UltraMobile Life are reporting that the VIA Unichrome GPU supports DirectX9.
That isn’t my understanding. I said so in a blog comment yesterday and its probably the reason for Bjorns posting.
I have always understood that the VIA Unichrome GPU does not support DirectX 9. I understood that the extensions were not supported in hardware.
This could be the reason for the confusion. You can run DirectX9 software but its not supported in hardware perhaps? I should have made it clearer in my comments. Apologies to VIA about that.
This still needs clearing up so I’ll contact someone about this, but I do agree with UltraMobileLife on one thing, Vista runs on the VIA-C7 based UMPCs and Aero Glass support is not needed to run Vista. For proof, see this video about Vista running on a VIA-based UMPC.
Regards
Steve.
November 29th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
You wont gain anything from DirectX9 in VIA C7 because there is not any acceleration. In fact, in those video players that I have tested in my eo I had to disabled anything relative with VMR9. So, yes, probably we were wrong to say that DirectX 9 was not supported but at the same time we are right. Via just can’t handle the DirectX9 or the other way around, DirectX9 does not handle properly the Via Graphic chipset.
About Via supporting Vista, yes, it does. I have right now Vista installed in my eo v7110 and it works better than XP.
November 29th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
Hi Ctitanic
I think you’re talking about MPEG2/4/WMV9 acceleration. Thats something else unrelated to DX9. In the eo v7110 the chipset can potentially do MPEG2 in hardware. There isn’t much player software under Windows that supports that, true.
DirectX9 does things like pixel shading though. Important for games.
This article from the VIA-supported VIA Arena site is interesting.
http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=5&ArticleID=365
You’ll see that it says that no Via IGP is Direct X 9 compatible. I’ve also read this many times before.
Regards
Steve.