This Week In PC Gaming: DX10 On XP?!

By Greg McNevin

Biting his thumb at forced software upgrades, Cody Brocious, a 19 year old software reverse-engineer from San Diego, has released a preview of his DirectX 10 compatibility libraries - APIs that enable DX10 games to be played on platforms other than Vista.

Currently the preview kit supposedly enables examples from the DirectX SDK to be run on Windows XP. Brocious says that future builds will move from demos to full DX10 games running on XP, eliminating the need to upgrade to Vista and fork out a spectacular wad of cash on a compatible video card.

“They're not the greatest thing since sliced bread,” writes Brocious in his blog, “but we want to whet your appetite.”

While the software won’t let you run all the snappy DX10 features with a non-DX10 video card, it will let you run exclusive DX10 games with lower settings – if a full working version sees the light of day.

With DX10 being one of Vista’s major selling points among gamers, Microsoft has probably already scribbled a cease and delivered it to Brocious by flying monkey.

Vista or XP, PC gaming is again surging in popularity according to The New York Times.

Quoting NPD Group analyst Anita Frazier, the paper notes that in the first two months of this year domestic sales of PC games in the US hit $203 million (£101.50) – a 40% jump from 2006. This doesn’t take into account online sales either, which are becoming increasingly popular with episodic content such as the Half Life 2 episodes.

The surge has been attributed to a number of factors. The continuing success of World of Warcraft drawing gamers to the PC (like moths to a flame in some cases) being one, the PC’s inevitable leapfrogging of the latest consoles in terms of power another.

PCs are still seen as the hardcore gamer’s weapon of choice, and with companies such as Dell, Alienware, HP and more bringing out more gamer-focussed machines this renaissance is only going to continue. Even Microsoft’s efforts to unite the PC and Xbox camps with peripherals and its online Live gaming service is helping.

Naturally it’s all about the games though. And the PC has some corkers coming out this year. Crysis, Half-Life 2: Black Box, Age of Conan, Spore and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars just to name a few.

One game that unfortunately won’t make it this year is Fallout 3, although fan anticipation received a boost last week when Bethesda launched the game’s official website.

Currently all it contains is a teaser poster which links to a newly created Fallout 3 forum allowing all manner of fans to add development suggestions, plead for features or just whine about how Bethesda is going to ruin the series.

Also this week…
[url=http://spong.com/article/12229]
Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar[/url] launches.

Advanced E for All tickets are now up for grabs… click here.

More PC-specific news next week - don't forget to send us any of your leads, stories or achievements to feedback@spong.com with 'PC Gaming' in the subject line.