DX10 fun.. Whats to come??

Is it just me, or is anyone else excited about the DX10 potential, now that real life cards are available?

Reading the specs on the 8800 and the SM4 stuff, it just seems like a whole new world is opening up.

Not that I'm suggesting indies necassarily go down that route, but it DOES open up potential for us IF we care to go down the "high end tech" kind of route.

For instance, well, instancing :) that opens up a world of really high quality RTS style stuff.

Or the increase in shader constants, lends itself to a load of things.

Then there's the possibilities of things like truly tesselated deformable water with the geometry shader.

So many things. Of course it wont actually make making games any easier. But it does open up some new ground (I think), much more than any previous push in technology since the introduction of shaders I guess.

At least for those of us interested in graphics research its a nice time. What with Quad-core CPU's and high-end SLI enabled 8800 graphics cards. I could spend the money that would buy me a small car on a PC easily!

Hey.. next week I'm at a conference with Ken Perlin! so I'm kind of revelling in graphics-ness right now! :)

Phil.