DirectX 10 Hardware Is Now Obsolete 373
ela_gervaise writes "SIGGRAPH 2007 was the stage where Microsoft dropped the bomb, informing gamers that the currently available DirectX 10 hardware will not support the upcoming DirectX 10.1 in Vista SP1. In essence, all current DX10 hardware is now obsolete. But don't get too upset just yet: 'Gamers shouldn't fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and, more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about. The spec revision basically makes a number of things that are optional in DX10 compulsory under the new standard - such as 32-bit floating point filtering, as opposed to the 16-bit current. 4xAA is a compulsory standard to support in 10.1, whereas graphics vendors can pick and choose their anti-aliasing support currently. We suspect that the spec is likely to be ill-received. Not only does it require brand new hardware, immediately creating a minuscule sub-set of DX10 owners, but it also requires Vista SP1, and also requires developer implementation.'"
Minor version change (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway - the whole business here seems to be to force hardware upgrades by one hand and software upgrades with the other just to be sure that the flow of money is ensured. How long will it take until video drivers are Vista Only - just to force an upgrade to Vista?
Since when is DirectX a standard? (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again, those seven little letters get left out of a "standards" article: d-e f-a-c-t-o.
Catchy title but... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Obsolete"
You could sum up TFA in a single line: "Microsoft discusses future extensions to the DirectX API. The current generation of hardware won't support those."
Are anyone really surprised? Newsworthy?
So DX10.0 Hardware doesnt support 10.1? (Score:4, Insightful)
You have 10.0 hardware and want it to support 10.1?
Please stop posting such nonsense, or would you cry foul if your SSE3 CPU doesnt support SSE4 when its available?
Re:Catchy title but... (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Some people (like many on Slashdot) hate MS and want them to fail, thus look for anything that makes them look bad and make sure it gets page time.
2) For some reason, some people had the perception that because DX10 was launched with Vista, that made it special and thus it wouldn't be changed for a long time. Never mind that MS has released a version of DirectX that has added a significant feature (as in something that needs more hardware) every 1-2 years in the past.
3) Perhaps because of this many people bought in to the DX10 cards expecting them to be "futureproof". Again no idea why anyone would think that given graphics cards are the things that evolve the fastest and thus obsolete the fastest.
Also I'm not so sure they said it wouldn't support it. Maybe I misread their slides, but all I saw was they said that "upcoming hardware" will support it. That statement doesn't mean that current hardware won't.
Either way, much ado about nothing. Games will continue to be made to support whatever hardware is common on the market. Game companies love all the flashy new toys, but they are in bussiness to make money and you do that by selling games that run on the actual systems that are out there. That means so long as most peopel don't have cards capable of using a new standard, they won't require it (though they may support it to give mroe eye candy to the eairly adopters).
Heck, right now you'll discover that a great number of games require nothing more than a DirectX 8 accelerator. That's a card like a GeForce 4 Ti fore example. Basically that means shader model 1.1 hardware. While many games support 2.0 and 3.0 (DX 9.0 and 9.0c respectively) you'll find that a good number don't require 2.0, and very few require 3.0. The reason is that there are still a lot of people using older cards. Not every one upgrades every year. Thus game makers have to take that in to account.
It's not like the second 10.1 comes out developers are going to say "Ok, everyone better upgrade because this is all we support!" They could try, and they'd just go out of business and other, smarter, developers would support the hardware that more people have.
Heck it is a pretty recent phenomena that developers have stopped supporting Windows ME for games, and some still do. Why? Enough people still used it.
Re:Is the developers tipping point reached? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
I am running OS X here and all my games are OS X native but you don't need DX 10 enabled Vista to browse game forums
The absolute need for Vista to run DX 10 killed it from the beginning. The DX 10 and Vista respectively. I am sure lots of game developers who coded direct3d only stuff questioned their choice and started to look to recent OpenGL advancements.
I am hoping they finally started to figure risks of using a MS only technology rather than platform independent, documented frameworks such as OpenGL, OpenAL.
Did MS care to explain what kind of undocumented,hidden quantum computing (!) routines in Vista needed for DX 10 running?
You think that "Linux user" wouldn't have clue but you forget WINE factor. If I had a problem with a missing dll in DirectX, I would talk to WINE people
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Where is OpenGL when we need it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Nobody would dare claim "Upgrade your OS so you can run OpenGL 3 on your compliant hardware".
MS spent billions to DirectX and converting some naive/beginner developers exactly for this reason. To control. Companies/Developers like ID Software, Blizzard spent extra millions as an answer. They are using OpenGL and OpenAL not because "they are 133t", they use it to minimise effects of such crap by MS. They don't want MS dictating users which OS to run using their millions of man hours as excuse.
This should be a clue for those
The extra price of OpenGL and OpenAL comes from the fact that they are intended for real developers, not some people pointing and clicking in Visual Studio and claim they are game developers.
Re:Where is OpenGL when we need it? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think what you say makes a lot of sense, except the last phrase. If games are easier to write (skipping over the effectiveness/perceived effectiveness of any 'platform'), then there are more people writing games and becoming developers, which would make the game market more competitive, and thusly we would have better games!
I can't see any reason why game development should not be point and click, if they made something like OpenGL easier to write for, I think it would be a positive for the game market, and might bring a viable alternative to Microsoft
Re:Oh no! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where is OpenGL when we need it? (Score:5, Insightful)
From the SDL website:
From http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/AboutGFW/Page s/DirectX10.aspx [gamesforwindows.com] :
No, it is not a joke. Yes, they are comparable.
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait... (Score:2, Insightful)
The last thing a hardcore gamer is going to do is get an OS that eats up processor ticks in the background when we want the game to be the sole user of the processor. (I know, it's over-simplifying the entire issue.) Moving to DirectX 10, which means moving to a resource hungry OS, when very few games support it is really silly. Oblivion still has a hard time crunching the data is some areas on my PC. (E6600 Intel, 2GB OCX RAM, nVidia 7900GS OC'd, 19" widescreen at 1440x900, HDR and distant rendering on)
This is one deluded discussion... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
I can explain that one. I read a post a while back where someone who was in the know explained it (it was on one of the Microsoft blogs, I think). DX 10 contained virtualized graphics memory (that may not be the right term). Like system memory, each program would get it's own addresses and you could page in and out graphics data. This is a big feature. It also required kernel and GDI changes. This is why DX 10 could only run on Vista.
Someone (I think it was NVidia), couldn't get it done in time.
So it ended up optional in the spec (or moved out completely, I don't remember). The people who did do it (ATI, I think) got an unfair shake. Now without that feature, there is no technical reason DX 10 can't be run on XP without a few small innocuous changes. But they don't have time at this point (or a business reason).
DX 10 being only on Vista was based on a very valid techical reason... that they gave up on and removed.
DX != OGL (Score:3, Insightful)
I would love to see more PC games developers target OpenGL, but for that to happen the little things that make DirectX attractive need to either be brought to OpenGL or to an open support API that accompanies OpenGL.
BTW There are companies that have attempted to port DX to other platforms, but they never seem to go anywhere and games companies who developer for DX don't usually seem to care about other platforms anyhow.
Re:Wait... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wait... (Score:2, Insightful)
This is the reason why many people don't take Linux seriously, because so many of you actually believe this.
Re:Wait... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
But way back when, I always wondered why a company like valve took an opengl engine and ported it to directx (for hl1) when no one would argue that directx was better then. Hell, carmack had his famous open letter to microsoft to ensure support for opengl. Microsoft saw how big gaming was becoming, and the best way to tie your users to one platform was to tie the developers to one platform. If hl1 was opengl only when it exploded, maybe companies like ati would have got in gear and developed better (i.e. not shit) opengl drivers. Either that or miss on out the huge hit that was/is counterstrike. I'm not saying valve was the lynchpin in how things ended up. But if big players like them stuck to opengl, more companies might be willing to port as their games would be opengl based anyway.
So why valve did that at that time I'll never understand, but microsoft understood the market in this case, all too well.
Why aren't there more game developers like id software who actually care? Carmack has said in the past he tries to keep everything crossplatform not because it's necessarily the profitable move, but because 'it's a good thing'.
For the extra features, I'm guessing (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, AFAIK DirectX offers more features than just rendering. If you'll run "dxdiag", you'll see that it has more tabs and more DLLs listed than just Direct3D and DirectDraw. There's also stuff like DirectSound, DirectInput, DirectPlay, and a bunch of other stuff.
So if you want to make your game portable by not using any DirectX stuff, well, you'll have to write your own equivalent for that other stuff. That translates directly into higher development costs, plus God knows if your own stuff will work as well, and what bugs will it have.
(We all like to pretend that we can write better code in one afternoon than MS in 10 years, but that's actually hardly ever the case. That's more usually just a mixture of hubris and an excuse to write one's own code instead of learning how to use a library. The former is simply more fun than the latter. Don't get me wrong, there _is_ stuff out there that does work better than MS's stuff, but that one too wasn't written in a day or two.)
You also face the issue that, traditionally, most graphics cards have been optimized for DirectX, since that's what the lion's share of the market uses. Traditionally, Nvidia tends to do well in OpenGL too, ATI less so. (Plus, if you actually plan to port it to Linux, there ATI's drivers traditionally are an inside joke. Not a funny one, either.) So the choice to go OpenGL instead of Direct3D also means that a bunch of gamers will post "OMG, your game has crap frame rates" or "OMG, your game doesn't work on my computer." And be quite justified in doing so, btw.
So, there you go. As long as 99% of the PC gamers are running Windows, it makes no sense to annoy those to appease the fragmented rest of the market.
Being able to emulate or dual-boot Windows... well, takes even more out of the motivation there. Windows compatibility is how OS/2 committed seppuku, after all. If OS/2 people can just emulate your program, well, there's no reason for you to put any effort and money into porting it. The same applies to the Mac and Linux market currently, to some extent.
I don't know why everyone is getting worked up. (Score:3, Insightful)
DirectX 10 other than a few limp patches and demos does not exist, hardware accelerated physics nope not yet, SLI or Dual and Quad GPU's hardly give a return on the investment unless you are running multiple monitors, etc etc etc. None of this is worth getting worked up about. Unplug out brain from the marketing driven fanboy/hater game and just enjoy ride. Graphics and computing power is fabulous compared to what it was just a few years ago, and the fact that MS has set an actual standard is kick ass so that when you go out and buy a card and game that says DX10 on the side you can actually count on it being exactly what it says it is. That beats the "good ol" days before DirectX where you had to wait for your graphic card manufacturer or the game publisher to come out with a patch so that your graphics card would be supported and when they didn't you were just shit out of luck.
Re:Where is OpenGL when we need it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Some clarification: Doom 3/Quake 4 is an OpenGL title. They use DirectX for the DirectInput and DirectSound APIs, I believe. Doom 3 had to use EAX for sound output, I'm sure - I'm just not familiar with it. WoW is a DirectX title with an OpenGL engine (like War3): It uses DirctX for graphics by default, but with the -opengl switch, it uses OpenGL for graphics, which works better for NVIDIA and Wine users and is a carryover from Mac OS X support.
Re:More juice! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:More juice! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where is OpenGL when we need it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Only indirectly. It sits on top of OpenGL. They are comparable in that--as the descriptions of both show--they do almost exactly the same thing, but SDL is cross-platform. Seems to me that you're being exceptionally pedantic, if they do the same thing then they are comparable, how they do it is irrelevant.
How's about a car analogy? An electric car and a petrol car are comparable, they are both cars even though the way they work is completely different. SDL and DirectX are comparable because they both provide an abstraction layer to low-level 3D/2D graphics, input devices and sound.
Re: Wait... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:For the extra features, I'm guessing (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenAL titles work fine though.
And... oddly enough... the thing MS changed to in Vista for the sound was what xbox is using... thus making it easier to port back and forth.
Now surely, SURELY, MS didn't toss out a many years standard just to make it easier for themselves to port sound.
Surely they aren't THAT evil.