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The End Of DirectX As We Know It
socram writes "Speaking with ATI and NVIDIA at ECTS allowed us to confirm that after DX9.0, DirectX Graphics is no more. In name only. Microsoft's next set of core presentation and 3D APIs are now under the umbrella of Windows Graphics Foundation and Avalon. Microsoft will still rely on DirectX in name for the rest of the core components, but the graphics API is now under a new name. Look out for WGF 1.0 compatibility on the back of that next generation graphics card's box. Some WGF 1.0 Info!" Update: 09/06 22:27 GMT by T : David Ross of hexus.net points out that this text comes straight from hexus, and should have been credited as such.
I think there are plenty of titles that use opengl
Doom 3's probably the biggest - and even if you hate the game, its very existence means that graphics card manufacturers can't even think about dropping OpenGL support, at least not without alienating a good number of potential purchasers.
Thanks, John Carmack, for keeping OpenGL alive!
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
What are you talking about? OS X has native support for OpenGL capability. It just so happens that some desktop graphics functions such as windows are offloaded to the GPU. OpenGL is the equivalent of DirectX. In fact, now that the ARB finally made a decision on shading languages, OpenGL's OGSL is superior to what Microsoft has to offer.
It's just that Microsoft is finally catching up with Apple in [b]using[/b] GPU functions to control more than just games.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
What about the parts of DirectX that are not about 3D? The article is only about the Direct3D part of DirectX.
I'm using DirectShow a lot myself actually. Are changes expected there too?
(Score:5, Not Funny)
On most games today it says "runs on either Nvidia card xxx or ATI card yyy".
Well, on most of the requirements I've seen recently, it'll list something like "Graphics card: 100% DirectX 8 compatible, 64MB RAM". Just because in today's hardware market that translates to "a recent card from NVidia or ATI" doesn't make that MS's fault.
So my non-nvidia card won't help me even though DirectX 9.0c claims to be running fine
Chances are, DX 9 *is* running fine, but your card lacks support for certain features used by the game. Now, the game devs could fall back to software, or even just disable those features; not doing so is not the fault of DX or MS.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
As opposed to the OSS world, where naming is working overtime.
Grep
Tell me -- just from the names -- what the following programs do:
Apache
Firefox
Thunderbird
Mono
BitTorrent
Putty
(and the fucking stupidest ever) Script-Fu, part of The Gimp
The idea, I guess, is to glamorize the program name like a brand name, and I suppose it works for some things (Apache, for example). Most of the time, however, it only serves to confuse people who have never heard of a program before. Microsoft errs on the side of shit you can understand, because when they use funky names (like BackOffice), they spend a lot of time explaining what the damn program does.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Yes, I'm sure the API changes have nothing at all to do with restructuring a terse and complex API or adding changes from user and deveoper requests to improve on the GUI. I'm sure it has everything to do with breaking WINE.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
On a different note, the really amazing thing about Avalon, and you gotta commend Moft for this, is that they're actually moving the graphics driver to User-mode.
Do you have a source for this? My impression of Avalon is that it's a library and version of Explorer.exe that sits on top of DirectX - of course the video card driver would still be ring 0, and the GDI+++ library (the new Avalon graphics library) would be user mode, just as GDI or GDI+ are today. Avalon represents a new interface application and set of tools for third party applications to use, but it isn't a tremendous plumbing change.
Funny thing about Microsoft software - invariably it hits the market as is dramatically less of a schism than people imagined it to be.
I did not say you are wrong, I said the thing you quoted from the article is unlikely to happen.
You are right, much time have passed since NT 3.1. Those days microkernels was thought to be the state of art, the future of kernels. Smart people claimed that as the hardware evolve, the performance gap between monolithic kernels and microkernels will become negligible and the robustness of microkernels will make it superior.
But it did not happen. Today, monolithic kernels dominate the desktop market, the only exception is OSX with its Mach kernel. The quasi-micro NT kernel was turned into a bloated monolithic kernel, BeOS died, and Hurd... hasn't really born yet.
Conclusion: monolitic design is still the way to follow.
Now back to the original topic: I don't really see any reason for userland graphics except stability. It WILL decrease performance, which is cruical for the VGA cards, and might result in driver incompatibility I think. If I'm right, then it will take quite some time to write compatible drivers for older cards (assuming that nvidia and ati is willing to write for their own cards). And Microsoft does not have time, they already decided to leave out WinFS from Longhorn. They can't postpone Longhorn beyond 2006 because that would be too big pull for desktop Linux/BSD. And I guess by 2006 ReactOS will become a usable OS too.
"We must start coding our version NOW if we're going to have any chance of opening up how girls actually work!"
I'm sorry to tell you that this is the impossible dream. Having been married for 21 years and having 3 daughters I am an expert on how little men will ever know about women. The more you learn, the less sense it makes. Accept it and try to solve an easier problem, like the beginning of the universe, it will take less time and be achieveable!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
"The days of backward archane APIs are gone."
That's exactly right, because DirectX is the only API people use. Why? Several reasons.
1. It drives all hardware development. There is no hardware built for SDL or OpenGL or what have you. Every feature--bad or good--is built to conform to Microsoft's latest DirectX rather than the other way around. And you thought Microsoft's monopoly was just in software! HA! And wait til you see what Longhorn itself brings to hardware!
Meanwhile, how do you even do Vsync on X11? Can it even be done?
2. Direct3D has pushed the envelope while OpenGL stagnated. Part of me hopes OpenGL 2.0 will turn this around, but you can't ignore reality that the ARB was sitting around on its collective arse for years, growing moldy a la XFree86, with only a hodgepodge of bolted-on extensions backported from DirectX 7, 8, 9. The GL shading language is even the newest shading language on the block---possibly too late for its own good.
3. DirectX, while updated every few years or so, is actually stable and consistent across Windows platforms, and even attempts to be backward compatible. You can play a DirectX 7 game on DirectX 9.0b system and have a pretty good chance it will work 100%. For example, 3Dmark2001SE still runs fine today.
4. DirectX is all-encompassing and isn't a moving target. It's more than Direct3D, but a standard way of getting input, doing sound, etc. That's alot more than the hodgepodge of ever-changing SDL,OSS/Alsa, devfs/udev, new Xorg Xinput extensions, etc. You can't even guarantee consistency across Linux *distributions*, let alone cross-OS, until Linux supports DirectX. Believe it or not, change and choice are *not* always good. You can't build a house if you're always ripping apart the foundation.
"Every API is just as good, and you know why?"
With games costing as much as they do, developers don't want to use every API. They only want to learn 1 and be done with it. That's why there is only 1 PC platform (and XBox) and 1 different console platform allowed to thrive (PS2).
Man, today, it doesn't matter what API you use...
Yes it does. Some APIs have implementations on multiple platforms, and some don't.
The only people who would be affected is OpenGL elitists
No, the only people who would be affected would be everyone who wants to play Doom 3 on their video card. That's a significant number of people.
Remember that Microsoft created PC gaming as we know it.
What the heck are you smoking? Microsoft was a pioneer in writing flight sims. But that's about it. You must be too young to remember what PC gaming was like before Microsoft ruled the universe.
There is nothing wrong with DirectX, except that such a brilliant idea came out of Microsoft.
There are plenty of things wrong with DirectX. One is that it is a proprietary standard created by MS to stop OpenGL. And unexpectedly, DirectX is locked-in to the Windows platform, unlike OpenGL.
It is not a 'brilliant idea' by any stretch of the imagination. It's was a mind-numbingly obvious idea. When DirectX was developed, essentially all PC apps had moved off DOS to Windows, except games. Obviously, Microsoft needed to get game developers to start using Windows. DirectX was an obvious solution. But they could, had they been less 'evil', just as well integrated OpenGL support into Windows instead.
Which I suspect is the real reason that certain people are as pro-OpenGL as they are. It's just more anti-Microsoft sentiment.
No, it's because OpenGL is a non-proprietary, cross-platform standard. DirectX is a proprietary API locked to the Windows platform.
That said, I'll concede that DirectX is better than OpenGL. It must be better than OpenGL to ensure its survival, because no developer wants to lock himself to a single vendor and platform if there is an equally good option.
Um, yeah. Different boot disks for every game, being able to rewrite CONFIG.SYS from memory just to get Wing Commander II to load, the joys of HIMEM.SYS and the differences between extended memory, expanded memory and high memory, manually setting the command-line IRQs for assorted soundcards and trying to find a real-mode DOS mouse driver that loaded in less than 5K of RAM.
Windows 95 (and to a lesser extent, DirectX) made it feasible to run games in the same environment as your 'normal' applications. They meant you could buy any Windows-compatible soundcard, video card, mouse or joystick and be fairly certain it would work. They also turned TCP/IP networking into a mass-market commodity. In that respect, I'd say Microsoft made a pretty substantial contribution to PC gaming as we know it. Created? Perhaps not. But I'd say PC gaming as we know it owes at least as much to Microsoft as it does to anyone else.
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
Lest we forgot, we have Microsoft to thank for all of that too.