Sega's Stormrise will be released as a Vista and DirectX 10 exclusive game on PCs, though not on consoles.
Sega has confirmed that the new real-time strategy game from
Total War developers Creative Assembly will require both Windows Vista and DirectX 10 hardware on the PC.
Stormrise will also ship on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, where it'll obviously not have such requirements, but the PC version has apparently been built with DX10 in mind from the start.
"
DX10 has offered a lot of advantages over DX9," said lead designer Artem Kulakov in an interview with
PC Games Hardware.
"
First of all, DirectX 10 allowed us to simplify the rendering engine. It matches capabilities of next generation consoles better than DX9, which is important for us considering that Stormrise is a multi-platform title. We had fewer driver-specific compatibility issues with Stormrise compare to our previous games released with DX9."
At this point DirectX 10 and Vista have been out long enough for this not to be too shocking a blow, but it's worth remembering that there's still an awful lot of gamers out there who run on Windows XP or with DirectX 9 hardware. Check the
Steam Hardware Survey if you don't believe us, as it shows that only a quarter of the systems using Steam (which is more than 15 million PCs) have DirectX 10 hardware.
Are you one of those gamers who'll need to upgrade if they want to play
Stormrise? Let us know in
the forums.
this is lunacy! when will it stop?!
I thought i was slow to upgrade... guess it just the company i keep round here that makes it seem that way.
Maybe they've made it for the consoles first because, they will actually buy the game... and they don't whine every time a developer tries to instigate a little progress.
I had the privilege of seeing a presentation from TCA last year. Granted, the focus was more on local game developers in my city, but they showed off quite a bit of StormRise, and said that it was designed primarily for consoles. They then added that there would be a PC DX10 version because they basically get it for free from the XBox 360 version and its SDK. I guess that's basically what the quote in the article says, but unspun.
I myself am surprised that DX9 games are still being made, and that people are still expecting DX9 versions of games, especially as DX11 is less than a year away. Not to mention that most people don't even have DX10 capable cards (not to mention 10.1), and that even these aren't fully compatible with DX11 (so far its really only hardware tessellation and possibly SM5.0 that most DX10 cards fall short on, though i've heard AMD/ATI say that some 4800 series cards have a compatible hardware tessellater). Though I guess much of this is because of people refusing to move from XP to Vista. Apple would never have allowed this...
lol yeah.. actually my girl took a class on poverty (she's a teacher) and the things people do while in poverty for entertainment.. they make up a huge part of the entertainment market- they go to movies, play games, watch tv more than the middle class to get their minds off thier problems
dx7 gamers that's pretty funny :D I was poor when I was younger around 17, was homeless awhile- I was always trying to get that nut though.. didn't watch tv or anything so I dunno- maybe welfare gamers XD
If it makes the difference between having a PC version made of a console game and not having it, then I'd say Vista/DX10 exclusivity is good.
Well duh, of course they do, since developers still only create for the older stuff, why upgrade if there's no incentive? Heh.
Can't keep living in the past and expect the products from the future to fit in nicely.
It's like wanting a working electric fridge but not having electricity. Doesn't quite work.
Read up on DX10 please, ignorance ain't bliss. :(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2007/02/7060.ars
It would require significant changes to the OS to the point where it doesn't make any sense what-so-ever to even bother doing them. Moving forward with a new OS built with DX10 at it's core was the way to go.
Sorry if you feel it as an attack/rude but I find it rather annoying when people say MS is at fault for not putting DX10 in XP. If you're creating an entirely new feature that isn't compatible with your current OS core, there's no business sense to alter your current OS to match it when it wasn't designed to support it.
And sure, there are "ports" of DX10 to XP, but last I heard they don't exactly work well and don't look quite the same as Vista DX10 (provided the game is actually supports proper DX10)
They're looking to move forward, not stay in the same place. The next gen OS was already in planning/development so it made more sense to integrate it into that rather than take resources off to put into altering XP to support DX10 and then having a whole slew of support dedicated to the bugs/problems it would create since XP wasn't built to support it.
Garry is dumb, my s*** graphic card can play DX8...
You're pretty wrong actually, my Dad regularly still plays Steam based games (slowly working through Episode 2 at the moment), and when I tried to install L4D on his PC it barely worked (I'm impressed it worked at all), all because his card doesn't support DX8.