>  It seems that this is a hoax. Just a marketing campaign. Yes, the
> "very high" quality setting does indeed turn on several additional
> rendering features, but the hoax is that these rendering features *do*
> work in XP with a DX9 graphics card, and they do so at perfectly 
> acceptable
> speeds. Not allowing to choose this highest quality option unless you are
> running Vista and a DX10 graphics card has nothing to do with lacking
> hardware/OS support, but it's just an artificial limitation.

The development team would have had to put in a huge amount of effort to 
ensure those special effects worked on a DX9 card.  Why would they go to all 
that effort and then not allow you to use them in the game?  If they really 
wanted to get people to upgrade to Vista, they simply wouldn't have written 
DX9 code for the effects and saved themselves a lot of time.

Another explanation is that they simply haven't got round to fully testing 
the DX9 code yet for all the special effects, and didn't want to let people 
try it "officially" in the demo.  If it is buggy after you've modified some 
.cfg file yourself, you are less likely to get annoyed than if it is an 
official option in the game.

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> Another explanation is that they simply haven't got round to fully 
> testing the DX9 code yet for all the special effects, and didn't want to 
> let people try it "officially" in the demo.  If it is buggy after you've 
> modified some .cfg file yourself, you are less likely to get annoyed 
> than if it is an official option in the game.

Then why does the game allow people to try it "officially" in the demo 
under Vista?

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>> Another explanation is that they simply haven't got round to fully 
>> testing the DX9 code yet for all the special effects, and didn't want to 
>> let people try it "officially" in the demo.  If it is buggy after you've 
>> modified some .cfg file yourself, you are less likely to get annoyed than 
>> if it is an official option in the game.
>
> Then why does the game allow people to try it "officially" in the demo 
> under Vista?

Vista uses DX10 (even with a DX9 card), which makes a lot of stuff far 
simpler to code.  I imagine that they concentrated on making the DX10 
code-base first (which will run on both DX9 and DX10 hardware in Vista), 
then ported the new features to be compatible with pre-DX10 systems (ie XP).

If they didn't want the new features to run on pre-DX10 systems, why would 
they even bother coding for DX9?  They must realise that a large proportion 
of people still are on XP, which is why I assume they are doing DX9 code, I 
guess they just didn't want to include it officially in the demo for some 
reason.

Also, if they really didn't want people to try it out in the demo, why leave 
it as a simple plain-text hack to get it working?  If they really were 
trying to fool people then just hard-code it into the binary somewhere, or 
better yet, just don't write any DX9 code at all for the fancy effects...

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scott wrote:
> If they didn't want the new features to run on pre-DX10 systems, why 
> would they even bother coding for DX9? 

I'm guessing they originally wrote it towards DX10, and when they got 
close, found that MS had screwed all their deadlines and release plans. 
So they all jumped in and pounded away to add DX9 support at the last 
minute.  And I'm guessing the lack of configuration is either an 
oversight or it's because it's on a different part of the game by a 
different group or something who didn't have time to fix it, maybe.

Maybe, in other words, they're waiting until the actual release of the 
game to decide whether to let DX9 do the highest rez stuff, depending on 
how fast MS gets their act together with Vista.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

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> I'm guessing they originally wrote it towards DX10, and when they got 
> close, found that MS had screwed all their deadlines and release plans. So 
> they all jumped in and pounded away to add DX9 support at the last minute. 
> And I'm guessing the lack of configuration is either an oversight or it's 
> because it's on a different part of the game by a different group or 
> something who didn't have time to fix it, maybe.
>
> Maybe, in other words, they're waiting until the actual release of the 
> game to decide whether to let DX9 do the highest rez stuff, depending on 
> how fast MS gets their act together with Vista.

Yeh, that was pretty much my thoughts.  I mean why spend a huge amount of 
resource debugging and testing the DX9 code (which will be far more complex 
than the DX10 version), if by the time the game is released only a small % 
of potential owners are not capable of running DX10.

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