Was looking over my buy list for a new rig i am putting together for games/photoshop/work and this question popped in my head. Its said that Windows XP will not support DX10. So for all the new DX10 games that are coming out and those who will be playing them on DX10 cards (Nvidia's 8series and ATI's new whatchamacallit) using XP, is it safe to say you will not be playing at full DX10 because its being played on XP instead of Vista? Vista as we know is a DX10 OS but XP is not. I know DX10 is not required to play the next gen games but will they run better if played on Vista because of DX10?

You cant play a dx10 game on a dx10 card using XP. This is because only vista ships with dx10.

IE you need vista to play DX10 games in dx10. Any other combination would use it running dx9 or a backwards compatible dx10, which is basically dx9.

I figured as much. I'm still on the fence to run vista on this new build. I was hoping a SP would be coming out this summer to fix some of the issues i've been hearing it to have.

Most, if not all of the new games will also support DX9. From the early reports, DX10 is not that big a deal unless you are into shadows and shading, etc... I am usually to busy playing the game to notice.

Mostly it sounds like a marketing angle to sell Vista and new hardware.

It DOES look a hell of a lot better graphically though.

There is a hacked version of DX10 for XP. It is still a beta but still... It isn't as if XP is inferior in technology and can't handle DX10, it's M$ getting greedy(er)
And since no one has really played ANY DX10 title how does anybody knows how it looks? From videos and alpha demos? I mean, c'mon! We are being conned with the oldest tricks in the book of marketing...

Thats right. Windows XP's inability to do DX10 is purely a trick to FORCE people to buy their new operating system. This as well as the prompt discontinuation of support for XP.
From the sales statistics one can conclude that people dont fall for that trick as Vista doesnt offer anything new to justyfy the price.
There is nothing hindering Microsoft from making DX10 for XP, except their greed, so maybe if there is enough demand thay would give in ...

there are many libraries that are being built to allow direct x x compatibility with xp, fortunately enough, this seems to be happening rather quickly because alot of code is being borrowed from the SDK