DirectX 10 back-ported to XP

[Davros]

thought you'd find this interesting

"Alky has released a preview of his DirectX 10 compatibility libraries. These libraries allow the use of DirectX 10 games on platforms other than Microsoft Vista, and increase hardware compatibility even on Vista, by compiling Geometry Shaders down to native machine code for execution where hardware isn't capable of running it. No longer will you have to upgrade your OS and video card(s) to play the latest games! The current preview allows you to run a number of examples from the DirectX SDK on Windows XP. They're not the greatest thing since sliced bread, but we want to whet your appetite. He hopes to release builds in the coming months progressing from demos to fully functional games. He also plan to post on his blog from time to time with screenshots and videos of what's to come."

http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/2007/04/finally-making-use-of-this-blog-i.html

 

[JHoxley]

Interesting - thanks for the link.

There's a lot more to the WDDM than just the 'marketing features' so it'll be interesting to see how far this project gets. I suppose some simple stuff would be easy, but anything that starts to depend on the low-level details enforced by D3D10 (e.g. full FP32 and integer instructions) might well fall apart on an emulated version...

The other aspect is completely unrelated to D3D10. If D3D10 is only available on Vista then application developers can, or will, start to make use of Vista specific API's that might not exist on XP. Therefore the D3D10 part might be back-ported to XP, but you could quite easily hit upon some function that doesn't exist on XP and brings the whole application crashing down for a whole different reason....

I'm sure Ralf can comment further, but ISTR he got some of the tutorials and samples running through a software device that remapped D3D10 over to D3D3D9 hardware.

Cheers,
Jack

 

[nutball]

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=40682

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

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