Over-Hyped and Over Here

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As we've been finding out all over the place, DirectX 10 in games right now is basically a frame rate killer, and that it only makes a small amount of visual difference, which will be invisible to the vast majority of gamers.

Yes, I admit that I want to play Bioshock in DirectX 10, so I can get the best water effects, but I've been accused of being a graphics card snob, and it's probably true. I know I want to have the best effects, but only because I know that they are there, not because it really makes much of a difference. In reality, in game after game, we've been getting almost no discernable image quality benefits, with a heavy drop in frame rate. Sure, when games are built with DirectX 10 as a minimum spec, it might deliver on the promises we've been fed, but that's not true for anything out there today.

Crysis is supposed to be the poster child for DirectX 10 - yet it seems that actually it's undermining the necessity the new API. Why? Because it seems that l33t h4ckers have found a way of getting Crysis to run at its Very High Settings, under DirectX 9 on Windows XP, which was only supposed to be possible using DirectX 10. Oh dear.

You still need a DirectX 10 card, but you don't need Vista, and you get a performance boost to boot. To be blunt, the implication here, from others of course, not myself, is that the DirectX 9 path in Crysis has been deliberately knobbled in order to boost sales of Vista, with Microsoft flashing the cash to get Crytek to play ball. Allegedly, of course.

Which brings me on to the next hyped product, Windows Vista itself. Yes I know that we gave it a Recommended award when it first came out at the end of January, but there's no getting away from the fact that, it's not had a great first year - with companies such as Dell having to go back and reinstate XP as an option, and everyone and his dog aware that while Vista is pretty, even if you manage to get it stable, it's guaranteed to be slower on any given hardware configuration than XP. So, just like DirectX 10 then.

Aegia. That was a pretty hyped technology, for a while. As a piece of dedicated physics hardware it was supposed to bring unprecedented amounts of realism to games. It's taken a lot of criticism, primarily for the fact that for a game to use it properly it must be one that can't even be played without the dedicated piece of hardware. This makes it difficult to sell, as even in the early days of 3D with dedicated Voodoo 3D accelerators you could still play games such as Quake without one, even if they did looks like pants. So it's been waiting for a real game to use it to show off what it can do. And it's arrived - two special levels of Unreal Tournament III.

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