While the reviews of Vista’s increased functionality have been vaguely interesting, the talk hasn’t exactly been gripping for gamers, until now.

How do the words six to eight times the graphics performance make you feel?

Before I go into this too much, I should add the caveat that this information is from gamespot and while they’re not as bad as some, I try to take everything with a grain of salt.

Unlike the gamespot article, I’ll give you the bad news up front. Current cards aren’t going to be compatible with the new features. So we’ll need to buy new cards to take advantage of the improvements, and I can’t see Nvidia and Ati offering budget cards for at least six months after launch.

But for those lucky enough to get new cards (and a copy of Vista, since the new Direct X10 isn’t going to be compatible with XP), it should be all good.

I’ll leave the gamespot article to talk about the specifics, but in summary it looks like those gains are based on better management of data requirements and the processor and memory resources available to process those requirements.

Reviews on actual improved performance could be quite some time in coming. We don’t have any full DirectX10 games or hardware, and the developers are only just coming up to speed with the technology.

Also, given that ATI and Nvidia are unlikely to come out with DX10 cards with the same specs as their DX9 cards, how is anyone going to be able to baseline the performance?

There are lots of questions to be asked and very few answers. If it was in my head to buy a new card, I’d either buy one right now (i.e. not six months from now) or be prepared to wait at least twelve months to see if there really is any value in the new combination of Vista, DX10 and DX10 hardware.

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