DirectX 9.0 L is simply a renamed and refurbished DirectX 10 for Windows XP. It will make DirectX 10 games to work on Windows XP.
And games such as the upcoming Crysis won’t work on the existing DirectX 9.0 c. they need a DirectX 9.0 L
One of the biggest issues is the fact that Nvidia or ATI won’t have any mainstream or entry-level cards until at least mid- to end of Q1 2007. This suggests that if Vista tips up around the beginning of the year, gamers will be turned off by it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if these DirectX L are as feature complete as the 10 version and even run better. The problem is that Microsoft won’t allow it and will find ways to cripple the features/performance.
I also don’t think it will be convenient to buy dedicated DirectX 10 hardware before the dust settles. So get a good card right now and wait one year, one year and half to make the jump. I’m sure you wouldn’t miss much.
I’m really excited about the new hardware. The G80 is Nvidias first new architecture since the NV40. It promises to be more than just your usual 10-15% benchmark uptick. We’ll know shortly, it launches second week in November. ATIs R600 is further out (Feb) and is the PC debut of the 360s Xenos GPU.
He’s totally wrong, as it seems like he often is about graphics-related things.
DirectX 9.L or 9.0L is DirectX9 in Windows Vista. It’s just DirectX 9 under the Longhorn Display Driver Model (LDDM). That’s it.
It’s not functionally different, and it’s not for Windows XP. Vista uses a completely different model for video display drivers, and DX 9.L is simply the tweaks for it to work under that model. Most of the changes have to do with the GPU being a shared resource between the desktop compositing engine, games, windowed 3D apps, etc. It absolutely does not include Shader Model 4.0 or any new features that aren’t in the current iteration of DirectX 9 on WinXP.
This is something you see at The Inquirer a lot as well, and it’s inaccurate too. R600 is a completely new chip, not at all related to Xenos. It’s a new design by a different team. Some of the people who made Xenos may be on that team, but that’s about as far as it goes. Of course Xenos has a unified shader architecture, and so does DX10, so R600 probably will as well. In fact, ATI has been saying it will be their “second generation” of unified shader architecture, after their first-gen attempt in Xenos. There are required features of DX10 that are not in Xenos, and for that matter, Xenos does a couple of console-specific things that R600 won’t (like the memory export function).
If you mean G80-class as in, DirectX 10, you have to wait until 2008. If you mean with the same relative performance as a G80, probably not until 2009 or 2010. But of course by then, it’ll be very slow next to the G100 or whatever is the latest neat high-power desktop chip. :)
