Spend enough time reading or writing gaming news and you'll quickly learn that PC gamers on the Internet have an irrepressible capacity to dig through, tweak, and just outright hack every nook and cranny of popular video games. While most of us scratch our heads and wonder why DirectX 10 is still exclusive to Vista—one industrious soul has found a way to enable DirectX 10 features and quality settings in the Crysis demo on Windows XP.

We have seen Vista-only games made to run under XP before but I've never seen anything like this enabled so easily.

If you tweak the configuration files in CVarGroups by copying and pasting the "very high" settings (1st paragraph) IN PLACE of the "high" settings (last paragraph) the game will load the highest possible settings even though the drop-down menus display "high."

Note to Microsoft and Crytek: When gamers find out that all that stands between them and DirectX 10 quality gaming on XP is a simple modification to a config file, your whole "Vista can do gaming things that XP can't" line sounds pretty manufactured—please stop jerking us around, kthx.

There is pretty much zero danger with this mod so I recommend you give it a try. Just make back up copies of any config files you plan to edit. If you get this working, be sure to let us know in the comments!