The People Behind DirectX 10

ThinSkin writes "In the first of a three-part series covering the people behind the new DirectX 10, ExtremeTech interviews Microsoft's David Blythe and Chris Donahue to discuss the development, decisions, and future of the new API. They answer several questions such as how different it will be than DX9, why it will only be for Vista (and not for XP), and when we might be able to see it."

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

This is going to be an annoying flamewar on Microsoft by a bunch of people who didn't RTFA.

I was about to comment as well on how Microsoft just wanted to force people to upgrade, but read the article and you can see it was the driver model of the older systems that was the problem. Microsoft took the Apple approach of making things better instead of sticking to the broke, buggy design of Windows that all of you seem love(I am talking about the 97% of you). Honestly, this falls right in line with all the news about Vista(driver and kernel re-designs)

So, to re-cap... The designers chose to not be hindered by the older design decisions and to look towards the future.

Re:Duh

[TubeSteak]

According to TFA, it has something to do with their new driver model, meaning less driver running in kernel mode.

That somehow ties into virtualizing access to the graphics hardware.

You can read the specifics on this page
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1982033 ,00.asp [extremetech.com]

P.S. The Printer Friendly page on extremetech leaves out pictures & perhaps more importantly, leaves out their captions.

Re:Duh

[Utopia]

It says right in the article that DX10 supports the new Vista driver model (which has user mode execution etc.)
Porting it to XP would means having support XP's driver model as well.

Supporting two different driver model means more complexity and less things added to DX10 in the same timeframe.

Re:OpenGL

[cyber-vandal]

Because the more lock-ins Microsoft has the harder it is for users to switch to alternatives.

Re:MS says no to openGL

[omicronish]

DirectX10 and Vista also means Microsoft will drop support for OpenGL in Windows.

Not true; see Kam VedBrat's comments on Vista and OpenGL support [msdn.com]. To summarize, Microsoft will provide an OpenGL 1.4 implementation that sits on top of Direct3D, legacy (XP-era) OpenGL ICDs are supported but will disable Aero, and new OpenGL ICDs may be written that works with Aero.

Finally ate their own words...

[Antony T Curtis]

I remember when Microsoft Windows NT 4 was released with its new in-kernel video drivers. Critics of OS/2 were saying how much better it would be than OS/2 which had the video drivers working in user mode - as DLLs loaded by Presentation Manager.

Sad truth, although it was easily demonstrated that DIVE was faster than DirectX on the same hardware, practically no games were ever written for OS/2 with people citing the critics.

Hopefully with the new driver model, they can address one of DirectX's big shortcomings which has existed since its beginnings - blitting graphics with an obscuring window intersecting it. With DIVE, the fps increases as there is less pixels to blit. DirectX the performance goes down as it makes heavy work with many more kernel-mode/user-mode transitions. Of course, to solve this, Windows games opted for full-screen mode so that there will be no obscuring frames above the window ... but it rather limits the multitasking ability of the system turining it into a fancy DOS.

When I used to play games, I rather enjoyed having the game run in a window next to my wordprocessor... Excellent for turn based games like Civilization.

The bottom line is..

[BadassJesus]

that DirectX 10 forces you to upgrade to Vista, because all the new shiny metal hardware like new GPUs will be made for DX10.

Re:Drivers running in user mode

[pe1chl]

That may be true for the "usual" XF86/X.org driver, but the kernel module for accelerated NVIDIA cards is not a small module just to interface with the hardware.
Else I find it hard to explain that it is over 4MB in size...
(the typical driver module is typically a few tens of KB in size, up to a few hundred for very complex drivers)

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

DX attempts to be as thin as possible to provide something end-users care about: performance.

In most developer's worldview there is something deeply wrong with caring about performance at the expense of architecture.

DirectX is possibly the one API where that worldview is wrong. DX exposes a bottom-up view of the GPU. That's how it's designed; that's why it outperforms OpenGL so spectacularly and that's why game developers - all bottom up developers par excellence - love it so much.

MS have the money to spend on doing architecture "wrong" to achieve high performance. So do games companies. This defines the industry, like it or not.

Re:Why should DirectX 10 support Windows XP?

[NickFortune]

Why should Microsoft make DirectX 10 available for old versions of Windows?

Because they're not a nasty vicious monopolistic corporation hell-bent on extorting every last cent from their customer base, and who would never stoop so low as to refuse to release a key product for a mature platform still well within its support cycle, purely to force an upgrade cycle upon a market that feels no particular need to switch to an unproven product that offers debateable advantages and which will require expenditure on new hardware in most cases?

Opps, sorry. Wrong parallel universe.

Re:ZONK IS BEHIND TACO IN DIRECTXXX ANAL ACTION 37

[Anonymous Coward]

For anyone interested try doing a lookup of the icann info for the anti-slash.org domain.

Then try throwing the phone number back at google and see what you get.

Re:OpenGL

[ichigo 2.0]

Any graphics developer will tell you what a fine API DirectX is.

I've used them both, and while OpenGL isn't a slouch, DX is a lot easier to use (especially in the shader department). Supposedly OpenGL has even that under control nowadays, so it's just a matter of taste, really (and performance, Ati's OpenGL drivers are still buggy).

Re:MS says no to openGL

[ichigo 2.0]

Did you actually read his post?

new OpenGL ICDs may be written that works with Aero.

That's the exact same situation that is in XP at the moment, graphics card manufacturers have an OpenGL ICD included in their drivers.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure here you go [eff.org]. One of a series of articles on the changes that Microsoft is making.