DirectX 10 Only On Vista 216
Next Generation is reporting that DirectX 10 will only be released for Windows Vista. Those of us puttering along with XP will have to make do with 9. From the article: "The exclusivity of DirectX 10 means that in order to enjoy the high-end features of next-generation GPUs, gamers will need to adopt Vista. Some end users are upset with Microsoft, as the move effectively forces gamers to buy Vista if they do intend to remain serious about cutting-edge PC gaming." It may even be worth it for titles like Crysis.
Of course. (Score:5, Insightful)
I can only speak for myself but from what I've heard, Vista will offer few enhancements over XP that I really need in an OS. Better searching? [microsoft.com] I don't particularly need it, but Google Desktop. IE7? [microsoft.com] Not a chance, Firefox has me hooked and has many more features. "Gadgets"? [microsoft.com] No thanks, but Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets) if you wanted them.
Additionally, I'm still concerned about Microsoft's (and other companies') plan to control our PCs [cam.ac.uk], even though we haven't heard a lot about it recently. So by the time Vista comes out, I'm likely going to move over to a Linux distribution, probably either Ubuntu or Gentoo, and this is really the only thing I might still want out of Windows: gaming.
This move smacks of Microsoft-brand lock-in, and it still won't convince me to move.
Re:Of course. (Score:2, Insightful)
back on topic, you do seem to be right, they do need to try and give people a reason to buy Vista but what makes me wonder is what they are going to offer for the version after Vista. MS said th
Re:Of course. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Of course. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
You can use "fedora" in a sentence and still appear to be speaking English.
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
Here [withaswing.com] is a picture of what one looks like. Red Hat got its name because its founder wore a red baseball cap, and was known as "that guy in the red hat." When he made his own Linux distribution, he took that name. Later on when he started the Fedora project, I guess he grabbed a name of a hat that people would recognize to go along with the theme. "Fedora" probably sounds friendlier than "baseball cap" or "football helmet" anyway.
Fedora (Score:2)
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
WTF? What about "Linux" and "GNU libc"?
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
I personally like Ubuntu more than Fedora. I took a couple classes in Fedora/Red Hat, but for home use I find Ubuntu more user-friendly. For windows switchers though I recommend either Mepis or Linspire. Ubuntu is only for newbies excited to use the command line.
Re:Of course. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
1. The new driver model is more restrictive than in previous versions of Windows, for security reasons, so it's not like there's some cool new feature that DirectX is hooking into. Maybe having the desktop (AeroGlass) use 3D acceleration makes things easier on DirectX 10, but it could just as easily make things more complicated.
2. Vista still has to maintain a large amount of backwards compatibility with DirectX 9 (and possibl
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
Ever since Apple did the OSX switch and STILL provided legacy support through the Intel switch (which is a 6 year cycle EOL cycle), I've gained the utmost respect for Apple's developers and have lost faith in Microsoft (Yes, I was an MCSE card holder at one time).
Their reasons are purely profit, shareholder, and market driven. - nothing wrong with that though in my book.
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
I don't trust companies that claim to be motivated by anything else. Greed makes one predictable; predictability is the foundation of trust.
You and he don't get it still (Score:3, Insightful)
What you have to ask yourselve if this "need" was introduced or not. Would MS have been capable of doing DirectX 10 as a patch to XP? I think so. They didn't choose to do so but it had nothing to do with technical
Re:Of course. (Score:4, Informative)
I can't figure out whether people actually believe the "Vista is just XP with a new skin" /. meme, or they just propagate it for mod points...
Either way, our friend Wikipedia has plenty of information [wikipedia.org] about the new features in Vista. In particular, note the following:
The Direct3D page [wikipedia.org] has more information.
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
Vista is a different OS in my eyes as there is the DRM issue that is as tied to the OS as Internet Explorer was tied to Windows 98-XP.
Good luck with that.
Re:Of course. (Score:3, Funny)
Cheers.
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
If Microsoft doesn't want to back-port their DirectX 10 to pre-Vistas and, in essence, make it a selling feature of their Vista then who are you to babble marketing advice?
If game companies choose to develop in DirectX 10, at the risk at loosing customer base, then so be it... its their choice.
With all the crying on
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
I'm confused at what you're actually trying to say here.
Re:Of course. (Score:2)
Of course, Linux is not Windows, as I always say, but perhaps Linux is capable of pretending to be Windows.
Re:Of course. (Score:5, Insightful)
If this means no more software is available to me because I won't upgrade, then I guess I won't be buying any of it. At $50 USD / video game, producers will need to think long and hard before releasing any "Vista Only" titles. (Hell, some are still releasing titles that can work on Windows 98.) Would you risk the revenue of a ten million dollar title betting on Microsoft's ability to pimp their newest OS? Are you going to be the one to explain to your boss "It only sold 200,000 copies because the guys who pirate software won't move to Vista."
OS lock-in can work both ways. Let's play this one to our advantage. Boycott Vista.
Re:Of course. (Score:3, Insightful)
A bunch of posts here are making that same point: Microsoft may effectively be stagnating DirectX development because many game companies will refuse to make games in pure DX10 format, as that would cut out a significant chunk of their potential userbase. If they make this and future versions of DX10 Vista-only, I predict that OpenGL or an entirely new graphic language will eventually take the place of DirectX as the de facto game API.
Re:Of course. (History Repeats) (Score:2)
MS pulled this stunt with DX5 and NT 4/2K.
Even though someone took the DX5 Win2K beta drives, and got them working on NT4, Microsoft refused to support DX5 on NT4 simply because they wanted to sell (gamers included) a new OS.
Re:Of course. or why I have insufficient memory (Score:2, Insightful)
I disagree on this one. I've consistently heard people complaining about Windows being bloated, but Windows 2000 and Windows XP run just fine with 192 megs of RAM.. sure, more RAM will incur less swapping, but it's certainly very usable. My VMware emulated Windows XP Pro system uses 192 megs of RAM and i
Re:Of course. or why I have insufficient memory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Of course. or why I have insufficient memory (Score:3, Insightful)
Minimum requirments for XP to run is 64MB on a 233Mhz processor.
Vista's minimum requirements are 512MB on an 800Mhz processor.
Microsoft recommended 128MB minimum for XP but we all know that 512MB is really what you need to use it effectively.
I'd say Vista would need 2Gig to run as a workstation as we know that their filesystem performance degrades with that pagefile problem they have.
Face it people (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Face it people (Score:2)
Sounds like an opportunity for OpenGL (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like an opportunity for OpenGL (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:Sounds like an opportunity for OpenGL (Score:2)
Re:Sounds like an opportunity for OpenGL (Score:2)
-matthew
Re:Sounds like an opportunity for OpenGL (Score:2)
OpenGL has this little thing called "extensions [wikipedia.org]" that allow GPU manufacturers to add features to their card without waiting for a new version of OpenGL to be released. So game developers don't have to wait for a new version of a specification from Microsoft that could take years to be available to the general public if they use OpenGL. If an extension get
So... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:2, Flamebait)
DirectX is a whole suite of multimedia api's with sound and networking and is ahead of SDL. (From what I heard, I dont develop games)
Also Opengl is fragmenting and becoming stagnant as Opengl was sold to Microsoft from SGI. It seems the card makers are now coming up with their own proprietary versions.
-1, Moron? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, and MS left the ARB a while back.
Re:-1, Moron? (Score:2)
Nvidia and ATI develop their own proprietary extensions and release their own opengl dlls that are seperate from Windows. I think Vista and XP use Opengl 1.5 though Opengl 2.0 is out. Again I dont develop games so I could be wrong.
The patent covering OpenGL and some api's were sold to Microsoft. But its true its not the whole thing.
DirectX10 comes with alot more stuff if you look into it and because of this the card makers try to match the implementation with the
Graphical apps? (Score:2)
I'm quite aware of the proprietary extensions. OpenGL has a well-documented extension process, which ATI and NVI have used extensively. Many of those extensions were rolled into standard OpenGL (pbuffers being the most important one for me) as the standard developed.
NVI and ATI have had OpenGL 2.0 compliant drivers for some time now. Windows has never shipped with OpenGL compliance higher t
Re:So... (Score:2)
Re:So... (Score:2)
Re:So... (Score:2, Informative)
Also, d3d10 introduces a general purpose graphics shader which can be used to create vertices. In directx9 and
OpenGL (Score:2, Redundant)
LetterRip
Re:OpenGL (Score:2)
Re:OpenGL (Score:2)
Re:OpenGL (Score:2)
Re:OpenGL (Score:2)
I am not really a Microsoft fan, at all, (Score:4, Insightful)
But, really, I don't really see anything wrong with this, nor do I see it as all that different from what Apple has done with its various releases of OS X. For example, Tiger introduced all sorts of cool new developer functionality, like Core Data and Core Video (I believe Core Image was already present in some capacity in Panther, but I may be getting my APIs mixed up). These were/are great for developers, but the side effect of them being used means that the resulting apps are Tiger-only.
Isn't it essentially the same with Vista and DirectX? Certainly, it's a pragmatic, business decision - but it's hard for me to fault Microsoft for it.
Re:I am not really a Microsoft fan, at all, (Score:2)
Re:I am not really a Microsoft fan, at all, (Score:2)
Same basic deal (Score:2)
I don't think developers should be under a particular obligation to backport new feature
Re:I am not really a Microsoft fan, at all, (Score:2)
So I guess a lot of gamers will upgrade to Vista when they upgrade their graphics card to a Direct X 10.
The rest on the other hand? But gamers _are_ a huge crowd noadays, aren't they?
Re:I am not really a Microsoft fan, at all, (Score:2)
same, yet different (Score:2)
You're right: it isn't all that different. What is different is that Microsoft has somewhere around 80-90% market share, and Apple has a few percent. That's why Apple can get away with doing things that would land Microsoft in federal court.
In any case, making DX10 Vista-only is probably still OK, even for Microsoft. On the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, it will probably mean that I will put a lot of ga
Re:I am not really a Microsoft fan, at all, (Score:2)
The difference is that a huge market of a specific type of software is not dependent on any of what you mentioned. 98% -- or more -- of the games market for Windows is dependent on DirectX 10. Furthermore, users of the Core development apps are not a huge proportion of Apple's customers, whereas again, gamers are a huge proportion of the Windows market. I think this is an apples to oranges comparison.
OpenGL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Crazy Talk! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Crazy Talk! (Score:2)
Re:Crazy Talk! (Score:2)
Dx3,5,7,9 were all backward compatible to Win98 app
Re:Crazy Talk! (Score:2)
http://www.nvidia.com/object/win9x_81.98.html [nvidia.com]
Apparently.
Slow Adoption? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Slow Adoption? (Score:2)
No, but every MS-owned game will suddenly now require DX10 I bet. And they make a good number of games (more than I once thought) in a wide variety of genres. All it takes is one or two "must-play" games to get someone to upgrade to Vista.
Looks like I'll get Spore on the Wii then (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I think this is a bad decision by them, but I'm sure Microsoft made some kind of deal that worked for them.
So DX10's delayed? (Score:2)
Games market? (Score:5, Insightful)
What does this mean for the games market? It seems to me that few developers/publishers are going to want to limit themselves to only a portion of their current market by developing a DirectX 10-only game - at least not until Vista is on well over half of Windows machines, which is likely to take a couple of years. This is especially likely considering the current cutthroat state of the PC games market, where the bar to entry in the top-sellers list is extremely high (not to mention that it's dominated by innovation-fearing publishers who would rather spend their money marketing recycled games built on DirectX 9 than fund a whole new engine for a DirectX 10 game).
My prediction is that only a few DirectX 10-only games will be seen in the first year after Vista's release, and most of them will be mediocre Microsoft titles. The only other thing I can think of is if a game could be made that takes advantage of DirectX 10 when available but falls back on DirectX 9 otherwise; in this case, I'd expect to see a handful of FPS games touting optional usage of DirectX 10 features.
--
On the user end of things, most people aren't going to rush out and buy a new OS. Most people aren't going to know whether Vista will run on their system, much less what the advantages/disadvantages would be, so they will simply wait until their current system gets too old and will have Vista pre-installed on their next PC.
I'm guessing that a lot of people will be upgrading within the next year, though, as I've seen indications that a large number of people are, for example, still using early AMD64 CPUs and GeForce 5xxx and 6xxx video cards.
Re:Games market? (Score:2)
Vista would ensure a nice system that is known to work well and would limit your QA costs by limiting your hardware.
This is what happened with WIndows95. Game makers loved it not because of directX 1.0 but because it made users use SVGA cards and systems with 16 megs of ram rather than 4. Most app
Re:Games market? (Score:3, Interesting)
Doing something that cuts your QA costs isn't such a good move when it cuts your potential revenue by multiples of your entire budget.
If Vista uptake occurs at the same speed as XP uptake, writing a Vista Only game would make as much sense as writing a Linux Only game for quite a while. Microsoft has a chicken and egg problem. Game exclusivity could speed Vista adoption, but Vista adoption has
Re:Games market? (Score:2)
Re:Games market? (Score:2)
Assuming that Microsoft knows/agrees with all of this, it could be that the DirectX 10 move is just a technical one to save
Old News (Score:5, Informative)
There's actually very good technical reasons it can't be back-ported to XP and that's because it's changing the entire paradigm of the way the Windows OS works with the video card. The GPU and video RAM are being treated as OS resources that are time shared and paged in and out in exactly the same way the CPU and main system memory are currently. Simply put, this means at the very basic level that the driver interface (WVDDM) for the video cards is very different, and much thinner but as it is a new driver model, XP won't be able to load it.
So, game development companies are left with the decisions of whether to use DX10 which has a bunch of new features (general purpose geometry shaders that can create and destroy primitives in the pipeline), or maximize compatibility and shoot for DX9 which is being effectively frozen.
The bigger issue for most is that OpenGL becomes a "second class citizen" on Vista as any use of it outside full screen rendering effectively turns off the entire Aero interface. Users are going to notice this, and apps using OpenGL will get bad feedback for "breaking the interface when they run".
Re:Old News (Score:2, Interesting)
--PEACE!
Re:Old News (Score:2)
There's no technical reason for the gui to go away, they just want to drive everyone to switch to
Re:Old News (Score:3, Informative)
also, OpenGL apps, which require exclusive access to the video card, will cau
Re:Old News (Score:2)
What is worse is Microsoft is refusing to update to Openg2.0 claiming security and I believe they now own opengl now (correct me if I am wrong folks?).
THis means the card makers will come out with more broken proprietary opengl versions. If I were a game maker it would be a nightmare finding bugs doing opengl due to the different implementa
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Old News (Score:2)
Re:Old News (Score:2)
Yepp, MS trying to break OpenGL again. You can't say they aren't persistent.
Re:Old News (Score:3, Informative)
From http://blogs.msdn.com/kamvedbrat/archive/2006/02/2 2/537624.aspx [msdn.com]:
"Windows Vista ICD's - this is a new path for 3rd party ICD's introduced for Windows Vista that will work in a way that is compatible with desktop composition. Essentially allowing direct acce
*gasp* (Score:2)
Re:*gasp* (Score:4, Informative)
Re:*gasp* (Score:2)
OpenGL? (for the sake of new conversation) (Score:3, Interesting)
this will blow up in their face (Score:2)
Re:this will blow up in their face (Score:2)
Game developers will code to DX9 for the forseeable future and possibly include a DX10 rendering path for power users. While DX10 won't be on XP Vista will run DX9 titles.
This is happening right now with XP (Score:2, Insightful)
I never "upgraded" past 2k - XP didn't have anything I needed or wanted.
When Age of Empires III came out, I bought it, as I did with all of the other Age of Empires games and expansions. No luck - the game "requires XP" to function. Not that it really does - there are undocumented switches to let it install on 2k, and it works fine (the demo was the same way). Ditto Rise of Legends, *another* game that MS bought that
Re:This is happening right now with XP (Score:3, Informative)
Setver did the opposite. A lot of software was hardcoded to expect certain DOS versions, often because it hooked into DOS internals, or made assumptions that were not guarenteed to be correct in different versions of DOS. Setver was an MS utility that came with DOS to let you
Big gamble (Score:3, Insightful)
95 take up was big because it really offered a huge difference between dos/windows 3.11 but still all the big companies stuck with supporting dos for a long time yet.
Vista offers far less and people have become wary of buying newly released microsoft software. How many of you waited when XP was launched to see if it was going to be another ME? Certainly no games were XP only for a very long time.
A game developer making a vista only game now is betting not only on MS actually shipping Vista on time, wich they can only do by redefining the term on time or with a timemachine, but also that it will be taken up by gamers.
The problem is that games nowadays have a very narrow window of hotness. Say a new game is launched, I need to have it but don't have the hardware. A month later I will have cooled off and just decide to get the game when it is on budget and I got the hardware. If I can't play it at launch I can just play it a year later fully patched and with complete walkthroughs.
Will Vista sell? Shall we be honest here? How many gamers have pirated copies? Live is expensive enough as it is and XP ain't cheap. Oh sure lots of people get it free with their machine from Dell but how many gamers buy from Dell? I steal my licenses from machines I free with linux (sorta illegal since they ain't mine but wtf. MS is getting free money for software never used because of their tax system).
If vista improves on the anti-piracy front then many gamers will be faced with the question of buying new hardware, new OS and that new game. With the PS3 and the Wii also shining seductivly in the stores.
Vista will take off on new computers but I think that like XP take off on already existing computers will be slow.
MS seems to agree and is setting artificial reasons for people to upgrade.
I don't think MS is going to be in trouble. XP takeup might not have been what they hoped but they still are earning billions so who cares. Game companies might be in for a shock though. If people don't buy the OS you set as a requirement you ain't getting the cash. MS can afford an ME. What game company can?
Re: (Score:2)
vista adoption (Score:3, Informative)
WPF is being back-ported to service pack 2 according the the wikipedia article. The powershell has already been released for xp. Directx 10 won't have games coming out for it for quite a while... what features exactly does that leave for vista?
XP offered a major upgrade in stability, to the point where it's almost on par with most other operating systems, an that was the selling point. What's Vista's selling point? Seriously, after all these years of development, does it have 1 single exclusive killer feature?
So far, the only thing I've seen are improved themes and hi res icons... I'd heard about built in virtualization in the past, but that hasn't been mentioned for quite a while. Was that dropped?
Virtualization support (Score:2)
Re:vista adoption (Score:2)
The few times I've ever had Windows XP crash were hardware (CPU overheating) or driver (Creative Labs SBLive with 128MB+ soundfont loaded) related.
There's a few reasons it crashes less:
really? (Score:2)
Oh, really? As if that is a surprise. When's the last time MS did not use every dirty trick in the book in order to force itself into a market or its products unto "customers"?
Inevitable (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm getting away from MS as much as I can because of crap like this. My computer, my rules... you wanna force rules on me, you don't come onto my computer. I just can't be bothered to play about with MS-based computers any more just to get a poxy game to run.
I don't care whether or not it offers new features or is given away free in cereal or everyone else in the world uses it, I'm keeping MS stuff strictly away from my own machines. I didn't want DirectX but numerous upgrades were forced on me by the games I wanted to play, and many of the upgrades killed performance or broke the install.
Each time, I still ended up with a game that performed better under OpenGL (almost any Quake/Half-Life based game for instance) or could EASILY have been replicated without using any sort of acceleration library satisfactorily (Age of Empires II springs to mind - nothing in it that NEEDS DirectX and still a massive performance slog through any sort of WINE or similar program and for what? A 2D RTS that shouldn't need ANY fancy stuff to do it's job - hell, DOS versions of Command & Conquer on an old Pentium 133 did the same stuff in similar resolutions without coming NEAR the CPU time used for AOE just to draw a screen on a 1GHz)
I work with MS systems all day long, spending half my time working around stupid quirks and things that should have been in the OS since day one. I get paid to do it there so I tolerate it and almost nothing uses DirectX, even though I work in primary schools. I don't tolerate the amount of setup needed to get a game running at home any more. Those machines that I have reserved as Windows "consoles" are treated as if they are plastered with strict disclaimers:
- Games only. Do not use for serious work.
- And old games at that, unless you feel like upgrading everything to get there and spend hours chasing patches, upgrades, updates, firewalls, drivers and controller setups just to play a crap game that you'll uninstall within a week.
- And even if you do that, there's no guarantee that tomorrow the game won't work because of an update, a new requirement, or something else killing performance to the point where it's unplayable.
In computing terms I'm now firmly considering myself an old fogie and haven't bought a game in a shop for years (unless you count a 50p copy of Warcraft in a local bargain bin), certainly not one I enjoyed playing.
I recently sold off about 75% of my back-catalogue on eBay because I realised I would NEVER play them again - some still had the wrappers on, a surprising amount had been played once and then uninstalled (Black & White, for instance, which I bought based on hype, played through until my creature was taken away from me and then promptly uninstalled... my brother did the exact same when I lent it to him afterwards). I'm sticking with my favourites and re-living some of the classics. Emulators, DosBox and remakes all the way.
If I want anything else, anything newer, I will buy a console. An old one at that. Secondhand with so many games bundled in that I could play forever, all for the price of a single full-price new PC game. If I can't afford a modern console and one game, I won't be able to afford the money for a PC that could run a modern game well enough, or the time to get it working, certainly not when you take into account how much I'd use it for because it WOULD be JUST a console in a fancy wrapper.
I decided a few years ago to not chase the latest and greatest and to stick to what's fun. Counterstrike is the only thing I can't really do on any other OS (My Linux PC's are just too slow to run it even under WINE but, strangely enough, more
There is a legitimate reason for this. (Score:4, Informative)
DX10 is built to take advantage of these new improvements. If they backported it, they'd have to do one of the following:
- Don't take advantage of the new DDM in Vista, and just do an incremental update.
- Backport the entire DDM to XP. This will result in less reasons to buy Vista anyways.
Option 1 was clearly unacceptable if MS wanted to make advancements in PC gaming software tech (stuff). Option 2 is clearly unacceptable from a business standpoint.
I think I know MS's game plan. (Score:2)
Which, I suppose, isn't all that bad a thing. The *nix OSes have such a long lead on all the important featuressystem uptimes, system security, solid code base, etcthat it probably really is best for Microsoft to focus on their XBox systems and cheezy Windows game-focused OS.
I'm pretty sure all the n00bs and
Hum... (Score:3, Insightful)
Forcing people to upgrade? It sounds naughty.
Of course, perhaps games can be created that are backwards compatible with DX9 with merely a reduced featureset to refelect the capabilities of the libraries. The same software will turn around and take advantage of DX10 features.
I would find it nice, however, if game companies made a strategic move by developing games using cross platform libraries (such as SDL, but more advanced) so that they could develop and distribute games rapidly for multiple platforms (read: more linux games?).
Everyone loves great games. Not everyone has the latest computer or version of Windows. If I were a game developer, I might target linux platforms because I'd be comforted to know that my product relies on software that will enable it to enjoy a higher level of system compatibility across the board and better legacy support after it becomes old.
Re:Dupe (Score:2)
Re:Or on the other hand... (Score:2)
Re:Or on the other hand... (Score:2)
How would you know this? DX10 will not be released until next year! Did you get this from the Microsoft marketing machine? They are always great on promises...
Re:5 years ago this wouldn't have worked (Score:2)
PC is mainly Windows, Gaming on a PC _is_ Windows.