Crysis demo’s ‘DirectX 10’ effects can be enabled in Windows XP

[Gh0st Face Killah]

So they’re not DirectX 10 effects at all, then…                                         After fighting your way through the Crysis demo this weekend, you might be considering upgrading to a DirectX 10 card and Windows Vista to see the awesome graphics in their full glory, but it turns out that you can actually turn them on in Windows XP.

Some gamers have been misled by the Crysis demo’s Advanced System Options, which don’t allow you to select the Very High settings in Windows XP, even though you can in Vista. This implies that the effects require a DirectX 10 renderer, but gamers over at the Crysis-Online forums have found that you can edit the game’s config files to force on the Very High effects in Windows XP, and it apparently works.

Does this mean you can actually run DirectX 10 games on Windows XP? Nope, but it does mean that the Crysis demo uses DirectX 9, even when using the Very High shader settings in Windows Vista. We haven’t had a chance to test this yet, but we plan to run the demo on identical Windows XP and Vista machines to see if there are any visual differences, as well as performance differences with Very High shaders enabled.

If the screenshots on the forum are to be believed, then the game looks very good indeed at these settings in Windows XP. So far, both Crytek and EA have been unable to comment on this.

[kregoron]

The SS's are true, tried it both with the Crysis SP demo and the MP beta, graphics improvements were noticeable no doubt.
BUT, the improvements you see arent entirely DX10 effects, after reading the topic at crysis beta forums i decided to try boot it up in Vista and try out the with DX10 enabled.
Comparing to the graphics in Crysis XP with the Very high enabled, you still see improvements, the textures become more alive, shadow shading gets enabled, which it isnt in Very high XP mode, bumpmapping gets more genuine like, and a lot of other effects.
DX10 is more then just more textures, shades and that jazz, its a slightly different way of using the shaders & stream processors in the graphics cards..
But again yeah enabling Very high in the cfg enables the stuff crytek/MS wants to hide from the users, to get people to take on Vista cause of the DX10 engine..

[merdok]

There is actually a little bit more to it than that.

DX10 add's features like a day/night cycle which has a realistic effect on the physics of the entire world ( not just lighting, it also effects what wildlife you see and how well you are seen )

Buildings are completely destructible, for example I walked into a building yesterday to get a sniper shot on an enemy vehicle and someone lobbed a grenade in the building and brought the full thing down on top of me I was literally buried alive in rubble.

The game is filled with foliage and everything down to the leaves and the grass is effected by physics, for example, if you parked a car in the middle of a load of trees and bushes you will flatten the area completely and even knock leaves of trees which felt the shockwave.

and I'm sure that there is even more that I've not discovered yet.

[Blunt]

Is Windows Vista slower than Windows XP?

                              

•                          Tim Anderson
•         The Guardian,
  
• Thursday December 6 2007

"The 'Wow' starts now," said Microsoft when Windows Vista was launched. For some users it was, "Wow, how can this computer be so slow?" But is Vista really slower than Windows XP? It seems so. We did informal tests, booting both Vista and XP on the same hardware, and Vista was between 15% and 25% slower than XP in benchmarks. Then again, users moving to Vista on a new PC should in theory find that fast new hardware more than compensates. In practice, that is not always the case.
Digging deeper into the results is revealing. First, Vista is simply bigger than Windows XP, and runs background services which index your documents, maintain the hard drive, look for malware, perform backups and the like. Vista grabbed more than three times as much memory as XP, even before running any applications. When memory runs low, Windows uses the hard drive more intensively, resulting in dramatically worse performance. Microsoft specifies 1GB RAM for most versions of Vista, but 2GB is the sweet spot.
Second, we noticed large variations in the performance results for different types of test. Pure number-crunching speed is similar on the two systems. Complex 3D graphics were close, and in some cases slightly better on Vista. However, basic operations like scrolling text in a window or drawing simple lines and shapes came out far worse. In some cases, XP was four times faster.
The reason is that Vista makes major changes to the way Windows draws on the screen. Vista handles graphics more in the manner of video games, using a software library called DirectX designed to exploit hardware-accelerated graphics. DirectX is also used in Windows XP, but Vista uses it throughout, not just for games. Unfortunately there is a performance cost for traditional Windows applications like Microsoft Office. These generally use an older graphics library called GDI (Graphics Device Interface). In Windows XP this was hardware accelerated, but in Vista this is no longer true. Instead, they are mapped through DirectX. The new system also holds GDI windows in memory twice over, contributing to Vista's memory bloat.
Microsoft did this to enable fancy graphic effects, and because it is betting on new applications using DirectX rather than GDI. Yet as Microsoft Architect Greg Schechter observes on his blog (tinyurl.com/2y3x3c), "Today and for the near future, most applications use and will continue to use GDI to render their content."
Vista is therefore suboptimal for the applications that most business users run. This looks bad in tests, but it only affects screen operations, and as long as they are fast enough it should not matter much. Nevertheless, it is further proof of the old computing industry maxim about processor speed improvements versus software features: what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away.