14 DAY TRIAL // Following reports that the upcoming DirectX 10.1 update will be incompatible with existing DirectX 10 hardware, Sam Glassenberg, Lead Program Manager on the Microsoft DirectX Team came out and stated the contrary. Glassenberg revealed that the existing DirectX 10 hardware supporting the Windows Vista operating system will run the upcoming version 10.1 of the DirectX graphics technology with absolutely no issues. In fact, the evolution from DirectX 10 to 10.1 is comparable with that of the DirectX 9.x series. Moreover, Glassenberg stated that DirectX 10.1 will change nothing of the current Vista graphics equation and that it will only enhance the current capabilities.
"DX10.1 fully supports DX10 hardware. No hardware support is being removed....It's strictly a superset. It's basically an update to DX10 that extends the hardware functionality slightly," Glassenberg explained as quoted by Next Generation. "All the hardware is still supported, all the games still run, all the features are still there, we've just simply extended the feature set and the lifetime of the API."
DirectX 10 will be updated with the availability of Windows Vista SP1. Until this point in time, Microsoft managed to avoid the subject of the final release of SP1. However, speculations point to either the end of 2007 or to early 2008 as possible release dates. As Vista SP1 shares the same kernel as Windows Server 2008, a launch after February 2008 is also valid. However, while support for a simple superset will be no issue whatsoever, the integration of new DirectX 10.1 features on existing DirectX 10 infrastructure is problematic.
"There will be new features with DX10.1, and those features may be exposed on new hardware, but this is similar to the model that we had with DX9...except with DX10.1, we're saying to developers, 'if you want to support the new features, you have to support all of them including original DX10 features,'" Glassenberg added. "It's a minor update, so we don't expect any developers to say, 'oh, this game is DX10.1 only. All off the games that are coming out in the next few years will take better and better advantage of current DX10 hardware."