By: Nick Evanson Aug 13, 2007

A recent report by The Inquirer suggests the all current DX10 hardware (that's ATI's Radeon HD and NVIDIA's 8 series of graphics cards) are now completely obsolete because they don't support the new features in the DX10.1 graphics API update. Needless to say, this is a load of nonsense; games can and will be developed for DX9 and DX10 for now and the foreseeable future. At some point, they will even support DX10.1 too but does that mean your DX10 graphics card will be useless? No - cast your mind back to the likes of DX8.1 and look at what graphics cards support the range of features in that. Oh, look, you can still use those cards in some games today! No different to DX10.1.

The only really annoying thing about DX10.1 is that it goes against one of the important changes between DX9 to DX10 - the removal of "caps bits"; in other words, the requirements for DX10 are set in stone, no more or less. This was to make it easier for game developers and the end user... so what does Microsoft do? Makes another incremental update, to account for new hardware again. We'll be back to square one with caps bits before you know it.

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