It seems gamers won't have to upgrade to Windows Vista as soon as previously anticipated. The problem with XP not being able to run DirectX 10 games will be solved as Microsoft will release DirectX 9.L that is basically DX 10 tweaked in order to work on our 'old' XP (with SP2 of course).

Games like Crytek's Crysis will now be playable on XP and so the only thing we may lack is hardware support as DX 10 graphics cards are not yet available and Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX & GTS will be quite expensive at launch. I hope this year Santa has put aside some serious cash.