Between the site and my new and old computer crapping out, I haven’t been able to post. We’re working on the stability of the site, but for now its up. As mentioned earlier the site is actually up but our nameserver, the thing that points you to the site after you type in hostilism.com is crapping out. A few people have been asking me about my building a gaming pc on a moderate budget tutorial. I figure I would share the answers to common questions I’m getting.

“What is the difference between DX10 and DX9 and is it worth upgrading over?”

The differences are pretty big, when directly comparing the two. However, its all graphic differences and is not really going to effect gameplay, so DX9 should be fine for now for most of us. The first big DX10 title that is going to hit is Crysis. Crysis released some videos months back directly comparing some scenes in the games in DX9 mode vs DX10 mode. Check them out here and here.

“I might upgrade for TF2. Is it DirectX 10? Will I be able to play with PC users on the 360? “

TF2 is not DirectX10. It will look and play identically on XP and Vista. Speaking of which, here is a link to the new gameplay footage that was just released. As far as cross platform, nothing has been officially denied by press release just yet, however the devs have stated it would be “more trouble than its worth” and have also stated if they were to release a game like that it would need to be built from the ground up with the cross platform focus in mind. So no, there will not be cross platform TF2 gameplay.

The 360 and PC versions of HL2: Orange Box (TF2) are being made by Valve and they have stated that it not only was technically possible to implement cross platform play, but months later announced they have successfully tested it and it was working. The PS3 version is being made by EA in the UK and will be using a totally different network code taken from other EA titles. So PS3 playing with any other platform is out of the question.

In the end, to keep the PC version and 360 version cross platform working, they would have to streamline updates to both platforms, which I’m sure is some major overhead. Some titles are already doing this, like ShadowRun, which you probably know unless you live under a rock. To date they are all Microsoft titles and those games are designed from the start to be cross platform. Its part of the whole “Games for Windows“.

Let’s not forget that Valve will be selling this through steam, and forcing PC users to log into steam. Unlike all current cross platform 360 titles that use the Windows Live network. Its still unknown whether or not Microsoft would even allow other game studios to do cross platform outside of its Games for Windows lineup.