[geRV]

Doom 3 is an opengl game, it never required anything more than having hardware transform and lighting on your graphics card. It was originally designed with the capabilities of the geforce 256 in mind. Halflife 2 just used a bunch of shaders on the engine, they wanted to cater to the low-end more because the majority of halflife 1 users are still on low-end pc's.

BF2..i dunno what dice are doing to make it a dx9 requirement, it has a few nifty effects like if you stand close to a tank when it fires you get a screen blurring shell shock kind of effect, its similar to what was in call of duty but seeing as call of duty was an opengl game its possible that dx9 might have been a requirement to produce this effect in a direct 3d engine. Ea do seem to be cutting off quite a lot of users by doing this dx9 spec, the game does look good though and thers probably more dx9 use going on under the hood of the engine that may not be very obvious just by looking at the game.