<< they should at least make it run in the LOW quality mode for the DX7 cards and then High Quality mode for the DX8 compliant cards. Instead they cut the whole part off. >>
Well, guys, I hate to break it to you, but it's impossible to make an engine choose whether to run in DX7 or DX8 mode. If the engine was written in DX8, and the hardware doesn't support one of the features, the only thing developer can do is allow the engine to use "Reference Rasterizer". That will fully disable all hardware features and use software emulation. It's sort of all or nothing. Either you do everything in hardware or everything in software, blame microsoft for that 🙂. Either way, if you were to enable Reference Rasterizer your FPS will drop well under 5. Btw, don't confuse Reference Rasterizer, with Software or RGB rasterizer. The later uses CPU, but cuts off a lot of important features to speed up the rendering)
Just my 2c