Best way to announce that the hardware does not meet the minimum requirements

Question

     Hi Everybody!!!
     I'm in the process of tiding my App up, and I stumbled into a requirement that needs to be addressed. I'm not quite familiar with the latest trends, so I was wondering if anybody could recommend a way to inform the user if the hardware
to use does not meet the minumum requirements.
     In a nutshell:
 * I just created a game using Direct3D / DirectX 11,
 * I'm using "DrawIndexedInstanced", which means that the videocard to use should meet at least DirectX v10 (my shaders are using model 9_3 but I tested it in a computer with DirectX9 model 3 (or so the nvidia brochure said), and the game pretty
much died in my arms).
 * According to the App Certification Requirements: "if you choose a minimum feature level higher than 9_1, your app must detect at launch whether or not the current hardware meets the minimum requirements. If not, the app must display a message to
the customer detailing the Direct3D requirements."
 * I know how to detect the Direct3D level supported by the current videocard. What I would like to know is how to tell the user that the videocard does not support the minimum requirements.
     I don't have much knowledge about the current trends:
 * I assume that displaying a message box may not be the best option, as that would mean I need to link the MFC layer to do so (the game is in Visual C++ and that's what I would do if it were one of my day-job projects). I'm quite sure that
is too much of a library just to show a message box... not to mention that most likelly the MFC is no longer supported in a Metro application...
 * I was thinking about displaying a nice graphic warning about the issue, but if the D3DDevice1 is not what I expect then I don't think I can be sure that at least it can display the graphic with the information.
 * I'm not quite sure if I should be linking to a .NET Library ("System.Windows.Forms" comes to mind), but then again maybe it's too much of a library for just a messagebox.
 * Then again, displaying that message in a command prompt may not be the best idea either.
     Any help is greatly appreciated!!!
     Best Regards,
     Tarh Ik
Tarh ik

Answer 1

     Hi Chuck,
     I tried your idea, but the game always crashed when calling the DrawIndexedInstanced() function in a computer that only supported DirectX Level 9.1 (plenty of those computers at my day-job, sometimes I swear this office could be
a museum). The crash started as a driver unload call, and after that everything goes down.
     I also tried using the WARP mode, but the performance was horrible, and after a minute of playing I started to have temperature issues with the CPU (I did not see that one coming)
     What I finished doing was to create two sets of shaders (pixel and vertex):
 * If the feature reported by D3D11CreateDevice was 9_3 or above, I'd use my very own and happy shaders, compiled in 9_3 model. Beautiful performance with DrawIndexedInstanced().
 * If on the other hand the feature reported by D3D11CreateDevice was either 9_2 or 9_1, I'd use a set of shaders compiled for level 9_1. That seemed to be enough to draw a couple of images on the screen and tell the user, using my own game elements,
that the computer did not match the hardware requirements.
      It looks like this was a good approach. My game passed the certification test, and it is currently on the AppStore.
      Best Regards,
      Tarh Ik
PS: This posting has been posted "AS IS"
Tarh ik