Originally by: Ulle

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DX10 will never be ported to xp, unless that would help spreading the next OS. DX10 is the main, if not the only, solid reason why normal customers will ponder about upgrading their OS. The "I can't port an API" story is just smoke and mirrors marketing game, no half decent system programmer can say that seriously. And there is really nothing wrong in this: MS is not a nonprofit nor charity organization, they're there for their shares and their dollars, and they don't want to repeat the bad performances of XP launch (and related QQ of the hardware vendors), hence the obvious decision.

Ultimately, players will decide with their own money. Consider this ... recently both ATI and nvidia launched new model of AGP cards - the reason was that contrary to their own prediction, lots of players still have to upgrade to pci-e and are using the old architecture. There was still a market - and I believe dx9 will have the same trend, if not longer. It may even be that there will be so many of them, that game producers will "ask" MS for a bridge solution, that would let them focus solely on dx10 while being able to access the 100% of the market instead of just a 30-40-whatever %, and then you might see MS discovering that actually they can port an API, while obviously claim that on vista it will run faster.

The double client is really the best solution. You can't compare it with UO and UOTD,as they were totally different, one 2D with arcade style client, another one aiming at becoming 3D in some point in the future and (badly) using d3d calls. A better comparision would be with DAOC clients, released one every year - classic, SI, ToA, Catacombs, each of them worked on different DX and minimum configuration, each release had a serious upgrade on part of it, either the water, the trees, the player avatars, the skinnable UI, and started with their own bugs, matured, became obsolete and then went out of support only when it was not economically feasible to support them. The older client was always the faster, not necessarily the most stable and attracted the pvpers and dual boxers.

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