The way I see it, developers will start making for DX11 when new consoles come out and use that. Then it will become the norm that games use that, and people who don't have compatible hardware or OS will have to upgrade.

Also, it's not 56% using 10. You guys suck at reading graphs. There's 78.72% using DX10 or higher, with only 16.04% using DX9.

That means they'd have to increase sales by about 20% to make it worth it. That's still a lot, and it's not counting the additional production costs involved in making the higher-level graphics, just the loss from excluding part of the market.

Who said exclusively?  I can assure you very few of these lack in DX9 support.  (Just Cause 2 being the only one that matters that does.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_11_support

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_DirectX_10_support

The downside of the best gamingsystem there is, having games developed to run on outdated crap!

Like Stardock deciding on Shader Model 2.0(!) when every gamer worth his salt got ATLEST Shader Model 3.0!   Myself I got a GTX 570 which supports Shader Model 5.0. (Good luck with seeing any SM 5.0 effects for a few years though!)

Oh yeah, that reminds me. Why haven't there been a video by Stardock that shows off Shader Model 4.0 ? (which they said Elemental would support)

That also reminds me of brad saying that support for DirectX 11 has to wait until 2015 (which is when enough people will have FINALLY upgraded to DirectX 11!)

About the Steam surveys, they say it's optional but I can't find where to opt-in. I need to get in so the % for Win7 64bit, GTX 570 and 4GB RAM incrreases. The 2nd most popular graphics chipset is 8800    It's my previous chipset though so I believe those who have it will upgrade soon (they better!)

I asked Steam support about it and he said the survey only actually runs once a year, which would be really weird.

Would explain why the numbers rarely change though.

But the numbers are updated every MONTH!

And yet, inexplicably for several months it's said 56% for DX10 users.

I think it used to be monthly but they changed it.

I know at least one of my games that can switch up to DX10 or higher, and I have a video card which is capable.  What I don't have is the operating system which supports the API.  Given the price of buying a new operating system, and the cost of the extra stick of RAM I will need to avoid degrading performance, it doesn't make any sense to upgrade at this time.

Making the

However, the graphics cards that support DX10 are less fragmented and therefore cheaper to  support. And it particularly makes sense to more on when the developer is creating a new engine anyways (say to support 64-bits and/or multithreading) and they plan on using it for some time to come. If they still feel enough people use DX9 to be worth supporting, the DX11 API provides the means to be compable with it (though they would have to dump Windows XP users).

Its pretty safe to write off the DX9 market. If they haven't upgraded to 7/vista and a DX11/10 card by now then like shit you are going to be able to sell a game to them. Battlefield 3 will pave the way.

Stardock makes games on a limited budget with nowhere near the graphical fidelity of your average FPS.  If Stardock were to write off the DX9 market they'd probably die.

Valve has yet to make a DX10 game, and they have practically unlimited resources.

They have yet to make a game, period. It's been years since their last game, they only buy out hl2 mods and put a $50 tag on them nowadays. Their old source engine cannot do DX10 too.

Hmm....I want to disagree with that as I'm not sure it's accurate, and yet I can't.    I wonder if Portal 2 will be any different.  I'm not willing to buy it until I actually know.

Of all the thing Stardock said Elemental would support which it doesn't, the shader model hardly seems worth attention. What would the game really get out of it anyway? There needs to be a reason to use some of this stuff given how relatively few computers have access to it, and with Elemental's graphics I'm not sure you'd get anything out of it.

The thing I'm liking in Steam's numbers is that 64 bit and multicore are becoming the norm. As we see games taking more advantage of those, we'll see some nice things happening.