Microsoft is starting to care less about backwards compatiability.

I was thinking of buying a new graphic card. My options were a Geforce 7900 or a Geforce 8600.

Now, I have no doubts: a DX9 compliant Geforce 7900.

Well, that's not exactly true. Directx 10.1 will work on Directx 10 cards. Here's what Microsoft has to say about this:

Microsoft's Sam Glassenberg did however note that "DirectX 10.1 fully supports DirectX 10 hardware. No hardware support is being removed. It's strictly a superset. It's basically an update to DirectX 10 that extends the hardware functionality slightly." Glassenberg says DirectX 10.1 will be fully compatible with all graphics cards supporting DirectX 10.

http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&sub= … 2004&cid=572922

Microsoft is pissing me up from some time now, specially when they aimed to destroy OpenGL.

From the article wrote:

DX10 hardware - such as the GeForce 8800 or the Radeon 2900 - won't work with the new 10.1 features. The 0.1 revision requires completely new hardware for support

I don't see how this is any different from how it was before.

A DirectX8 card doesn't have all the features of DirectX9. And DirectX9 doesn't have all the features of DirectX9c. And Direct9c doesn't have all the features of DirectX10. And now DirectX10 doesn't have all the features of DirectX10.1.

If you have a DX10 card and the game doesn't require any DX10.1 features, it will work just fine. And games are flexible. Oblivion, for example, can run in both DX9 (Shader Model 2) or DX9c (Shader Model 3). And Bioshock runs in both DX9c and DX10.

As most people on Vogons, I prefer OpenGL because of it's portability and so on, but complaining about this is, well, pointless.

From what I've read, DX 10.1 is a minor change but adds things current cards can't do. double precision floating point math for example. Considering devs are currently writing mainly for shader model 3 and cheap bastards are up in arms over BioShock's lack of support for shader model 2, I don't think shader model 4 is at risk of being rapidly outmoded.

But I wouldn't buy a GF 8600 or ATI 2600 HD anyway. They suck. A cheaper X1950 would be a much smarter buy unless you are primarily concerned about HD video playback CPU usage.

IMO the only DX10 option right now is something from the 8800 series.

The 8600GTS does not suck when it comes to value for money and performance. Newer titles play smoothly on the card with most features (FSAA sometimes not) pushed way up and HD video, as you pointed out, is hardware accelerated. x1950 is like 7900 - dated and soon to be unsupported. Even the addition of HDCP doesn't make those cards attractive...

Somewhat related to current topic...

Valve Software to Stick with DirectX 9 for a While

Gabe Newell: DirectX 10 for Vista was a mistake