When will I *need* a Directx 9 card?

On Sun, 23 Nov 2003 22:47:22 +0000 (UTC)
Seahorse wrote:

Following prompt first aid from the medic
(John) managed to scrawl the following bloodstained message On 23 Nov
2003 12:27:35 -0800:

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.

1. Don't cross post.

Wrong. Cross post to all relevant newsgroups. That is the way USENET
is intended to work and that way everybody sees the post, everybody sees
the responses, and there is no duplication of effort.

Have you ever answered taken the time to research a question for someone
and then found after posting your response that there was a 500 message
thread in response to the same post on a different newsgroup which
you did not see before expending your own time because the OP failed to
cross-post? If not, the first time it happens to you you'll become an
advocate of appropriate cross-posting.

What on Earth has led you to believe that one should not cross-post?

2. Xmas 04.

Wrong again. You need it when you encounter an application that uses
features not present in DirectX versions earlier than 9, you want to use
those features, and you find that enabling them on a board without
hardware acceleration of those features (thus forcing use of the
software implementation that runs on the main CPU) causes an
unacceptable performance penalty.

That means that for some folks the answer is "never" while for others
it's "yesterday", and for the rest it's somewhere in between.

To the OP the answer is "spend the bucks for an upgrade when you
encounter something that causes you to notice the lack".

---------
Rgds Mike
Remove XXX to reply

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--John
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