Vista and FSX

Its true the DX10 cards are going to be excellent DX9 cards.How much that floats the FSX RTM boat is an open question, given the CPU-bound nature of the app. If that helps the driver on the CPU chew thru our draw calls per frame faster, that will help quite a bit.The point isnt that over time DX10 hw will get better, its if the 1st gen DX10 hw performs such that we can live up to the artistic impressions we have shown the community. And I will point out that the 9700, the 1st gen DX9 card, was a quite capable 1st gen card running the new DX9 interfaces. Thats a lot to live up to for the DX10 cards wrt running DX10 interfaces. Its complicated by the fact that there are 2-3 new pipeline stages ( IA, GS, OM ) and there is no prior art to help with the design of those stages. The DX9 card designers had both the 8.0 and the 8.1 generations to get comfortable with designing programmable graphics pipes ( the vertex and pixel shader stages ) and thus I feel that the step from DX8.1 to DX9 isnt anywhere near as steep as the step from DX9 to DX10.as always, ymmv.