Ok, so we have all these standards bodies that are supposed to help make the playing field somewhat level and allow different software vendors to supply products that should work on all platforms.
Now, here we have M$ encouraging game vendors to adopt a DirectX 10 only approach to gaming...
1) DirectX 10 is proprietary and only runs on Vista, with no hope of a back port to XP or any other OS for that matter (not that we'd want their code bloat anyway).
2) Since it's not open source nor governed by any sensible standards body... see point # 1).
3) There already exists a great standard that allows games (and great ones at that) to run on (or easy to port to run on) just about any OS (Linux, Mac OS X, etc) - OpenGL
What I do not understand is why there isn't a bigger fuss. I guess if we were all well informed as a consumer base, then perhaps we would begin to ask the correct questions. Do I really need a new $500 video card to run this new game which requires DirectX? Of course you do... NOT. There isn't much OpenGL cannot do, that can't be done on pretty much any recent budget video card.
But that's not what M$ and the big Video Card vendors want you to believe. Is there some mutual benefit conspiracy happening here? "I make slow proprietary code that requires a super fast card... you make a super fast card to run my code"...
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