As many of you know Microsoft is releasing DirectX 10 for Windows Vista only and working to persuade game makers to support it only as a means to pressure gamers to "upgrade" to Windows Vista whether we need or want to or not. (Yes that is my personal take on things and some may disagree). There is a
hope for DirectX 10 compatibility on XP.
Link to siteDirect3D10, which will ship with Windows Vista in a few months, doesn't seem to be a large cause for concern. At first glance it appears to be more of an evolutionary change rather than revolutionary. New shader support will be needed, but extending ours once OpenGL supports it should be pretty easy. Stefan mentioned Microsoft is currently offering a lot of incentives for Windows developers who develop D3D10-only games since they'll only be usable on Vista - there's no plan to backport D3D10 to XP. Dan Kegel asked if that means we should port Wine's forthcoming D3D10 implementation to Windows, which would be relatively easy when we switch to WGL.
Wine is a "compatibility" system allowing the use of (some) Windows programs on Linux. Here is a developer talking of taking what they learn to allow DX10 compatiblity in Wine and port it back to XP to allow
some who don't "upgrade" to Vista to use
some newer games.
Will it happen? I can't say. If it looks like it will happen Microsoft is sure to react.