As long as we have to support XP, we have to support DirectX9.  And while it's possible to create an engine that can be initialized with DirectX9 or higher, it's a LOT of work, which means more cost to develop.  

I'm still on XP and have no reason to upgrade until I build a new PC which will probably be another year or two.  At that point I'll put on Windows 7 (or 8 if it's out and stable).

Wait for Skynet to go online.  It will be free and will run everything for you

Naturally.  I'm not dissing Stardock or anyone else with limited resources, I'm just wishing DX9 would go away.  I thought D3D9Ex was also supposed to handle alt tabbing better, but if I had to guess it still doesn't (unless nobody is using it.)

I believe that D3D9Ex is only supported on Vista or higher, which is why we didn't use it for Elemental.

None of the consoles support DX10+ and the PC market is heavily fragmented between DX9 and DX10. Cull those numbers further with type of game and genre and you have a product that will be tough to pitch to the accountants.

Since consoles make up for the biggest platform big games are published on, why would developers work on a dx that only runs on high end PCs?

I was just mentioning it as (yes, it only runs on Vista and 7) I'd think it wouldn't need two seperate renderers, or if it did the work to implement it should be much smaller.

Because Vista/7 and DX10+ cards make up a significant chunk of the market now, and it's only growing.  They won't be able to ignore it forever.  I expect Bioware is not the only one who's moving up this year, though we'll have to wait and see.

I should also mention once Windows 8 comes out it's highly likely devs will start dropping support for XP entirely.

[quote who="Savyg" comment="10"]

Because Vista/7 and DX10+ cards make up a significant chunk of the market now, and it's only growing.

[/quote]

I thought I'd research this claim.  As far as us gamers go, I feel the monthly Steam hardware survey is representative of current computer configurations.

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Sure enough, right there in the middle of the top row are some numbers that strongly support your claim: 56% of the Steam respondents are using DX10 (which also implies Win7/Vista).  Go, go, DX10!

I gather Steams hardware survey doesn't match up with the numbers Impulse gathers on system specs.  It's as good an info source as any though, since it's the only publicly available one.

I don't think that is a good representation of the market. You're not getting the entirety of Steam Users in that survey, and less than half the people I know who frequently play PC games want anything to do with Steam.

If you drew a picture, and I told you I could sell it for $1m if you used every color, $5m if you left out green and red, or $10m if you only used black and white; what would your color palette be? What would most people choose?

I would be surprised if we saw developers abandon dx9 until the next generation of consoles are released. By that time, enough PC users will have upgraded, and multi-platform games will be able to scale easier.

That will also mean that we [PC Gamers] will be on dx14 by then.

Uh... 56% is a very bad number.  You're talking about throwing away half your potential market by developing for DX10 exclusively.  You'd have to double your sales with the remaining market in order for this to pay off, which is highly unlikely.

This is really straightforward: in order for it to be worthwhile developing a DX10 game, the increase in sales from the higher-quality product must exceed the lost sales from people whose systems cannot run the game.  For most games, that probably means DX10 won't be viable until market penetration gets up into the high 80's.

When it happens, it's going to be all at once, as the remaining DX9 holdout users upgrade en-mass.  Until developers see it as a worthwhile investment, however, it's really easy to remain a DX9 holdout and so the transition is going to be delayed.

I doubt these are significant sampling biases.  I see no reason to believe that the group of people who use Steam and respond to surveys have substantially different system specs than the general gaming population. 

Anyways, as has already been mentioned the consoles are what form the upper bounds of graphical support.  If DX10 really was enough of a breakthrough to be worth it, we'd be seeing console gamers converting en-mass to the superior PC market.  This isn't happening; the consoles are "good enough" for most gamers, and developers are happy to oblige with graphcis that are "good enough".