IHVs
providing their own Direct3D 10 implementation
As every solution we have looked at so far requires some work from Microsoft, it is very unlikely that any of them will ever happen. Therefore we have to look for someone else to bring Direct3D 10 to Windows XP. The GPU IHVs already have the necessary driver code. But they don’t have the kernel mode system and the user mode runtime. They could not change the kernel, but as already noted it would be possible to add the necessary functions to the driver. This would solve the problem on one end, but on the other side the runtime is still missing. Like OpenGL support for the Windows9x product line, they could provide their own replacement for these DLLs --but such an approach would make it difficult to reach 100% compatibility. Providing such a solution as an official part of a Windows XP driver would probably open the door to lawsuits. Adding this factor to the time required to develop something like this, and the fact that during this development period more and more new systems with Vista preinstalled would be sold, it becomes unlikely that we will see something like this.
