Crysis Demo

I tried that and it did definitely introduce some of the DX10 features, but as far as I understand it, there are still several more subtle features from DX10 missing. People are talking about shadow "fullness", water wave simulaton, smoke interaction and stuff like that.

I couldn't tell myself, honestly, and I don't plan on reinstalling Vista to be sure anytime soon.

But I'm pretty sure there are parts of DX10, which includes a bunch of performance enhancing features as well as visual additions, that simply can't be done in DX9. So I'd be VERY surprised if the DX9 version is identical.

They apparently dumped down DX9 to make dx10 look better:

http://haleyshothouse.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5159

"Crytek developers have deliberately crippled Crysis for the only purpose of marketing DX10 and Windows Vista. the proof is a simple config file tweak allows the use of 'Very High' quality textures, shadows, etc on DX9 and WinXP. "

I guess they didnt get anything else out of dx10 except performance problems so they had to make it look better artificially. I wonder how much MS oiled EA to do this.

Those people are wrong, there are differences between the two versions, regardless of how much they would want it to be otherwise. Object motion blur, for one thing, and there are other more subtle differences.

However, I must agree that it's pretty pathetic of them to disable certain features for DX9. That's just utterly stupid and reeks of being in the pocket of MS.

Is the dx10 motion blur any good? In dx9 many have disabled becasue its more like annoying than anything else.

Well I just went ahead and did the ini tweaks and I must say there isn't a huge difference. The ripples in the water looked slightly better but it was very very subtle. I thought everything else was nearly identicle.