Vista Service Pack 1 comes with an important update for gamers - DirectX 10.1. The catch? You need brand new hardware to support it, and NVIDIA enthusiasts are left totally out in the cold.

One of the benefit Windows Vista brought to the gaming table was the next version of DirectX – version 10. With the potential improvements to 3D gaming potentially outweighing the anticipated performance drop in running games on a more resource-hungry operating system, most hardcore gamers waited until ATI and NVIDIA released their DirectX 10-capable GPUs before taking the plunge and upgrading to Vista.

To clarify, neither NVIDIA’s GeForce 8 series nor ATI’s Radeon HD 2x series of GPUs support DirectX 10.1. ATI’s new products – the Radeon 3870 and 3850 – do support DirectX 10.1, but NVIDIA apparently has no plans to release a DirectX 10.1-capable GPU.

View: Full Article @ APC Mag

Source: http://neowin.net/news/main/08/01/14/direct-x-101-in-vista-sp1-requires-new-hardware

no doubt, can't imagine though that an incremental upgrade from the original direct X 10 to 10.1 would leave them out of the game.  I think people who want the latest and greatest will not mind buying a brand new hardware to uprgade to this.  the gamers doing this will easily spend $5,000 to $10,000 on their systems so it is not too much an inconvienence

I love online multiplayer games simply because the internets blow my mind and being able to virtually drop a grenade is very gratifying.

but i wonder why dxdiag does not shows Directx version : 10.1 :( it shows 10 ... i guess someone forgot to update the version no, lol