Yeah.. All of them using the same chip architecture or a mild variant. No really new cores have been released in more than one year and a half IIRC.

Not even DX10 seems to pull the expected amount of users in, I wonder how long it's going to take before MS bites the bullet and admits that it is perfectly implementable in older operating systems.

For gaming vista in not so good.
But i like it, right now i'm using win2k8, thats Vista features but still fast :D

Actually, people have been able to enable directx10 features on XP a long time ago.

too bad your games don't work on it, remember the LANparty last year :D

que? not really no

Microsoft already did this. Their reason is they don't want to invest the effort and time on porting DX10 to XP.

Right, so they replace the one BS story with another BS story.
Either MS can extend dx 9.0c to implement dx10 features for XP or they can remove the virtualisation aspect and work from there. Or at least stop making the virtualisation mandatory. Both are perfectly possible and actually not that much of an effort to implement. The latter would be welcomed by both AMD and Nvidia.

DX10 will never exist on XP. Impossible due to the way the software addresses the hardware in Vista

Because of the video component virtualisation? Everyone except for MS wants to see that go :)

I think the main problem with DX10 was that it was a spec without any actual hardware to back it up. While cards were able to use the new instructions, they didn't have the speed to really do any next-gen shaders fast enough to matter. The only really interesting thing to come out of it so far is the ability to do fast and accurate AA under DX10.1 while still using complex shader architectures. Hopefully nVidia decides to implement it sometime soon.