Im not sure were you guys see that Vista will require anything more than DX9 ive searched high and low and all i see is the same thing.
"Microsoft has yet to unveil Vista's official requirements. The company, which has said it would not finalize them until summer, has thus far recommended that customers who wish to upgrade and take full advantage of all Vista UI features purchase a machine with a discrete graphics card that supports its DirectX 9 graphics framework, Windows Display Driver Model, 32 bpp (bits per pixel) color depth, and which contains at least 64MB of graphics RAM.
It has further hinted that Vista technologies, such its Max user interface for Windows XP, should be used on PCs with at least a 2.4GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, and a graphics card capable of handling its Windows Presentation Foundation.
Such a card, the company says in an online FAQ, should be "the fastest PS 2.0 [Pixel Shader 2.0] card with the most memory your bank account can afford," such as ATI Technologies Inc.'s Radeon X800 or Nvidia Corp.'s GeForce FX 6800.
Most discrete graphics cards available now meet those Microsoft requirements.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the hardware guidelines for Windows Vista offered by the software are unchanged.
However, analysts say the cutoff point for running Aero Glass is likely to begin with only today's latest and thus highest performance integrated graphics chip sets, including models such as ATI Technologies Inc.'s Radeon XPress 200, Nvidia Corp.'s nForce4 and Intel Corp.'s Intel 945 Express, which arrived in desktop PCs last May and will ship for notebooks in January."
Source:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1886829,00.asp
And this spec from MS's site:
"Minimum system requirements will not be known until summer 2006 at the earliest. However, these guidelines provide useful estimates:
•
512 megabytes (MB) or more of RAM
•
A dedicated graphics card with DirectX® 9.0 support
•
A modern, Intel Pentium- or AMD Athlon-based PC. "
Source:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/VistaBeta1FS.mspx
Now im not saying that they wont use something other than DX9 in the future but to me this sounds like that Vista will still run with all its froo-froo just fine on DX9. And that the upgrade to anything higher will really be decieded by the community..not by MS evil as they may be they just cant force the upgrade on people. A company cant afford the upgrade and gamers just wont accept it.