There is no working DX10 hack for XP.

The only improvement with DX10 in bioshock is slightly better textures.

there working on improving support

dx10 for windows xp is still in alpha and will be some more time before it is ready for use by everyone

Yes I am aware of this and I have indeed looked into it, however I'm yet to find any evidence of it working in games. The group the was working on it folded as purplerat said, it can hardly be said to be working as all it effectively does is trick dxdiag to say dx10... And if it doesnt actually work in games then a DX10 hack for XP does not exist.

Either way I can't see why anyone would be so desperate for DX10, not nearly as much difference to DX9 as hyped, not yet anyway.

Just look at how far behind WINE is on DX and thats been going ages even with really dedicated developers.

What "fact" are you referring to? Making dxdiag say DirectX10 is hardly a fact proving that DX10 works in XP.
Even beyond that making very specific DX10 features available in XP is not the same as hacking DX10 for XP. What people seem to miss about this whole attempt is that it was never about just flipping some magic switch in XP or DirectX to make them compatible. What was being done was to completely re-write portions of DX10 function calls to use either OpenGL or DX9 functions in a similar way that could work in XP.
It's not that the effects that DX10 is capable of are not possible with other APIs in XP, just that the way DX10 achieves them was not possible in XP. There are others who can explain it a lot better than me but it has to do with the difference in how XP communicates with hardware (specifically the GPU) versus how Vista does.
The problem with having to rewrite or work around each individual difference between the two is that it completely defeats the purpose of an API. What you end up with is emulation, which as djcoolmasterx pointed out usually lags why beyond in both development time and performance. So what's the point of DX10 on XP if you have to wait until it's outdated to use it and at a heavy performance cost.

I would have to somewhat disagree with some of you. I think DX10 is better than DX9 visually. The blur effect, the moving objects, the texture stream, smoke and water algorithms and the memory allocation are great in DX10. I find it makes a difference (IMO) in Crysis. Another, rather lame game, which shows a lot of DX10 improvements, is Hellgate: London. The game is, imo, very disappointing in gameplay and storyline and yadi yadi yada…but when you switch settings from DX9 to DX10, then you see a huge improvement in smoke particles (Nvidia DX10 Smoke), and the blurring effect (Distant view).

Regardless, Bioshock’s DX10 features are barely unnoticeable. The water effects (which was suppose to be “the” noticeable improvement) looks the same. A crack is a waste of time.

The hack does NOT work. Really that simple.

Not really sure what you think that would accomplish. The bigger flop (not that I would really call either a flop or mistake) was DX10, not Vista. For all the crap that MS got about Vista at release combined with all the hype of DX10 and the continuing desire to get it on XP the really ironic thing is that most gamers who "bit the bullet" and went to Vista for DX10 found that Vista is a really good OS for gamers while DX10 offers almost nothing. I'd take Vista w/o DX10 any day over XP w/DX10.

You can disagree all you want. I'm not going to get into a debate about which OS is better, but there is a strong opinion from gamers who went to Vista for DX10 that while DX10 itself was not worth the switch Vista is still a very good OS for gamers. I prefer it over XP and know that given the same hardware that I have I'm not giving up any performance (maybe even gaining a little).

The results on Vista's gaming performance have been in for a while now. If you're using adequate hardware there's almost no difference between the two. Conversely DX10 does take a big bite out of performance. Crysis is a perfect example along with being the most demanding game out there. XP DX9 vs Vista DX9 = no difference. Add DX10 and there is a noticeable difference. So what I don't get is all these people who's systems are not capable of handling Vista but want to try DX10. If you are experiencing difficulty playing games in Vista, DX10 is only going to be worse regardless of the OS you are running it on. Actually it reasonable to expect that making DX10 work in XP would require even greater overhead so XP DX10 would probably be even worse than Vista DX10.

+1

Incorrect, Vista is actually faster for gaming if the DX9 render path is used along with AA (which is something most of us use), if AA is not used then the difference is within the margin of error. All the vista slowdowns on gaming were actually caused by incomplete graphics drivers, not the OS itself, so you should really draw your own conclusions and not just repeat what a sea of neophytes keep babbling over and over.

For general use, Vista is great IF you have a capable system, it offers a lot of functionality as long as it's not hindered by weak hardware. I've come to the conclusion that the OS uses about 30% of your available memory, reasoning behind this is because when I had 2GB of ram Vista 64 would take about 700mb, but when I upgraded to 4 gigs, it'd take about 1.3GB (Both fresh installations). However, the thing that almost nobody tells you is that when you start a game the memory usage drops (From 1.2-1.3GB it drops to about 700mb while in a game). Pretty handy if you ask me.

The only two mistakes I've found in Vista are that it doesn't have a proper defrag tool (However, I got my third party tool, so I'm covered) and that Microsoft decided to make a 32-bit version of it. The latter will repeat itself in Windows 7 32-bit version.

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