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DX9 required games?

T

Tavoc

Member
Does anyone know if there are going to be games coming out in the next 12 months that will require a card with DX9 features to run? I'm not just talking about needing one to take full advantage of all the graphics goodies, but rather actually require a DX9 card to run period.
 
Sounds unlikely to me, seeing as how you could pretty decently play most any of the latest games with a quite old Geforce 2 or equivalent, even if it means not fully optimized for all hardware supported features.
 
Doom 3 uses DX9 features (floating point shaders) on the Radeon DX9 series (9500+), albeit via OpenGL. Other than that--maybe HL2? STALKER? I'm sure there are others, but I'm equally sure DX9 won't be mandatory for a while (look how long it took for DX8 games to appear--at least a year or two). All we'll see in the near future is games that allow for nicer effects if you have a DX9 card.
 
I can imagine many developers are in any hurry to develop a game that cannot be run on 98% of systems. I'm sure even 3yrs from now almost every game will be able to run in some form on DX8 compliant graphics cards.

Looked at the much hyped UT2003 for example, drop the details and resolution far enough and even pre-DX6 graphics hardware can run it passably well, and anything beyond that can run it quite smoothly if your willing to sacrifice visual quality enough.
There are still only a an extremely small number of games that require a fixed function HW T&L capable graphics board, and those that do can all be forced to run via software emulation on earlier hardware via simple software hacks.

Developing a game that absolutely cannot run in any form on non DX9 graphics hardware would be foolish at this point in time, your immediately cutting off virtually the entire market and ensuring that even much of the already extremely miniscule enthusiast market cannot run it.

It's a perfect way to ensure your game sees next to no market success and is a complete failure financially.
 
By the time we`ll be using games that require a fully DX9 complient card, we`ll be using R500s in our budget systems. lol
 
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