14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has never looked back on its decision to make DirectX 10 available exclusively in Windows Vista. Never for a moment. The Redmond company only shrugged off requests to backport DirectX 10 to Windows XP, and faced a consistent wave of criticism, virtually crucifying it because of the intimate connection between Vista and the next generation of its graphics technology. And through it all, Microsoft remained immutable, offering end users a single option in order to enjoy the evolution of the graphics infrastructure synonymous with the introduction of DirectX 10.
With Windows being the main gaming platform worldwide, with in excess of 200 million gamers, the decision to bring DirectX 10 along with Vista only to a niche, impacted both the community and the industry. Microsoft has been slapped over the hand by members of the gaming industry in the past, and now it's the turn of one of the developers that worked on BioShock, Martin Slater.
"DirectX 10 offers your gameplay nothing ... DirectX 10, probably for the next three, four, five years is not important to you. Microsoft are going to tell you everything under the sun differently. Everybody under the sun is going to tell you differently", Slater stated as cited by kotaku. "You've got the business side and you've got the games side. The games side, you want to minimize the technology because you want to maximize the amount of time you spend interacting with game design. DirectX 10, for all your game programmers, is a beautiful place."
Microsoft, at over a year since Vista was released to manufacturing, managed to push a total of 88 million copies of the operating system to its channel partners. At the same time, concomitantly with the availability of Vista SP1 in the first quarter of 2008, the platform's adoption is bound to accelerate. Of course that SP1 will bring to the table the first update to DirectX 10, but the wider Vista's install base, the more DirectX 10.1 will be leveraged by the gaming industry.