Kind of exciting. Graphics chip guys will chastise me for not taking into account that their chips are really easy to program, and game developers will get on to me about not getting paid enough and having to work long hours, and gamers will tell me that they can't afford the GeForce3 or R200, but would buy a Kyro II, if only it was the coolest chip on the planet (yeah, I can't figure that one out either). Flame away, boys. I missed ya'.

You have to realize that game developers are just so happy to be developing games that they'll do almost anything to keep coding. They'll torture themselves by figuring out how to do serious object culling at the front-end of the pipeline so that they don't have to make a mess of their Vertex Buffers (VB). They'll run a little VS and PS code here and there, but also stick to the FF for the majority of their code because, that's where the action is, and they're on deadline anyways, but they'll pretend that they're like, really, cool and thrashing the hardware.

They'll accept that getting "to the metal" is cool so, blessed is DirectX for exposing the graphics chip, but they'll back off spending too much time with their artists and animators convincing them that they should use proper skinning techniques to avoid, as much as possible, texture state changes that really bugger up performance because fill rate is still important.

Game developers will take the pain, but just remember that OpenGL got a whole lot easier.