(John) wrote in message . com...
Anybody know when you'll absolutely need a Directx 9 card to have any
fun with games? It seems that games like Halo and Max Payne 2 use
Directx 9 features sparingly, and therefore, it's no big deal if I
play them on my Directx 8.1 card (which is a GeForce 4 Ti 4200).

Are we talking 3-4 months maybe?

I'm just trying to get a handle on when to spend the bucks for an
upgrade.

thanks.

I was trying to figure this out a couple of months ago. What someone
needs to do is take a few screenshots and record a few gameplay demo
movies to show off the differences between DX8 and DX9 hardware.

From what i've seen so far, there really isn't much visual difference
seen yet. That just means no game has made use of the DX9 hardware
enough to show a real difference. I've seen a few screenshots of
Halflife 2 that supposedly showed the differences. It was only
apparent in the way the water reflected images or obscured objects
underwater. There was a *slight* difference between dx8 and dx9
cards. But barely noticeable.

The high density lighting is a bit more impressive but i think only
halflife 2 has this feature so far. Imagine standing in a dark room
that has a hole in the roof, and sunlight is streaming through the
hole. with dx8 hardware you get a sunlight colored beam coming in.
with DX9 high density lighting you really see sunlight pouring through
the hole. so far it's the only dx9 effect i've been impressed by.

I guess the dx9 shaders and whatnot must allow some things to be done
faster than their dx8 equivalents but i also know that the new dx9
features can slow your framerate just because they are so intensive.

So unless someone else has other examples, i'd say that there's no
visual quality reason to upgrade specifically to a dx9 card except
that they also happen to be more powerful and will therefore get you
faster framerates than your current out of date card. But once
halflife 2 is out, maybe that will change.