I know the headline seems as if I'm trying to be overly controversial but hear me out on this one and I think by the end of this little diatribe, you'll see what I mean.

The Microsoft DirectX-Factor:
Over the course of the past 12-months, Microsoft has been championing its Vista Operating system and its inclusion of DirectX10 as the next great thing in gaming. However, if anyone has read this site and others, then they know that DX10's promises are nothing but empty ones at best. The huge performance penalty it puts on the overall gaming experience is highly lost in the shadow of barely any noticeable visual gains to justify its existence.

In every single instance of a “DX10-class” game to some out so far, there has been no clear graphical advantage over the DX9 variant – weigh in the HUGE performance hit, and you have a recipe for a less-than-stellar gaming experience. Here’s a run-down of recent games which perform far superior and look nearly identical:

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows (which make your game crawl) of Angmar
Crysis
(Slow)Gears of War
Hellgate London
BioShock
Unreal Tournament 3
Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
Lost Planet: Extreme Slowdown (er.. I mean Condition)
World in Conflict

Using Crysis as perhaps the most popular examples here - Microsoft has been hailing this game in efforts to promote DirectX10, only come to find out that one can easily manipulate the game’s config files to turn on all the same eye-candy of DX10 in DX9 mode and have the game run far better.

Why doesn’t Microsoft use its control over the PC Operating System use DirectX to open doors to more creative game development that’s outside the norm of sound and video acceleration?

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