The majority of people still don't really have DX10 capable hardware, so for the most part adding DX10 to Sins is not a very efficient use of resources.

I don't deny it'd be nice for those of us that do, but I'd rather IC focus on gameplay that everyone can partake in, rather than spend lots of time implementing something for a minority.

'Tis the nature of things

World in Conflict uses DX10 as well, that was actually the first to. In its case, the difference in appearance is very noticeable. CoH and UaW I agree, hard to notice much

Why? That would mean you'd have to run Vista [shudder].

I'm building a brand new high end PC and I'm putting XP on it. Now way I'm touching Vista.

Just curious as to why you think the 8500 GT is that bad? I have that also and run vista without any problems. I also have World In Conflict and that looks great too.

I agree. I've got Vista on my new machine and it's fine. A lot of the flak it's gotten has been from people that put it on old machines somehow thinking that it would speed them up. New versions of Windows ALWAYS use more resources. It's the best 64 bit version of windows to date however. It's got some nice features I like and a lot of the bad press on the internet has simply been people passing on what they read on a thread or site passing on something they read. It's really not that bad.

As for DX10, there's really not a good point for Sins to be on DX10, as it doesn't change many graphic resources that Sins uses. A game has to be designed to use a newer version of DX to gain anything substantial from it. Sins wasn't designed to take advantage of DX10's capabilities, so just lean back and enjoy Sins for what it is.

It amuses me when people make these sort of posts fundamentally misunderstanding what DirectX is, or think that it's just something you can pop in and magically makes everything look better.

Or run DX10 effects on a 8500GT.

An 8500 is a bad card by definition, just looking at its name. Lets break it your usual four digit video card name:

. 8500 GT
. 8800 GTX
.x1800 XT
HD2800 XT
. XYZZ HH

They all boil down to the "XYZZ HH" format: X being the "generational" number, representing which generation the card is in -- the higher, the better. Y is where the card falls into in that generation, call it its "purpose" number, again, the higher the better. ZZ is usually "00", but can occasionally be increased to 50 to indicate an incremental improvement, or for can be played around with for marketing purposes. The HH is a suffix, which further modifies the nature of the card -- some like GTX are really good, others like LE, called Lame Edition, supposedly Limited Edition (probably in the sense that what you can do with it is limited) just plain suck.

Now, lets focus our attention on the Y -- the "purpose" number. 600 and above is considered gaming grade; 800 and above is considered enthusiast. 500 and below is "budget" grade, and is generally quite a bit weaker. 200 and below are basically "I have a video card!" models that are so crippled as to be useless for gaming. The 8500, while in many ways a decent card, does not have the raw power needed for a gaming card... or for DX10.

For further reference, Supreme Commander (Orignal, not the expansion) runs DX10 & DX9 as well - and the difference between the DX9 and DX10 versions are dramatic.

DX9 on SupCom *vanilla* is a lot slower on my system, and looks like Empire Earth 2.

DX10, with the graphics turned all the way up, looks like some divine entity came down and said "you are not worthy - but you will TASTE MY POWER UNBELIVER!"



Its a very big difference, infact the difference was so big that when I picked up SupCom : Forged Alliance, I couldnt stand to play it since it was only DX9. The change was enough that I thought I was playing a 5-year-delayed-deployment of Total Annihilation, with a zoom feature ; it was that bad.




For reference, my system is a Quad-Core, GTX8800, Liquid Cooled system that I hand built.

It seems like the better technology gets, the worse the old stuff looks due to the changes themselves, not the actual games graphics


(Sure I remember Super Mario Bros. & Starcraft looking blocky, but its not the same when you see it on a widescreen 10 years later, in all its 640x480 glory)

DX10 is a resource eater. Also: why do you have a quad core, 3gb of ram, and an 8500 GT? I'm not trying to be rude, but your video card is a bottleneck.

I have some bad news for you . . . no version of Supreme Commander runs DX10.

I thought something seemed strange there.

This . . . just isn't true. Look anywhere, and the only mention of DirectX 10 in regards to Supreme Commander will be that it was supposed to have it, did not, that they planned a patch to add it, that that patch was canceled, and that it does not have DX10.

Beyond that, why in the world would they drop support of it for an expansion? It doesn't work like that. I'm not even sure that they could if they wanted to. And if they wanted to, why would they?

Coincidentally, the graphics for FA are much better than originals. And it's muuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuch slower.

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