On the Subject of DirectX 10

Sophie Marceau

Playing the superb Crysis demo has reminded me that DirectX 10 exists. It's easy to forget, what with it being Vista-only. I recall prior to Vista's release, our friends the forum idiots were declaring DX10 would be the Saviour of PC gaming and "OMG if it looks this good in DX9, DX10 will be amazing!!!!111!1". Ignorant bollocks, of course.
Predictably, all we've seen in practice are a few gimmicky graphical flourishes in the handful of games that support DX10. Not to mention the main feature of the API, increased graphics pipeline efficiency, hasn't resulted in effortless performance gains. In fact thanks to Vista being a fat version of XP games generally run slower.
I haven't actually tried Crysis under Vista yet, on account of Creative's shitty X-Fi drivers rendering my sound card useless and also because I simply can't be arsed. I believe the "Very High" graphics settings are only available under DX10, but given that my 8800GTX can barely scrape by on "High" I'm not particularly tempted to push it any further.