Forgive me if this has been answered; I searched but found nothing conclusive other than discussions of graphics cards.

http://www.megagames.com/news/html/pc/crysisdirectxversionaffectsmultiplayergameplay.shtml

This article, and several similar blurbs I've read, have me concerned.  Servers are seperated into DX9 and DX10 servers.  As stated in the article, DX10 users can play on a DX9 Server, but DX9 cannot play on a DX10 server.  The DX9 also has all the pretty frills taken out. 
The alpha video you showed was gorgeous, and must have been on a DX10 server.  Is the game going to be on a DX10 server?  Or has this whole DirectX thing been resolved?  Those of us with XP would like to know.
[thank goodness I get a student discount on Vista, if I do have to get it...]

Many thanks.

Correct, the server used was on a DX9 box.

Actually, with this new mobo that I'm running, the Windows XP drivers aren't too stable and I was forced to switch to vista (can't do the devel work reliably in Fedora  ) but, to my suprise, my framerates in most games is actually higher than it was in XP. The rest of the time the computer feels significantly slower but in games I'm averaging about 5-10% better. Odd. Only thing I can think of is that I'm running an 8 series Nvidia so mabey the DX10 is working better than expected. CPU really can't feed the video card as is anyway.