DX9 is like 10 years old, which in computer terms means 1500 years.
I don't see the point of developing a game for DX9, nor the point of NOT using Windows 7.

Vista was suicidal, ok, but Windows 7 is really good.

Another thing is, that you will loose performance on multi-core systems in windows xp, and have a limited amount of RAM.

I think your GXT285 is ok for the game, the bottleneck in CoD right now seems to be the lack of multithread support for the main sim thread.

Well then that makes CLoD already 900 years old "in computer terms". DX10 is no spring chicken either.:rolleyes:

Everyone seems to have forgotten...original IL-2 ran like crap under DX9. That's why most people run it today under Open G/L. Open G/L..that's gotta be like a million years old!!!. But it gives good performance. Anyway, I have doubts about Direct X any version. It could be that Direct X will always be glitchy for the type of programming used in this game. Maybe they need to re-write CLoD in the latest version of Open G/L?:-P

IL-2 Original and IL-2 1946 is DirectX 8.0 :mrgreen:
you wish it was DirectX 9.0

Not quite true - remember the 'Perfect' terrain setting? That was the result of a Shader Model 2 (DirectX 9 spec) sub-routine, in OpenGL, that made the water look real .

I was talking about DirectX not OpenGL , of course the main engine was
done and optimized for the best graphics ( water etc.. ) with OpenGL but
when run under DirectX it was and it is 8.0 version , sorry . :cool:

EDIT: It's DirectX 8.1 to be precise updated for Windows 98, Windows Me
and Windows 2000 which was latter on just backward compatible with DirectX 9.0 ;)
Game is using d3d8.dll when DX is selected .

Just to clarify your statement, you can't actually escape DX9 or DX8 for that matter when developing games for DX11. The reason is that each DX version is not a complete overhaul, it's just an incremental addition of features.

For example if I wanted hardware tessellation then I need to use the DX11 function calls to do it, however if I wanted to read the joystick states and apply force-feed back, under DX11 specifications, I would still be using the DX8 DirectInput function calls which haven't changed since being introduced since 2000, or under XNA (C#) I'd be using DX9's XInput which came in 2002.

What I'm trying to say is if you develop a game saying it's DX11 you can, with very little effort ensure it also runs under DX9.

With regards to CloD, and the requirement to have .NET4.0 installed, I think CloD's main game code sits in the managed space but all the graphics routines are done in the unmanaged space. This can slow things down a little, but reduces the possibility of memory leaks (not eliminate) and the need to manage garbage collection.

from wiki:

Prior to DirectX 10, DirectX runtime was designed to be backward compatible with older drivers, meaning that newer versions of the APIs were designed to interoperate with older drivers written against a previous version's DDI. The application programmer had to query the available hardware capabilities using a complex system of "cap bits" each tied to a particular hardware feature. For example, a game designed for and running on Direct3D 9 with a graphics adapter driver designed for Direct3D 6 would still work, albeit most likely with degraded functionality.

However, the Direct3D 10 runtime in Windows Vista cannot run on older hardware drivers due to the significantly updated DDI, which requires a unified feature set and abandons the use of "cap bits".

Direct3D 11 runtime introduces Direct3D 9, 10, and 10.1 "feature levels", compatibility modes which allow use of only the hardware features defined in the specified version of Direct3D. For Direct3D 9 hardware, there are three different feature levels, grouped by common capabilities of "low", "med" and "high-end" video cards; the runtime directly uses Direct3D 9 DDI provided in all WDDM drivers.