On the Crysis forums, a gamer by the alias of LennyRhys has found an easy way to get the quality of the Dx10 version of Crysis running on XP, in Dx9.

This will undoubtedly prove to be another big embarrassment for Microsoft, as the corporate entity has maintained that Dx10 is only compatible with the Vista operating system, and is incapable of running in XP.

A similar situation happened with the initial launch-game for Vista, Shadowrun. Gamers in the community found a couple of relatively simple steps to enable the Dx10 mode within Vista.

Unlike the Dx10 version of Shadowrun, however, the Dx10 version of Crysis is much better than the Dx9 version, from all reports. Forum dude mail4yootoo had this to say after trying the simple config edits to enable Dx10 features:  "I tried this and I am amazed.  I am even more amazed that it still runs at an almost playable fps." 

Other forum-guy Club Heaven summed up (probably) what many were thinking with his forum post: "I can also confirm this. There is a huge upgrade in image quality coupled with the obvious  framerate drop. Every DX10 effect seems to be present and the game is a lot more playable than under Vista. Plus with some tweaking one could get to an awesome quality/performance compromise. I wonder what exactly do we need DX10 and Vista for ?

So Crytek basically greyed out the very high options under XP, simply because they and their buddies in the industry want us to buy the worthless resource hog that Vista is and the overpriced 8800GTXs. This move on their part is absolutely disgusting. Nothing new of course, but it hurts to see it coming from someone you respected.

Please make this sticky so that more people know they can get better graphics and performance, without hawing to throw more money out the window."

Many people had hoped that Dx10 Crysis would end the trend, common in 2007, of having a huge frame-rate drop in Vista over Dx9/XP, with hardly any noticable image quality improvements in Dx10 mode. And while Crysis (and to a lesser extent, Hellgate: London) have bucked this trend, with superior image quality in Dx10 (compared to Dx9 modes), it does seem that their are only artificial limitiations that prevent these higher quality shaders from being used in Dx9 and Xp.

With this find -- if it's not patched up post-haste by a back-tracking CryTek -- even more gamers will probably decide to stay with XP for the time being, in the interest of better framerates, to better enjoy this excellent FPS. Perhaps more software work-arounds will come out for future games, that will allow the quality of Dx10 to operate under Xp.

Here's a link to the forum thread (which has already been viewed over a 70,000 times since Oct.28th !)