ATI & Nvidia Duke It Out In New Gaming War

geek_on_a_stick writes "I found this PC World article about ATI and Nvidia battling it out over paper specs on their graphics cards. Apparently ATI's next board will support pixel shader 1.4, while Nvidia's GeForce3 will only go up to ps 1.3. The bigger issue is that developers will have to choose which board they want to develop games for, or, write the code twice--one set for each board. Does this mean that future games will be hardware specific?"

Comments

Why DirectX is better

[be-fan]

This story actually gives me a chance to bitch about OpenGL! None of these new features are a part of the standard OpenGL. "Extensions! Extensions!" you shout. However, due to the differences between hardware, you'll end up with ATI and NVIDIA versions of the same extensions, since the ARB won't touch such new/untested features. This makes sense in the pro segment, where hardware is slow to evolve, but in the consumer segment, it will make the API seem antiquated. Plus, the extension mechanism isn't even suited to such uses anyway, since it was meant to expose features, not radically different methods of rendering. And yes, these are radically different. Part of the reason that the GeForce3 has 57 million transistors is that it has to have a standard geometry engine for DirectX 7 and a new vertex shader-based geometry engine.

In the long run, this will make OpenGL unpopular with game developers. Sure guys like Carmack and afford to suck it in and develop to all the extensions, but for a small development house that wants to make an impressive game, they'll go with DirectX to save themselves the development costs. And when they do, there goes the possibility of a native Linux port.

Now there are two solutions to this. First, the ARB could get off their asses and start integrating extensions. This could be problemetic for the pro segment, which wants a stable API. On the other hand, the ARB could fork OpenGL into a pro and a consumer version, but that results in two incompatible APIs. I think Microsoft is doing the right thing by supporting the latest featuers (in essense, baiting all the hardware manufactuers to integrate these features) but it *does* make DirectX unsuitable for pro use.