Gamertell

Microsoft recently announced that DirectX 10 hardware (read: that graphics card you paid a small fortune for) will not support 10.1, the next version of DirectX.

The announcement was made at Siggraph 2007, the annual international conference on graphics technology run by the Association for Computing Machinery. DirectX 10 currently comes bundled with Windows Vista operating system and is available for download. Much like Windows XP, the first Service Pack (SP1, currently in beta testing) will soon become available to update and improve various aspects of the faulty OS, including the requirement to upgrade from DirectX 10 to 10.1 which will be supported by newer hardware.

The good news is that DierctX 10.1 might be relatively useless in terms of gamers’ needs. According to an article by The Enquirer:

Gamers shouldn’t fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and, more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about. The spec revision basically makes a number of things that are optional in DX10 compulsory under the new standard - such as 32-bit floating point filtering, as opposed to the 16-bit current. 4xAA is a compulsory standard to support in 10.1, whereas graphics vendors can pick and choose their anti-aliasing support currently. We suspect that the spec is likely to be ill-received. Not only does it require brand new hardware, immediately creating a minuscule sub-set of DX10 owners, but it also requires Vista SP1, and also requires developer implementation.

Read [Softpedia]  Also Read [The Inquirer] Site [DirectX 10]