[bwillford]

Well built a new pc for myself last week and have been debating on xp or vista... I went ahead and put 30 day trial of xp pro on there until I decide. Got a few questions hoping you guys can answer for me.

1. Do we have a price tag on how much the new ATI dx10 cards are going to cost?

2. Will dx10 run older games better performance/visually or will past games look/perform the same?

3. Will upcoming games work on dx9 & dx10 or are future games strictly going to require dx10?

4. How much ram will I need to take full advantage of Vistas capabilites?

5. Will my Video card decently run games and the sorts on vista until I can upgrade to a dx10 card? (see specs below)

6. Will my system handle Vista decently?

Asus A8S-X 1000mhz fsb (motherboard)
Socket 939 Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 1000mhz bus (proc)
ATI Radeon X1600 Pro 512mb 400mhz PCI-E (vid card)
1.5 gig Ultra PC3200 400mhz (Ram)

(If I go with Vista will be adding an additional gig of ram)

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Like most DirectX games, they are designed for a certain version, so eventually DirectX9 will fall out in favour of DirectX10. This is the way it always has been. Older games designed for older versions of DirectX should still work on DirectX10 but you're always going to have some incompatibility issues.

RAM wise, at least 1Gb if not more for Vista. I have seen the amount of memory used by Vista alone out of the box at 52% on a 1Gb system. Once you start adding overheads like antivirus and what not, it'll soon shoot up.

[Neil Jones]

Like most DirectX games, they are designed for a certain version, so eventually DirectX9 will fall out in favour of DirectX10. This is the way it always has been. Older games designed for older versions of DirectX should still work on DirectX10 but you're always going to have some incompatibility issues.

RAM wise, at least 1Gb if not more for Vista. I have seen the amount of memory used by Vista alone out of the box at 52% on a 1Gb system. Once you start adding overheads like antivirus and what not, it'll soon shoot up.

[starjax]

1: 150-600 usd. This is for Nvidia. ATI doesn't have a dx10 yet, but will probably have the same price range.

2: If the game is designed to run in dx10, it will. If not then it will run in dx9. Games like cod2 and battlefield 2142 work just fine under vista

3: Yes. Crysis is a dx10 game but will run under dx9 just fine. It's up to developers as to what they design the game to do. Most likely they will support both for the short term (year or longer).

4: at least 256megs of video ram or more. Minimum 1gig of ram. If you game you will want 2-4gigs of ram.

5: Yes. you should be able to run the aero interface even with your specs.

6: yes, it should run decently.