My understanding is that Crysis is a dx9 game with some dx10 paths. According to this review
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2143672,00.asp of CoH the dx10 patch brings very small visual gains at the expense of a 2/3s drop in performance.
Two thirds drop!!!
Crysis has been built with DX10 in mind essentially since the graphics engine's early stages of development. Why do I bother to mention this? Because CoH's engine
was not. Snapping a few extra graphical features into a DX9 engine and calling it DX10 really isn't a fair way to asses the true performance "impact" from switching.
If you do more research on Crysis, you'll find the devs talking about DX10 giving them performance
enhancements which allow them to turn on more features without sacrificing framerate on machines with DX10 available. That's not what the developers of CoH did.
From the developers' feedback, I'd say that DX10 in Crysis will not provide any additional performance benefit for the most part, but will offer better visual fidelity instead.
[edit]
since there's that new article on B3D, I think I should be clearer, D3D10 is the API that only works for high end hardware, so it's normal that D3D10 games look much better than D3D9 games.
D3D10 could be done for Windows XP, I'm talking about the API and the D3D9 flaws addressed, I'm not talking about the whole drivers architecture meant for Aero.
For a staff member, I'd think you'd be intimately aware that the Aero interface is not hinging on the new driver architecture, nor does Aero have any link to DX10.
As for D3D10 being done on XP? Sure, you could implement the API. But many of the flaws in D3D9 are related to unnecessary overhead, and those could not be addressed without completely rewriting the kernel. Which means completely new drivers, which means all the same performance and driver headaches on your beloved XP as you're seeing on Vista. And to what end? Why completely rewrite the core underpinnings of an old OS? That doesn't make sense at all, and I behoove you to tell me why it DOES make sense for any reason other than you want Microsoft to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of hours of manpower to give you something for free.
Brand new hardware works better on Vista than it does on XP, in my opinion. My Dell laptop with a Core Duo, 2gb of ram, 7200rpm hdd, 7300Go 128mb video and Intel 3945 A/G/B wireless definitely boots faster, shuts down faster, sleeps faster, wakes up faster and multitasks better with Vista than it did with XP SP2.
My "old" Prescott 3.0Ghz S478 processor OC'd to 4.0ghz, along with a 7900GT, 2 x 250gb raid 0 drive array, Envy24PT audio, Intel CSA gigabit lan and 2GB of ram also works better on Vista. That's not to say that everyones' computer will do better, but mine do.
What's funny is, I've got a brand-spanking-new Lenovo Thinkpad T60 with a Core 2 Duo, 7200RPM drive, 2gb of ram and ATI x1400 that does
not do well on Vista, and I can't really understand why. I'm beginning to think it may be a BIOS/Firmware issue, or maybe a wireless card that is just causing more than it's fair share of problems.
So, do some homework on the parts you buy, and you should be fine. Vista is a great OS, albeit a tad expensive. Still, I spent ~$350 total for one copy of Ultimate and two copies of Home Premium -- so like $115 each? That's like $20 more than I paid for a copy of XP Pro, so I don't really think it's that expensive. And with all the other features of Vista, I think it's a decent deal.
