DirectX 10 on Non Vista PCs?

Could this even be possible? Well, that’s what Cody Brocious’ ALKY PROJECT ( http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/2007/04/finally-making-use-of-this-blog-i.html ) would have us believe. According to Cody, who’s a “19 year old software reverse-engineer” in San Diego, California, it could soon be possible to play all your DirectX 10 games without necessarily having to upgrade to Microsoft’s shiny new OS, Windows Vista.

Considering how the DirectX 10 API is exclusive to the new OS, Microsoft has explicitly said that if you want to play a DX10 game in all it’s graphic richness, you’d need to get yourself a nice big DX10 card and then fork over the dough to get yourself onto the Vista bandwagon. Unfortunately, Vista isn’t all that it was touted to be. Even though there are lots of newsitems flying around the web about how Microsoft is retiring Windows XP sometime late next year, a lot of us haven’t really seen the benefits of jumping from a stable gaming platform to one that is yet to prove itself indispensable, especially considering how the 64-bit version of the OS causes more problems than it fixes, which sucks especially if you’ve forked over hard earned money for a spanking new quad-core 64-bit QX6700/8800 GTX SLi/Windows Vista Ultimate x64 rig to take advantage of the OS’ 64-bit/multiprocessing improvements.

If what Cody and his team claim are true and they really can do all that they claim, then it would mean we would at least have a small degree of backward compatibility with previous OSes, and while non-Vista users certainly wouldn’t enjoy all the gorgeous eyecandy on their “derelict” systems, they’d at least be able to at least play the game at medium-high settings, instead of watching a “Your Operating System version is incompatible with this game” message. While Cody’s already showing off a preview on his blog about how the reverse-engineered APIs are used to play the Microsoft DX10 tech-demos on a Windows XP SP2 PC, we wonder how long it is before Microsoft shuts him down completely, since they’ve probably got a thousand lines of legal mumbo-jumbo preventing just this kind of stuff. One thing’s for sure, this would never see the light of day on a commercial basis - the Redmond Goliath will see to that.

Update: We’ve had quite a few people ask us whether they will be able to run DX10/Vista only games on their Windows XP PCs, but please remember:

a) We have no clue if or when this program will actually work and are NOT affiliated with Cody or anything that he does. If you have any questions, please visit Cody’s blog / website ( http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/2007/...-this-blog-i.html ) / ( http://www.fallingleafsystems.com/ )/ forum and ask him about it directly.
b) Most DX10 games, including Crysis, whose screenshot was included just because it’s the poster child of DX10 gaming, will automatically run on the D3D9 pathway on non-Vista systems, whether your PC has a DX9 or a DX10 card.
c) Even if the software still works on your PC, to enable all the DX10 eye candy, you WILL need a fully DirectX10 compliant video card, either the GeForce 8 series cards or the ATI X2K cards.
d) Microsoft most probably won’t let this last long on the Internet, or allow development on it to continue, considering reverse-engineering any Microsoft licensed software is illegal. We’d be highly surprised if they haven’t already sent a cease-and-desist letter to Cody.

I suppose you can have DX10 on a xp computer but you would not really benifit from it unless you had a top of the line dx10 video card or something or a real need for it. Thats all I can say for now.