Is DirectX 10 really Vista only?

As pretty as Windows Vista is, one of the most likely reasons for you planning to upgrade may not be the interface, but the fact that only Windows Vista will support DirectX 10. Highly anticipated games such as Crysis and Alan Wake will only be seen in their full glory if you run Windows Vista and have DirectX 10 hardware. However, is it true that only Windows Vista runs DirectX 10, or is this merely marketing from Microsoft, not so subtly intended as an incentive to upgrade?

Microsoft has radically altered the way in which hardware is addressed in Vista, taking a large proportion of the graphics driver code out of the kernel, and this is the main reason it offers for DX10 being Vista-only. However, although there was once a good reason why DirectX 10 couldn't run on XP (memory virtualization), this feature is now only an optional part of DirectX 10, so there's no fundamental impediment anymore.

In fact, someone has been trying to create DirectX 10 on XP for some time. Cody Brocious's Falling Leaf Systems has been developing the so-called 'Alky' compatibility libraries for Windows XP. These currently only allow you to run a few examples from the DirectX 10 SDK - so don't expect to be ready to fire up Crysis on your old XP box just yet. However, the aim is to make DirectX 10 applications run on DirectX 10 hardware under XP, and even on some DirectX 9 hardware. You can keep an eye on Falling Leaf's progress at http://alkyproject.blogspot.com.

Microsoft could port DirectX 10 to Windows XP, but it's highly unlikely that it will do this when it has copies of Windows Vista it wants to shift. So we'll just have to hope that Mr Brocious progresses a little further with his Falling Leaf endeavour, or it will definitely be winter for Windows XP gaming sooner or later.

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