Test results show something interesting. This puts me again bit away from uber chrome cool shiny vespa OS, game need to be specially designed to work without big performance hit? Great, let's wait few more years before jumping to vistiodwagon

Quote from anandtech :

The new lighting and shadowing techniques combined with liberal geometry shader use are responsible for at least halving performance when running the more detailed DX10 path

What are they comparing there? From that sentence it sounds like they're comparing different detail levels. If the DX10 test is drawing a more complex scene then you'd expect it to show a lower score than the DX9 test.

They might as well throw in a wireframe DX5 test and show the cards whupping some serious DX10 arse, and we can all go back to that.

Quote from Christofire :

What are they comparing there? From that sentence it sounds like they're comparing different detail levels. If the DX10 test is drawing a more complex scene then you'd expect it to show a lower score than the DX9 test.

They might as well throw in a wireframe DX5 test and show the cards whupping some serious DX10 arse, and we can all go back to that.

That is true, also it is true that you can't turn off all dx effects from detail settings in most of games, some don't allow much of disabling at all, so you are forced to use heavier details if you happen to have dx10.

Luckily some games let you choose detail level and perhaps dx9 games are not getting as big hit, but I have seen that with LFS I get bigger hit in fps with vista than with linux, where lfs runs with emulation

It would be nice if part of performance would not be lost with new software, would be really nice to get same performance with same hardware and with newer software there would be then possible to use some new things. Should be not too much to ask that same game runs same way with same hardware, don't you think?

Remember that it is still way too early to tell for sure with DX10. It will take a while before IHVs learn all the ins and outs of their hardware and drivers. There's a lot of optimization to be done yet.

And yes, as with any API change, games do need to be specifically designed to work in DX10. All APIs have their way of doing things and wrestling them to work like another one (using DX10 the "DX9 way" for instance) will not yield the performance it is capable of.

I'm fully confident that DX10 will be a very nice step in the right direction once driver- and game-developers get a grip on it. Tech demos are already doing a lot of cool stuff that just couldn't be done (as) efficiently in DX9.