With all the talk of next-generation consoles—and some very impressive screenshots floating around the web—fans of PC games are naturally wondering whether these powerful new systems are going to “kill” PC games. In a word . . . no.

The upcoming Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are based on DirectX 9 technology, in the case of the 360 it's “DirectX 9 and then a little more.” But DirectX 10 is a whole different animal. It's a major revision to the API, almost a complete rewrite that requires substantially different hardware than the stuff we've seen so far.

Suffice it to say: When DirectX 10 games hit us, they're going to be of a quality that next-gen consoles can't touch.