DirectX10 games you can play NOW!

A lot has been said about DirectX10, or to give it its more accurate title Direct3D10 and the release of Vista and DirectX10 compatible graphics cards has heightened the chatter about what it will do and what it will mean for the likes of you and me.

Well, you may or may not be surprised to know that you can experience DirectX10 now if you have Vista and either a Geforce 8800 or an AMD Radeon 2900XT.  There are more mainstream DirectX10 cards available but these perform so badly in DX10 they are worth avoiding for now.  My system currently comprises an Athlon X2 3800 overclocked to 2.6Ghz,  I have 2gb RAM running at 433mhz and a 640mb Geforce 8800GTS with standard clocks (513mhz GPU core, 1584mhz GDDR3 RAM).  I have a 17" TFT so my maximum resolution is 1280x1024.

Full games?

Yep, there are a couple of DirectX10 games you can buy now:

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

This is a port of an Xbox 360 game but with the detail ramped up to make use of the new hardware.  You play a guy called Wayne who is stuck on a frozen wasteland of a planet infested with a range of alien insects and "space pirates".  You need to make use of a range of mechanised vehicles scattered around the landscape, as well as your trusty grappling hook and an array of weapons from shotguns to rocket launchers.  You need to harvest the orange goo that is left when your enemies die in order to keep your vital suit charged up or you'll gradually freeze to death.  Nice.

Graphically it is quite impressive, there are a lot of flying particles (snow) for your graphics card to deal with.  The new DirectX10 pipeline allows for the skin textures on the Akrid to be particularly detailed and "lumpy".  For this reason it is quite demanding and an 8800GTS with a 2.6ghz Athlon X2 will average around 35FPS at 1280x720, which doesn't inspire confidence.

This is really a Directx9 game at heart so who's to say whether a native DX10 game will perform better?

Company of Heroes

Another DirectX9 game with a patch to turn it into DirectX10.  Company of Heroes is a well respected World War 2 real-time strategy game which, along with Lost Planet is now available on Steam.  I'm not normally a fan of RTS games, preferring a more "first person" view on the world, but Company of Heroes surprised me.  The level of detail on the characters and environment is something to behold and the game is really easy to get to grips with, yet not always easy to win.  A mouse is all that is needed to play it - selecting your team with the left mouse button and selecting a position for them with the right mouse button.  The "campaign" mode starts off at Normandy for the D-day landings and steadily moves inland, where you attempt to thwart the German onslaught at every turn.  You'll need to set up a barracks and position your various mortar, infantry, sniper and heavy machine gun teams around the map, gradually reclaiming territory from the enemy. 

In all its directx10 splendour with settings as high as they'll go with a resolution of 1280x1024 and 2x anti-aliasing I get a peak frame rate of 60fps, presumably because of a seemingly enforced vertical synch, it'll then dip down to the mid 20's and average at around 30FPS.

World In Conflict: Open Beta

I've not looked into this all that thoroughly - not really my cup of tea, but it is supposed to be a DX10 title and it is available as an "open beta" from www.nzone.com.  Its a stunning-looking real-time strategy game using some impressive effects and an even more impressive nuclear arsenal.  If you like RTS games then I suggest you give this a try.

Demo's

Call of Juarez (DX10 Benchmark)

The US release of Call of Juarez is a DirectX10 game (apparently).  The UK and EU versions are DirectX9 but not exactly ugly to look at.  The nearest the Brits can get to some wild west DX10 action is the benchmark which can be downloaded from a number of places, such as Fileplanet and Guru3d.com.  This is a stunning looking rolling demo using the new pipeline but like Lost Planet it also struggles to reach 40FPS on my hardware at 1280x1024.

Nvidia Cascades

If you picked the Nvidia 8800 you can download the Cascades demo from www.nzone.com.  This isn't a game, more of an interactive screensaver, using the DX10 power to render rock formations and waterfalls in real time.  It can churn out some impressive effects but won't keep you amused for long.  Its a shame that it isn't actually a screensaver - that would be quite cool.

I'll try to update this as games and demo's appear.