I give up on the seach. But DX 10 sounds good:
DirectX 10 will increase game performance by as much as six to eight times. Much of that will be accomplished with smarter resource management, improving API and driver efficiencies, and moving more work from the CPU to the GPU. "The entire API and pipeline have been redesigned from the ground up to maximize performance and minimize CPU and bandwidth overhead," according to Microsoft. Furthermore, "the idea behind D3D10 is to maximize what the GPU can do without CPU interaction, and when the CPU is needed it's a fast, streamlined, pipeline-able operation." Giving the GPU more efficient ways to write and access data will reduce CPU overhead costs by keeping more of the work on the video card.
Hehe, I just found out how to do it. It's like XP. Type in dxdiag at the Run window. Vista doesn't come default with Run on the Start Menu. Go into Toolbars property for that.
Here's a screenshot of it:
Also, I just found something pretty neat. Whenever you save a picture, it shows you a natural thumbnail type view of the image. You never see this on XP. I have like 15 pictures on my Desktop and they're all in small thumbnail like views--acts like a sneak preview of the image file. So neat.