A recent online survey by Valve points out that, only one in 50 gamers have Windows Vista and DirectX 10 compatible graphics cards to play DirectX 10-based games. It also has found that only 8% PC gamers run Windows Vista. The results of this Valve survey hold significance because Microsoft has announced Vista exclusivity for DirectX 10 prompting panic among PC gamers who don’t have the OS (a majority).

Gabe Newell, president Valve Software, in an interview to a German gaming website, termed the Vista exclusivity of DirectX 10 a “terrible mistake” on part of Microsoft.

Microsoft recently announced that DirectX 10 hardware (read: that graphics card you paid a small fortune for) will not support 10.1, the next version of DirectX.

The announcement was made at Siggraph 2007, the annual international conference on graphics technology run by the Association for Computing Machinery. DirectX 10 currently comes bundled with Windows Vista operating system and is available for download. Much like Windows XP, the first Service Pack (SP1, currently in beta testing) will soon become available to update and improve various aspects of the faulty OS, including the requirement to upgrade from DirectX 10 to 10.1 which will be supported by newer hardware.

The good news is that DierctX 10.1 might be relatively useless in terms of gamers’ needs…