GameSpy: Is compatibility with DirectX 9 completely hardware dependent or can it be achieved with drivers updates?
David/Eric: It’s all hardware dependent. In the same sense that a DirectX game will run on a GeForce4 MX card, you’ll only get the features that were already available in DirectX 7. The same is true for the high-end GeForce cards. While DirectX 9 games will run on them, only the features implemented in DirectX 8.1 will be present. Features written for DirectX 9 will simply be disabled. This is because each version of DirectX has to be backwards compatible, but as new features are added [like floating point calculations], new hardware must be created to take advantage of it.