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

What about OpenGL?

[ender-]

Upon skimming over the article this question popped into my head. Of the disadvantages of DX9 that DX10 is supposed to fix [such as the small batch problem and the fixed pipeline shader architecture], does OpenGL have those same disadvantages and if so, what is being done about them? Are those disadvantages present in both Windows and Linux/OSX etc?

Is it even possible to fix that kind of issue without having your API written into the OS/Kernel?

This inquiring mind wants to know! :)

Re:What about OpenGL?

[MaestroSartori]

"It seems to me that "DirectX 10 hardware" may finally be approaching a phase-3 machine."

No, at least from a coding point of view it passed that around the time of maybe DX5 to DX7. Back then it was a real chore to write stuff for, documentation wasn't entirely great and textbooks got all confused and out of date really really quickly. Round about DX8 it really started to be OK though, and that's about when I did a bit of Xbox dev work. Since then, I've been on PS2 duties so have fallen out of touch.

The thing is, DX isn't the same as OpenGL. It's pretty much a full game middleware platform, only for Windows and Xbox instead of being really multiplatform. Open Source stuff can approximate the feature set if you combine things (OpenGL + SDL + various things for audio, networking, etc.) but they're all done by different people, with different coding styles and different levels of goodness. DirectX's strength is its coherence, and the big install base of Windows users.

DX10 is throwing away a big pile of audience, I'm not sure that's a good idea...

Re:No thanks.

[Surt]

Yep, it'll no doubt be a dismal failure the likes of which have not been seen since the time that technology was developed that required everyone to have win95 and excluded all the dos & win3.x users ... what was it called ... oh yeah, DirectX 1.0.

Immersion comes from where now?

[El_Smack]

OK, I'm going to take another whack at a dead horse. I don't know that "immersion" comes from thousands of unique trees in a rendered forest. Honestly, I don't know where it comes from. I think it may come partly from the player _wanting_ to be immersed.

Here comes the "back in my day" part. I remember sitting in the computer lab in college in '93 or so, and seeing guys literally jump backwards and rip the headphones off their heads while playing Doom. I did it myself a time or two. That seems pretty immersive

Immersion at 320x200 with sprites that looked the same no matter what angle they are veiwed from comes from somewhere, and I hope that game devs can continue to tap that. I guess the good/great ones do, and the rest just make every chair in the game unique and hope that's enough.