Vista SP1 needs new hardware

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James Bannan13 January 2008, 1:53 PM

Vista Service Pack 1 comes with an important update for gamers - DirectX 10.1. The catch? You need brand new hardware to support it, and NVIDIA enthusiasts are left totally out in the cold.


Vista Service Pack 1 comes with an important update for gamers - DirectX 10.1. The catch? You need brand new hardware to support it, and NVIDIA enthusiasts are left totally out in the cold.

One of the benefit Windows Vista brought to the gaming table was the next version of DirectX – version 10. With the potential improvements to 3D gaming potentially outweighing the anticipated performance drop in running games on a more resource-hungry operating system, most hardcore gamers waited until ATI and NVIDIA released their DirectX 10-capable GPUs before taking the plunge and upgrading to Vista.
Well, it looks like those early adopters might be left somewhat in the lurch, as Microsoft has recently announced that Windows Vista SP1 will include a minor version upgrade to DirectX – DirectX 10.1. This includes some features originally intended for DirectX 10 but which had to be left to one side, and as such DirectX 10.1 is a superset of DirectX 10 – supporting all of DirectX 10’s features with some additions and enhancements of its own.

DirectX 10.1 offers greater application control of the GPU’s shading and filtering resources, especially multi-sampled and super-sampled antialiasing. The shader model is updated from 4.0 to 4.1, and floating point technology is beefed up from 16-bit to full 32-bit, which should demonstrate a direct improvement in quality for HDR (High Dynamic Range) lighting effects. In addition, all DirectX 10.1-capable hardware should be able to run 4xAA (antialiasing) as a mandatory setting.

So all this is great news, right? If you lashed out on a DirectX 10 card, then perhaps not. Although DirectX 10.1 is fully backwards-compatible with DirectX 10 features and hardware, the reverse isn’t true. Neither NVIDIA’s GeForce 8 series nor ATI’s Radeon HD 2x series of GPUs support DirectX 10.1. ATI’s new products – the Radeon 3870 and 3850 – do support DirectX 10.1, but NVIDIA apparently has no plans to release a DirectX 10.1-capable GPU. Their next product range, codenamed GT200, will support DirectX 11, but as this is due for release before DirectX 11 itself it will be interesting to see how well early products based on this GPU will support the new DirectX technology.

So gamers have a difficult choice to make – go with NVIDIA and be restricted to DirectX 10, or travel the ATI path and get enhanced gaming visuals. And as for those unlucky users who have alreadyt upgraded their graphics cards as a prelude to migrating to Vista, and are now facing even more financial outlay to get the full benefits of a simple service pack…you have a our deepest sympathy.

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William Lauritzen:

i am so pissed off at this
i just upgraded to a 8800gt 512mb directx 10.0 and a 500watt antec power supply into my dell dimension 9150 risking blowing it up its been working for 3 days now and microsoft go and make directx 10.1 that is so annoying

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knight:

That 8800gt will be a great card for the next 2 years. DirectX 10.1 won't be much of a factor for years to come. Also most games have yet to be upgraded to Directx 10. Software takes a long time to catch up.

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Anonymous11:

Be happy with your 8800GT, that is a smoking video card at a fantastic price point.

The directX 10.1 update is a minor change and as was said earlier new hardware is not required but rather SP1 supports 10.1 hardware.

This article suggests consumers go down the ATI path for rich graphics. What a joke. nVidia have completely cornered the GPU market and continue to do so. ATI simply do not have anything to compete with current generation or next gen nVidia parts, aka 9xxx. Even with 10.1 ATI are dragging their feet on the performance front. Hard for anyone to go near them with nVidia coming out with equally priced gear with much better performance. Nuff said.

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William Lauritzen:

i never said i wasnt happy with my 8800GT just said i was annoyed they upgraded to directx 10.1 from 10.0 lol

plus i risked blowing up my dell and going back to the stone age lol no tech for ages would be horrable :O

thats coz dells don't normally like power supply upgrades keep thinking its going to blow any second lol kinda crazy but its been working for 5 days so i assume it has worked only side effect is an Alert Card-Cage fan failure message every time i start up and have to hit F1 to continue every time i reboot but all fans in system are working fine but its worth the upgrade i guess dell is a dell dimension 9150 in case any one wants to know

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Henry:

Wow what a suprise - more Vista FUD.

Read this for the real info on 10.1
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20070815123340.html

DirectX 10.1 fully supports DirectX 10 hardware and no hardware support is being removed. Think of 10.1 as in DirectX 8.1.

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Jeff90:

Notice how the Nvidia owners will downplay this upgrade. If Nvidia had added it like they should have in the first place, they would all be supporting how important it is.

This is also no minor. Not when it requires hardware. Minor updates are just downloads of an updated directx.

I find it pathetic that Nvidia puts out $350 cards, and can't even add the latest directx to it. They have a history of milking their customers for every last dime in minor upgrades.

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Henry:

Nope, ATI user here. I care about FUD being reported as new 6 months after the issue was cleared up. Advanced Basket Weaving takes more effort than Journalism these days.

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Chris Green:

This article is unnecessarily alarmist.
The reality is that direct x 10.1 adds support for new gpu hardware features, as all d3d upgrades have done. GPUs which lack these features will not be able to support the 10.1 features, just as dx9 parts could not support the dx10 features, dx8 parts could not support the dx9 ones, etc.

This doesn't mean you're left in any sort of a lurch with your dx10 graphics card. We game developers will not require these features as long as there are a meaningful number of potential customers which don't have them. The specific enhancements in dx10.1 vs dx10 are largely minor and will be easy to work around for developers.

Chris Green

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tin:

And here I was thinking that DirectX did more than graphics... I always thought Direct3D was what did that ;-D

More seriously though, I'm not surprised MS are adding the dropped stuff and generally updating Direct3D. That's what happens with software. In this case it's software that has strict hardware requirements or it runs in an older mode.

With the headline, I was expecting to read how normal users will need to upgrade their CPU or RAM, not how hardcore gamers might need a new 3D card to play games at the highest graphics settings.

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vx7:

This is fairly old news - I knew this several months ago. The thing of it is that this is not a "minor" upgrade. Going from 16-bit to 32-bit is a major upgrade. MS should either have delayed it until DX11 or not released DX10 until it was ready, but that would have meant one less reason to buy Vista if it didn't have DX10 in it. So it's obvious why MS did this.

Calling a 16-bit to 32-bit change in DX10 to DX10.1 means that when MS switched from 16-bit Windows OS