Defunct is a relative term. First, you must play games, then you must want
to play DX10 games, then you must have DX10 hardware to play said games
I still get a kick at looking at valve's hardware stats.
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
If you have the X1900 series, you're in the 1% group. Got the 8800 family,
you're in the .88% group (that's point 88, as in less than 1%)
75% have 1GB or less of RAM
over 90% are using windows XP, only .99% is using Vista
Now that's only a sample of 1.16 million gamers or at least gamer's systems.
But the Steam games is faily popular and gives a pretty good snapshot of
where gamers are at. it would be really great if Blizzard did hardware
snapshots for it's World of Warcraft users
Do we really expect that everyone is going to run out to Buy Vista ?, then
Buy DX10 hardware to run on it. When there is only maybe 5-10 games coming
out this year to offer DX10 support and even then, they will have DX9
support.
XP isn't dead, though obviously dying, but my prediction is, it will be 2
years, that's right 2 years, before it takes over the 75% OS used for
gaming. unless some serious games come out that get people to jump.
But I think this last december proved something important. The Xbox 360 had
some great sales numbers (1.1 mil), but oddly enough it was beaten by PS2
(not PS3) with 1.4 million sales. Granted there is a bit of a price
difference between the two, it does show that great graphics alone won't
carry an platform. DX10 is a great tech, but it's not free and that will
keep gamers on XP for a while longer
