Quote: "Yes, I know that many games runs DirectX9, perhaps the most these days. But many brand new games run DX10/11.
My concern here is more technical. (DX9 games can run, and look very good)
I fear that DX9 will become outdated in a couple of years. And,,, how do these day computers and cards that are fully DirectX 10/11 compatible run DX9 games and applications. Perhaps they are run in some sort of a virtul machine? And how is it with hardware acceleration? If a person purchases a new computer from the store, does it come with the DX9 runtime installed?"
ALL new games AFAIK, can use the DX9 runtime if DX10/11 isn't installed. DX9 is simply too large of a demographic of gamers on PC to ignore.
DX9 is outdated, but support is as simple as creating an installer that downloads and installs all prerequisites(i.e. the DX9 runtime) prior to running it(similar to Steam). Virtual machines don't have 3D capability for DX9 yet, so no it won't be run in a VM. A brand new machine has no DirectX runtime installed at all AFAIK, but that might not be true depending on the type of machine(computer targeted at gaming audience probably comes preloaded with DX9/10/11 runtimes, etc).
FPSCR will be coded on top of the existing codebase(though Lee has said that he's going to go through and clean up a lot of junky old code, I think that's a bad idea), so it will still use DBP.
