Gamespot has an interesting article about Gaming on Microsoft's newest baby, Windows Vista. Check out the mouseover shots of DirectX9 screenshots versus DirectX10. Direct X 10 makes the graphics look more alive but these are just first generation DirectX 10 games so i expect DX10 games a year or two down the road to look much much better

The general public may struggle with the decision over whether to move from Windows XP to Windows Vista, but there isn't much to agonize over for PC game fans--if you want to play games with advanced DirectX 10 graphics, you're going to have to upgrade to Vista. Windows XP owners will be left behind in the graphically inferior world of DirectX 9 once Vista arrives. The real debate for PC game fans is when to upgrade to Vista.

For PC gamers, Windows Vista is pretty much a next-generation gaming platform launch happening in slow motion. The operating system has been available since last year as a closed, then public, beta, and the hardware arrived last November, when nvidia shipped the world's first DirectX 10 GPUs, the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS. The cards themselves shipped with excellent Windows XP drivers, but Nvidia held off on releasing Vista drivers until now. The actual OS and hardware package finally came together today for the official launch of Windows Vista.