So I have this copy of Geometry Wars Retro Evolved. I played it on my computer running Windows XP. It had no warpy grid effects, and very limited particle effects. No special lighting or glow. I was a little dismayed, as I realized that the cool blue wavy grid effects and explosions I saw when I first played it were only available for DirectX 10, on Vista. So, I copied it over to my mom's vista computer. It looked more like this: (note the warping blue grid) Now, months past, I have since then reformated my HDD and reinstalled Windows XP on the first computer. I got a flash drive and copied the game back onto my first computer with XP. But what! The grid effects are there! Here's a screenshot: SO what is this? Is it bullshit that this game needs DX10 for those effects, and it really just disables itself on XP machines? Did I thus inadvertantly reenable the effects by running it on the vista machine? What is going on? This should not happen! I mean, it's awesome, but why?
Odd. I have that game as well (bought it through Steam), but those effects were enabled by default. I'm on XP. I suppose your previous install of Geometry Wars was misconfigured somehow.
I personally think the whole DX10 thing is BS. DX9 isn't much weaker, it can still do pretty much everything DX10 can.
Plus, DX10 can most likely be made to run on XP, they just refuse to do it to force gamers to upgrade.
After doing some google searching, it appears that Geometry Wars never required DX10. When it was initially released, it required Vista, but not DX10. Artificial requirement, because later it was re-released on Steam for both XP and Vista.
Sorry but it's not possible. It's due to the way that vista loads display drivers. In xp if the driver crashed you would get a bsod. In vista it would exit the game you were using, tell you it's crashed and then re-load it. This is because XP loads the drivers in to it's kernel (sp?) but vista doesnt.
My point is that the things which render the DX10-specific effects can be ported; obviously, you can't just move the driver from Vista to XP completely. Hence, the 'DX10 only' thing is merely a marketing thing.
Well, these crazy effects either don't show up on the demo, or my lolgraphicscard once again is just not man enough to handle it. I'm quite willing to believe the latter.
It was most likely something to do with your drivers, or the date of your OS files at the time. (ie: was it SP2 then upgraded to SP3, or was it straight SP3, if not made any fancy third party configs?)
Of course, there's nothing stopping Microsoft from releasing a DX10 API for XP and allowing driver developers to add DX10 support to their XP drivers. Also, that sort of grid effect looks like it's fairly simple, and should be possible even in OpenGL 1.x using the GL fragment program extension. (For the record, the 360 only supports DX9, so if these grid effects exist on the 360 version, then the restrictions are, in fact, a load of bullshit.)
And I'm not sure if even that would be too much. I guess that just moving the grid vertices would do the trick. Even the lamest APIs will allow you to do that.
Sometimes on XP I get "Your driver NV4DISP.DLL Crashed and was reloaded to resume normal operation" (translation from german)
It's because display drivers made specifically for vista are user-space, and they actually act more like an user application than anything else, like it used to be in Windows NT up to 3.51. In XP they're kernel space and run directly in the kernel. This means that if something crashes, everything can blow up.
It is possible to have DX10 on XP, I have it. In other words, there is a hacked DX10 and the Vista transformation pack 9, with those, XP and Vista are the same, yet XP can play Xp AND Vista games. And, yes it does work, I can play Bioshock at the DX10 settings, I can also play Vista only games on it.
Thing is the last time I checked DX10 XP is too unstable to really be worth it. Plus most of the game with 'DX10 settings' have been hacked.
DX10 is a joke. Valve said this when they made TF2. They said TF2 could have been a DX10 game, but they found they were able to do almost everything in DX9. Also from what I read the group that was working on porting DX10 has given up on it. So all that's left is a port that's still in the alpha stages supposedly.
In conclusion, DX10 is a joke, as it can theoretically be used on XP, some of its features are actually old ones revived from old versions of NT, and finally nobody seems to want to use DX10-only effects exclusively. And if they do, there is a highly unstable mod which makes even those usable on XP.
