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DirectX 10 Only On Vista
Next Generation is reporting that DirectX 10 will only be released for Windows Vista. Those of us puttering along with XP will have to make do with 9. From the article: "The exclusivity of DirectX 10 means that in order to enjoy the high-end features of next-generation GPUs, gamers will need to adopt Vista. Some end users are upset with Microsoft, as the move effectively forces gamers to buy Vista if they do intend to remain serious about cutting-edge PC gaming." It may even be worth it for titles like Crysis.
From a marketing standpoint, this is the only way Microsoft is going to get a lot of people to buy their new OS.
I can only speak for myself but from what I've heard, Vista will offer few enhancements over XP that I really need in an OS. Better searching? I don't particularly need it, but Google Desktop. IE7? Not a chance, Firefox has me hooked and has many more features. "Gadgets"? No thanks, but Konfabulator (now Yahoo Widgets) if you wanted them.
Additionally, I'm still concerned about Microsoft's (and other companies') plan to control our PCs, even though we haven't heard a lot about it recently. So by the time Vista comes out, I'm likely going to move over to a Linux distribution, probably either Ubuntu or Gentoo, and this is really the only thing I might still want out of Windows: gaming.
This move smacks of Microsoft-brand lock-in, and it still won't convince me to move.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
You'll all get your copies from work.
what's wrong with using OpenGL?
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
much more like an Apple zealot, which is why I'm as surprised as anyone about what I'm about to write.
But, really, I don't really see anything wrong with this, nor do I see it as all that different from what Apple has done with its various releases of OS X. For example, Tiger introduced all sorts of cool new developer functionality, like Core Data and Core Video (I believe Core Image was already present in some capacity in Panther, but I may be getting my APIs mixed up). These were/are great for developers, but the side effect of them being used means that the resulting apps are Tiger-only.
Isn't it essentially the same with Vista and DirectX? Certainly, it's a pragmatic, business decision - but it's hard for me to fault Microsoft for it.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
Will this encourage game developers to continue using DirectX 9 for the time being, or possibly switch to OpenGL? Vista won't be common for the next few years, after all.
What! This is crazy talk! You mean I'm going to need the newest OS to play the newest games on the newest hardware. Has the world gone insane?
The thing is, DirectX 10 won't be used for a long time. What's the point in developing for a market that is very small and won't grow for several years? People are going to work on DX9 for a while yet, so this won't exactly have a huge impact. Telling us that we need to upgrade to Vista for DX10 isn't an issue for a long time yet.
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
if they force me to buy Windows Vista to use Direct X 10, then I'll just wait until the come out with the Wii version, cause I'm not upgrading to Vista.
Personally, I think this is a bad decision by them, but I'm sure Microsoft made some kind of deal that worked for them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
(side note: this is old news - I heard of it at least a week or so ago)
What does this mean for the games market? It seems to me that few developers/publishers are going to want to limit themselves to only a portion of their current market by developing a DirectX 10-only game - at least not until Vista is on well over half of Windows machines, which is likely to take a couple of years. This is especially likely considering the current cutthroat state of the PC games market, where the bar to entry in the top-sellers list is extremely high (not to mention that it's dominated by innovation-fearing publishers who would rather spend their money marketing recycled games built on DirectX 9 than fund a whole new engine for a DirectX 10 game).
My prediction is that only a few DirectX 10-only games will be seen in the first year after Vista's release, and most of them will be mediocre Microsoft titles. The only other thing I can think of is if a game could be made that takes advantage of DirectX 10 when available but falls back on DirectX 9 otherwise; in this case, I'd expect to see a handful of FPS games touting optional usage of DirectX 10 features.
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On the user end of things, most people aren't going to rush out and buy a new OS. Most people aren't going to know whether Vista will run on their system, much less what the advantages/disadvantages would be, so they will simply wait until their current system gets too old and will have Vista pre-installed on their next PC.
I'm guessing that a lot of people will be upgrading within the next year, though, as I've seen indications that a large number of people are, for example, still using early AMD64 CPUs and GeForce 5xxx and 6xxx video cards.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Microsoft has been saying DX10 would be Vista only for about a year now. I even blogged about it last September. If the gaming community is only just realizing it then they only have themselves to blame because they're a year behind the devlopment community.
There's actually very good technical reasons it can't be back-ported to XP and that's because it's changing the entire paradigm of the way the Windows OS works with the video card. The GPU and video RAM are being treated as OS resources that are time shared and paged in and out in exactly the same way the CPU and main system memory are currently. Simply put, this means at the very basic level that the driver interface (WVDDM) for the video cards is very different, and much thinner but as it is a new driver model, XP won't be able to load it.
So, game development companies are left with the decisions of whether to use DX10 which has a bunch of new features (general purpose geometry shaders that can create and destroy primitives in the pipeline), or maximize compatibility and shoot for DX9 which is being effectively frozen.
The bigger issue for most is that OpenGL becomes a "second class citizen" on Vista as any use of it outside full screen rendering effectively turns off the entire Aero interface. Users are going to notice this, and apps using OpenGL will get bad feedback for "breaking the interface when they run".
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
I disagree on this one. I've consistently heard people complaining about Windows being bloated, but Windows 2000 and Windows XP run just fine with 192 megs of RAM.. sure, more RAM will incur less swapping, but it's certainly very usable. My VMware emulated Windows XP Pro system uses 192 megs of RAM and it runs just fine. There's no reason to believe Vista will be any more bloated than XP is if you shut off the eye candy and just use a regular Windows "classic" skin like you can now with XP. Hell, we run Windows 2003 Server on a VMWare ESX server and allocate it 384 megs of RAM and it runs perfectly fine (actually uses less than 100 megs of "real" memory).
How will DirectX 10 compete with OpenGL for game developer mindshare? With news of version 10 does the DirectX featureset now dwarf OpenGL's (if it didn't already)? Are there any amazing revelations coming to OpenGL anytime soon?
Comparing an instance of an OS running as a guest in VMWare to an actual installation "on the bare metal" with equally limited memory should be considered cheating. The host OS will buffer read and write requests to the VMWared OS's swap file in any leftover free memory, so the penalty for swapping is drastically reduced.
This isn't a surprise - the exact same thing is happening right now, and has been, with XP.
I never "upgraded" past 2k - XP didn't have anything I needed or wanted.
When Age of Empires III came out, I bought it, as I did with all of the other Age of Empires games and expansions. No luck - the game "requires XP" to function. Not that it really does - there are undocumented switches to let it install on 2k, and it works fine (the demo was the same way). Ditto Rise of Legends, *another* game that MS bought that now "requires XP", even though it's not doing anything that's beyond what 2k offers.
MS has always had the strategy of selling OS upgrades by artifically requiring them - hell, they've done this since DOS version 5 and "setver". That they would make something Vista-only purely to drive Vista sales is par for the course.
Of course, in my case, it *didn't* drive sales of a new OS - at least not Microsoft's. I still run 2k to this day, alongside what I did upgrade to, my Powermac dual G5. Someday 2k will be useless to me (probably when I upgrade my mac to an intel based one and virtualize windows), and I'll reformat and run the old box as a freebsd one or such. I guess MS actually did me a favor in some sense...
95 take up was big because it really offered a huge difference between dos/windows 3.11 but still all the big companies stuck with supporting dos for a long time yet.
Vista offers far less and people have become wary of buying newly released microsoft software. How many of you waited when XP was launched to see if it was going to be another ME? Certainly no games were XP only for a very long time.
A game developer making a vista only game now is betting not only on MS actually shipping Vista on time, wich they can only do by redefining the term on time or with a timemachine, but also that it will be taken up by gamers.
The problem is that games nowadays have a very narrow window of hotness. Say a new game is launched, I need to have it but don't have the hardware. A month later I will have cooled off and just decide to get the game when it is on budget and I got the hardware. If I can't play it at launch I can just play it a year later fully patched and with complete walkthroughs.
Will Vista sell? Shall we be honest here? How many gamers have pirated copies? Live is expensive enough as it is and XP ain't cheap. Oh sure lots of people get it free with their machine from Dell but how many gamers buy from Dell? I steal my licenses from machines I free with linux (sorta illegal since they ain't mine but wtf. MS is getting free money for software never used because of their tax system).
If vista improves on the anti-piracy front then many gamers will be faced with the question of buying new hardware, new OS and that new game. With the PS3 and the Wii also shining seductivly in the stores.
Vista will take off on new computers but I think that like XP take off on already existing computers will be slow.
MS seems to agree and is setting artificial reasons for people to upgrade.
I don't think MS is going to be in trouble. XP takeup might not have been what they hoped but they still are earning billions so who cares. Game companies might be in for a shock though. If people don't buy the OS you set as a requirement you ain't getting the cash. MS can afford an ME. What game company can?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
DirectX 9 never came to Win98. It was one of the major reasons many gamers upgraded to WinXP. (Well, that and stability).
It sounds like vista offers a bunch of API improvements, ala directx 10 and the presentation foundation. What's interesting is how few things *won't* be back-ported.
WPF is being back-ported to service pack 2 according the the wikipedia article. The powershell has already been released for xp. Directx 10 won't have games coming out for it for quite a while... what features exactly does that leave for vista?
XP offered a major upgrade in stability, to the point where it's almost on par with most other operating systems, an that was the selling point. What's Vista's selling point? Seriously, after all these years of development, does it have 1 single exclusive killer feature?
So far, the only thing I've seen are improved themes and hi res icons... I'd heard about built in virtualization in the past, but that hasn't been mentioned for quite a while. Was that dropped?
Oh, and MS left the ARB a while back.
You should compare oranges to oranges.
Minimum requirments for XP to run is 64MB on a 233Mhz processor.
Vista's minimum requirements are 512MB on an 800Mhz processor.
Microsoft recommended 128MB minimum for XP but we all know that 512MB is really what you need to use it effectively.
I'd say Vista would need 2Gig to run as a workstation as we know that their filesystem performance degrades with that pagefile problem they have.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
What you have to ask yourselve if this "need" was introduced or not. Would MS have been capable of doing DirectX 10 as a patch to XP? I think so. They didn't choose to do so but it had nothing to do with technical limitations. Smarter people then me have examined Vista and a lot of the improvements could easily be back ported. But then people wouldn't pay for an upgrade now would they?
Something smells fishy here.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Ah, I've seen this coming for ages. The PC games market is bouyed up by those who stay on the cutting edge only - your average Joe doesn't stand a chance of having a PC that you could run a modern game on... take a random family with a PC and a random game from the full-price shelves and see how much fun it is to get it working at a decent speed.
I'm getting away from MS as much as I can because of crap like this. My computer, my rules... you wanna force rules on me, you don't come onto my computer. I just can't be bothered to play about with MS-based computers any more just to get a poxy game to run.
I don't care whether or not it offers new features or is given away free in cereal or everyone else in the world uses it, I'm keeping MS stuff strictly away from my own machines. I didn't want DirectX but numerous upgrades were forced on me by the games I wanted to play, and many of the upgrades killed performance or broke the install.
Each time, I still ended up with a game that performed better under OpenGL (almost any Quake/Half-Life based game for instance) or could EASILY have been replicated without using any sort of acceleration library satisfactorily (Age of Empires II springs to mind - nothing in it that NEEDS DirectX and still a massive performance slog through any sort of WINE or similar program and for what? A 2D RTS that shouldn't need ANY fancy stuff to do it's job - hell, DOS versions of Command & Conquer on an old Pentium 133 did the same stuff in similar resolutions without coming NEAR the CPU time used for AOE just to draw a screen on a 1GHz)
I work with MS systems all day long, spending half my time working around stupid quirks and things that should have been in the OS since day one. I get paid to do it there so I tolerate it and almost nothing uses DirectX, even though I work in primary schools. I don't tolerate the amount of setup needed to get a game running at home any more. Those machines that I have reserved as Windows "consoles" are treated as if they are plastered with strict disclaimers:
- Games only. Do not use for serious work.
- And old games at that, unless you feel like upgrading everything to get there and spend hours chasing patches, upgrades, updates, firewalls, drivers and controller setups just to play a crap game that you'll uninstall within a week.
- And even if you do that, there's no guarantee that tomorrow the game won't work because of an update, a new requirement, or something else killing performance to the point where it's unplayable.
In computing terms I'm now firmly considering myself an old fogie and haven't bought a game in a shop for years (unless you count a 50p copy of Warcraft in a local bargain bin), certainly not one I enjoyed playing.
I recently sold off about 75% of my back-catalogue on eBay because I realised I would NEVER play them again - some still had the wrappers on, a surprising amount had been played once and then uninstalled (Black & White, for instance, which I bought based on hype, played through until my creature was taken away from me and then promptly uninstalled... my brother did the exact same when I lent it to him afterwards). I'm sticking with my favourites and re-living some of the classics. Emulators, DosBox and remakes all the way.
If I want anything else, anything newer, I will buy a console. An old one at that. Secondhand with so many games bundled in that I could play forever, all for the price of a single full-price new PC game. If I can't afford a modern console and one game, I won't be able to afford the money for a PC that could run a modern game well enough, or the time to get it working, certainly not when you take into account how much I'd use it for because it WOULD be JUST a console in a fancy wrapper.
I decided a few years ago to not chase the latest and greatest and to stick to what's fun. Counterstrike is the only thing I can't really do on any other OS (My Linux PC's are just too slow to run it even under WINE but, strangely enough, more
Vista's new Display Driver Model. It allows for a hardware accellerated desktop environment, in addition to multiple hardware accellerated windows (ie two videos can both be playing hardware accellerated at once) and the ability for GFX cards to have virtual memory.
DX10 is built to take advantage of these new improvements. If they backported it, they'd have to do one of the following:
- Don't take advantage of the new DDM in Vista, and just do an incremental update.
- Backport the entire DDM to XP. This will result in less reasons to buy Vista anyways.
Option 1 was clearly unacceptable if MS wanted to make advancements in PC gaming software tech (stuff). Option 2 is clearly unacceptable from a business standpoint.
Forcing people to upgrade? It sounds naughty.
Of course, perhaps games can be created that are backwards compatible with DX9 with merely a reduced featureset to refelect the capabilities of the libraries. The same software will turn around and take advantage of DX10 features.
I would find it nice, however, if game companies made a strategic move by developing games using cross platform libraries (such as SDL, but more advanced) so that they could develop and distribute games rapidly for multiple platforms (read: more linux games?).
Everyone loves great games. Not everyone has the latest computer or version of Windows. If I were a game developer, I might target linux platforms because I'd be comforted to know that my product relies on software that will enable it to enjoy a higher level of system compatibility across the board and better legacy support after it becomes old.