There is a hoax about directx, I am sure I have yelled at this very four year old thread. I recently blew out vid card #7 with my new mpeg2 camera....my card is supposed to render mpeg2, but maybe it does not understand my little standard size vid being 10mbit, anyway, whatever the Software breaking Hardware reason...
I can't help but wonder, if fixed pipeline (dx9 and older) had not fixed pipeline (dx10), would my card just give me the green vid of choking, rather than destroy itself....Hmmmm.
In other words, more than once, much more than once over my years with this "over hyped" seeming yearly event about DX upgrades, real video, beyond gaming, utilizes directx. It is NOT just for gaming, it is for the cards and machine and videos and os and colors and monitors and ALL encoding and decoding. To say you are caught up in hype about directx , there is other reasons aside from beautiful gaming that demand the cards that gain transistors with the gain of directx. dx10 is soon out, and so is 390million transistor cards for agp capable (ie: ati 2600 pro vs my blown 9550se with 50million).
I learned the bad way for my 10th year with pc. it only took a 10mbit video to destroy my dx9 card, and 11000+ hours of great use.There is never enough definition for what is needed, what never gets used, and what is hyped 😛
To me. it is always go for the latest, not necessarily the most hyped. Just for the facts of evolution, and to bury the thought...what am I going to do to kill my card this time...?