DirectX9+ in layman terms please

[TheChemist]

Hi,

If I am not mistaken, Parallels supports DirectX 8.1 at the moment, while MS is at DirectX 10.

Could someone explain to me in layman terms what the obstacles are in bridging this DirectX version gap?

I'm asking because at the moment I need to turn off all acceleration to allow my chemistry software to function properly (in parallels that is). This affords a hit in performance compared to my P4 machine.

This got me to thinking as to why such a performance hit was experienced, which leads me here.

I am not very computer savvy, so please keep this in mind when answering my question.

Thanks

[frankie]

Could someone explain to me in layman terms what the obstacles are in bridging this DirectX version gap?

DirectX provides "direct" access to special purpose hardware (graphics card, audio, etc) on the PC. This obviously cannot be done by a virtual machine (hence the name "virtual") so most DirectX commands need to be translated, passed up to the host OS, then the output interpreted and returned to the guest.

Parallels uses DirectX code from the WINE project, whose latest stable release supports 8.1 (or at least enough of it to be usable). WINE says 9.0 support is coming soon, but v10 is a ways off.

http://wiki.winehq.org/DirectX-ToDo
http://sourceforge.net/projects/directxwine/