> Seen the lists, seen the rebuttals. Still not impressed. Especially when 
> some of them are things like "Added a mess of new features to DirectX",

Huh? How many programs have you written using DirectX9 and DirectX10?  Why 
do you think the improvements are a mess?

1) DX10 now allows multiple programs and threads to use the hardware at the 
same time, and is totally integrated with the OS GUI now, unlike in WinXP / 
DX9.  This means that many more fancy stuff can be done with non-fullscreen 
3D apps and multi-threaded programs can use DX without careful programming.
2) DX10 got rid of the fixed function pipeline which has made the API much 
simpler.  Everything must be done with shaders now.
3) Scenes can be rendered to multiple render targets at the same time, which 
makes generating cube-maps and multi-view scenes way faster
4) Geometry shaders have been introduced, which for the first time allows 
the GPU to have some concept of triangles rather than just working blindly 
on vertices and pixels.  This can be widely used to improve performance and 
display quality.
5) Geometry instancing has been much improved, allowing meshes to be 
rendered multiple times without so much overhead as in DX9.  Again, for 
scenes with large amount of vegetation or people etc, this will have big 
speed ups.
6) The usual increase in flexibility of the shaders, including a massive 
increase in the number of registers (like a factor of 1000 increase), 
complete dynamic flow control, unlimited execution length blah blah blah.

Of course some of the above can be implemented using DX9, but it would be 
horrendously complex and very slow.  DX10 is definitely a welcome 
improvement, it will just take a while before game writers can drop DX9 
support and really concentrate on DX10 only games.

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