26 MAXIMUMPC JANUARY 2007

WELCOME TO THE

Revolution!Revolution!Revolution!Revolution!The era of incremental improvements in PC graphics

is over. The debuts of DirectX 10 and the fi rst videocards

that take advantage of it are fomenting radical and

far-reaching changes in PC gaming

BY MICHAEL BROWN

We’re sick to death of console weenies boasting that the Xbox 360 and the PS

are going to render PC gaming obsolete. Innovations such as DirectX 10 and

the introduction of several hot new GPUs available only for the PC will put those

poseurs in their place.

These console systems do have impressive graphics—for gamers on a bud-

get. But games running on a full-blown PC can tap into several times the pro-

cessing horsepower just for graphics, never mind the depth of computational

resources available for A.I. routines, physics, and complex audio algorithms. If

DirectX 10 delivers on its promise, PC gaming will be better than ever.

We haven’t been this excited about a new development in graphics since 3dfx

and Rendition showed off their fi rst products. And the best news is that it looks

as though the fresh hardware is going to make today’s games look better and run

faster, too. DirectX 10 demands a lot of power, which means you’ll be able turn

on a lot of DirectX 9 features simultaneously—high dynamic-range lighting and

antialiasing, for example—without taking a performance hit. So even if the devel-

opment of new DirectX 10 titles lags, or you decide to hold off on moving up to

Windows Vista, you’ll still benefi t from this new generation of videocards.