Well its DX9.L but still whats stop people form making .com/.exe hacks to get vister only games to run on XP like the old DOOM 3 hacks for 98/ME..mmmmm

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After announcing that DirectX 10 will only be available for Vista, Microsoft may be releaseing DirectX 9L for WinXP.

So much for DIrectX 10 only being for Vista.

The Inq reports that Microsoft, under pressure from EA (and presumably other game publishers), will make a new DirectX available for XP after all - to be called DirectX 9L

Mind you, since it supposedly runs DirectX 10 games, it may be DirectX 10 in all but name.

This is what happens when you paint yourself into a corner by announcing no DirectX 10 for XP... which announcement was really just a way of forcing people to Vista, in order to get DX10, to play DX10 games.

I'll be interested to see if DX 9L shows up, and how compatible it will be with DX10...

[url]http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/6216/[/url]
[url]http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=25937[/url]
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WE ALREADY reported here that Microsoft plans to introduce a new DirectX 9.0 version. This time we managed to get the name and the company plans to call it DirectX 9.0L.

You will remember that Nvidia was pressing Microsoft to call its last revision of DirectX, DirectX 9.1 but Vole decided to simply add a letter C to its existing DirectX 9.0 name. This currently available DirectX 9.0c features support for Shader model 3.0 and Nvidia though that upgrade from Shader model 2.0 would deserve at least 9.1 prefix.

Now the Vole plans to do the same thing. It will call its next generation DirectX featuring Shader model 4.0, DirectX 9.0L.

We don't know when the company plans to make this new marchitecture available but we expect that this will happen sometimes trough 2006. It's still too early to shift to Shader Model 4.0 as Nvidia and ATI won't have Shader model 4.0 hardware until middle of 2006.

It's interesting that ATI has to upgrade to Shader model 3.0 in a few weeks time and Shader Model 4.0 within a year from R520 aka Radeon X1800 RV530 aka Radeon X1600 and RV515 aka Radeon X1300. µ
[url]http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=26220[/url]
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this to is interesting
[url]http://forums.tweakguides.com/showthread.php?t=4701[/url]

the tweakgauides link suggestions its DX 9 for vista however what do you think people will hack it for use on XP?

In any case why do you need a new OS to run DX that would run perfectly on XP? this hardware/OS jump is madness.