John Carmack, id Software -- There are some specific driver paths in DX8, like rendering to textures, that are more optimized, but in general, people should not expect to see noticable performance boosts when upgrading to a new DX version. In most well written apps, little time is spent in the microsoft code, and almost all of the time is in the vendor specific driver.
The cool parts of DX8 are the new features, but until NV20 ships, all they get you are software emulated versions.
What do you think will be the next BIG thing (for example, T&L was supposed to be, but hasn't really hit it, just yet).
Kevin Francis, No One Lives Forever engineer -- That one's kind of hard to pick. High-order surfaces (i.e. curved geometry te ellation in hardware) do make things look a lot smoother, but people aren't going to be taking full advantage of that for quite a while, and it doesn't actually introduce any new information into the scene. But if I were to suggest new hardware to buy, I'd point at anything that has full DX8 pixel shader support. Having a little program that you can run per-pixel is going to make for some really cool hardware demos, and the techniques used in those demos are often the ones that make it into future games. Having a standard way of expre ing the techniques (vertex & pixel shaders) makes it easier to code, which leads to more eye candy. (And hopefully happy gamers. ;D) But that's a few years away from finding heavy use just because there's still so much current hardware around, not to mention old hardware.Oftewel: de features zijn allemaal goed, maar je moet nog even wachten tot je het allemaal kan gebruiken en qua performance schiet je weinig op met DirectX 8.
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