DirectX 10 & the Future of Gaming

Homogeneous Cow writes "Brent Justice at [H] Enthusiast has put together a quick look at what DX10 has to offer gamers and what the main differences are between that and our current DX9. Unified Architecture and Small Batch Problems are shown to be addressed. There are a lot of ATI slides supporting the text as well." From the article: "The obvious question for the gamer that arises is, 'Will this terribly expensive and arduous upgrade path positively impact my gaming experience enough to justify the cost?' That has yet to be seen and can only be answered with the games we have yet to play. We can however discuss some of capabilities of DirectX 10 with a unified architecture and how it can potentially benefit gamers."

Comments

Re:What about OpenGL?

[dpilot]

I was also wondering this. Given that OpenGL has always held it's value in being cross-platform, not performance, I'm going to guess that it has overhead issues. Not the least reason would be that OpenGL runs in userspace, where I've been under the impression that DirectX has been in the kernel. Actually, I thought graphics were getting kicked out of the kernel for Vista, so I wonder how that affects this pitch.

Beyond that, I see something interesting happening in graphics hardware. There's a saying that machines go through 3 phases:
1. Simple, but not truly useful. (Got the base concept, but that's about it.)
2. Horribly complex, but useful. (Tacked on fixes until it's usable, but now it's a mess.)
3. Simple and usable. (Really understand what we're doing, finally.)

It seems to me that "DirectX 10 hardware" may finally be approaching a phase-3 machine. Along with that thought, it seems to me that a gross rearchitecture might do better yet, because they may still be carrying too much baggage along with them. This would be an opportunity for Open Source / Open Hardware. Starting from the oft-mentioned open graphics card that's trying to get off the ground, imagine experimenting with the unified-shader as well as other architectural simplifications. To begin, it obviously wouldn't perform, but it could deliver scaling information to tell what would be possible with higher clock rates and more shaders. Even at some level of scaling, while not adequate for newest games, it could well deliver eye-candy desktops, and adequate performance for older games.

Besides, how much *gameplay* improvement has the fps seen since the old Doom engine. (Doom, Doom2, Heretic, Hexen, Strife) Most of the work has been in graphical detail, though I'll agree that multiplayer and physics have seen significant advances. As for graphical detail, many of the source ports, like Doomsday, add some of that in.