity so way less overhead. Also usability-wise I think XP gets out of your way much better than Vista. Vista has a ton of crap running in the background and way more layers and complexity, most of which is for Microsofts and not the users benefit (as in: to be able to get any old crap to market quick rather than do a technically good job such as making it use memory or CPU time efficiently).

Also about the reason for not being able to run DX10 on XP... its nothing to do with the kernel interface. Vista kernel really is still just the XP kernel with some extensions. DX10 talks to the graphics subsystem which in turn talks to the graphics driver. Its the graphics card driver (nvidia/ATI-supplied) that talks to the graphics hardware.

The actual reason DX10 won't just plug and play on XP is that Vista has an entirely new graphics subsystem (that DX10 uses features of). The real question is why Microsoft couldn't port the new graphics subsystem over to XP which would in turn allow DX10 to run under XP. My bet is that they could but don't want to for marketing reasons (but thats just an educated guess. I've been a professional software developer for 25 years and know first-hand how messy Microsoft's internal code is). DX10 benchmarks/games would probably run way quicker under XP+DX10 than vista because its simpler which ususally means more efficient/less overhead per system call. Secondly, if they did that, they'd lose nearly all serious gamers back to XP straight away because without the DX10 advantage Vista performance and resource usage sucks for gaming.
 
Actually I think the XP launch comparison is very accurate. And not only at launch. Really any thing XP prior to SP1 was pretty frequently bashed. Not only that but I can attest to the fact that while working in Best Buy in 2005 the idea that Windows 98 is better then XP was still very well alive and kicking. Even in 2005 there was atleast 1 person a day who would come in looking at PCs and swear up and down that 98 was better then XP in every way. When Vista came out the anger was shifted towards the new OS. Really if you think about it what reason is there to not still be using Windows 98? All the arguments for sticking with XP could easily be applied to 98. The truth is that human beings in general have an adverse reaction to change. Most of "what is wrong with Vista" is myth. A large area where these myths grew from is people being branded Dells, HPs, Sonys, etc, etc. These things are loaded with crapware regardless of OS and I've seen high end machines with XP run piss poor because of how these manufactuers configured them. I'm 100% confidente that if HP sold consumer PCs in Best Buy with Linux preloaded it would run like crap to.

Also after reading all these "Vista sucks for gaming", "Vista can't run games", "gaming performance is horrible in Vista", I now believe that I have a magic PC. That's the only explanation I have for being able to play every high end game with max settings and great frame rates in Vista.
 
You don't mention which games you play, but the fact that they get reasonable performance on your hardware under Vista is not logical justification that Vista does gaming the same or better than XP.
Actually, if your games are the vast majority case, they will run even faster/smoother under XP.
 
Sure there are people averse to change, that doesn't mean that Vista is suddenly a good operating system. The non-Microsoft offerings these days are much better than when XP came out. The real competition with XP was Windows 98. Mac OS9 was archaic, and linux was only usable by those who understood it's complexity.

Vista is an obvious rushed product. Where were the real fundamental changes in it that Microsoft promised like the SQLFS and truly powerful performance? Microsoft has been loosing market share to Apple over the past few years now. Tiger and Leopard are much prettier and easier to use operating systems than Windows is. Also with the success of their other products, Apple's been making a strong push to gobble up the consumer market. Also if you're a current Apple customer, it won't cost you over 200 dollars for a modest upgrade.

Microsoft thought that gamers would be drawn initially to Vista because of DX10 and the OS eyecandy. They forgot to realize that most gamers tend to like higher frames per second than a pretty interface to launch their games. This is where something like a new file system or efficient code rewrite would have benefited Vista. Instead of rearranging menus confusing users, they should have spent their time truly rebuilding Windows. Apple did it by switching over to OSX, with much fewer resources than Microsoft had at their disposal. Vista is the new WindowsME.
 

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. Even with the massive overhead people claim Vista has I've still yet to see a game running in Vista take my CPU or RAM to 100%. So either the game easily stays at the max fps (60 with VSync on) or it's limited by my GPU. In cases where my fps falls below 60 the difference between Vista and XP is roughly 10%. That means at the high end a 5-6fps gain and at the low end 2-3fps. Not really enough to make me care. The reason for this small performanc loss as I understand it is that it's how Vista uses DX9. This is supported by my own 3D Mark 06 scores; XP ~9300, Vista ~8800 is even less then 10%. So I fully expect as DX10 matures and gains momentum those results will be easily overcome. Is there a difference between the two? Yes, however it's actually very small - nothing even close to the mythical claims that so many make. And the reasons that I like Vista make 2fps in Crysis quite a reasonable trade off.
 
Ok well I did a little testing/research of my own. Running Crysis on my PC with the following specs:
AMD FX60 2.8Ghz
2GB OCZ DDR400
EVGA 8800GTS 512MB G92
Vista Ultimate 64

I compaired my results to Crysis benchmarks done on XP with the same GPU. Here are the links to two such benchmarks:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/12/12/geforce_8800_gts_512_mb/page11.html
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1234/18/page_18_benchmarks_crysis/index.html

The results of my tests along with those from the links above are below:
crybench.jpg


The results show that when set to lower quality and lower resolutions XP outperforms Vista by as much as 40%. However this advantage drops drastically as quality and resolution are turned up. At the highest resolution and quality settings my lesser(overall spec wise) Vista machine actually surpasses the Tweak Town machine and is less then 3fps behind THG's machine running @ lower quality settings. The performance difference at lower settings can in part be attributed to both XP machines having better CPUs and Memory. At lower settings these high specs would come more into play then at higher settings. Even if this is not the case XP only gives significant gains when quality is comprimised. Also Vista does allow for higher quality settings with DX10, albiet at a performance cost. For me this indicates that Vista is the way to go. I can play at XPs highest settings with no performance loss and have better DX10 performance to look forward to (hopefully in the upcoming Crysis patch?). I encourage others to draw their own conclusions and share.
 
My english isn't too good (since I'm from the NL) but this topic seems to have changed into yet another XP vs Vista discussion with an aim for 3D gaming/apps.

But it has been yesterday that the Alky project <http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/> has been shut down (big surprise ... :na:)

Altho it keeps his head up and apparantly has released "their" source code for the Project they have been running.

I'm not a programmer but figured it might be interesting enough for someone who does know programming to take a peek...
 
nice find swamoe. Based I what I read about how they were actually trying to acheive DX10 compatability and now that they've officially called it quits I don't see this going anywhere. Like it or not it looks like Vista is going to be the PC gaming OS.
 
Somehow it surprised me that this whole dx10-xp-compatability wasn't a hoax. I expected a bunch that was just trying to exploit the hype around dx10 and the OS it was chained to.

It is exactly this surprise that actually made me more convinced that there's a possibility someone will get this thing to work... even more now that the source code by Alky has been made public. I'm now really hoping that someone takes it over...
 
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