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The People Behind DirectX 10

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the behind-the-curtain dept.

ThinSkin writes "In the first of a three-part series covering the people behind the new DirectX 10, ExtremeTech interviews Microsoft's David Blythe and Chris Donahue to discuss the development, decisions, and future of the new API. They answer several questions such as how different it will be than DX9, why it will only be for Vista (and not for XP), and when we might be able to see it."

4 of 352 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Duh by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    The point of an API is to hide the implementation details. A Direct3D programmer doesn't have to know whether they're using an Intel, ATi or nVidia chip, for example, in order for their code to work. This is called abstraction. Similarly, they don't need to know how the driver is implemented; with DirectX 3, there were widely different driver models on NT 4 and Windows 95 implementing the same API. With OpenGL, the Windows, Mesa and IRIX implementations are hugely different, and yet they still implement the same API.

    If your user-visible API dictates the structure of your drivers to the extent that you can't back-port it to another driver model, then you're doing something deeply wrong. Or you're using technical buzzwords to confuse people into thinking that a management decision is a technical one.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  2. Re:What will their NEXT version be? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Too late:
    http://www.ticalc.org/archives/news/articles/13/13 7/137972.html

  3. Simple Opinion.. by DoctorDyna · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I think, honestly, game designers are going to be the deciding factor. Microsoft can do whatever they want with versions, support, backwards compatibility and directx. If game designers don't want to develop for DX10, then they won't. I'm going to go out on a very thick limb here and say that DX10 will still run all the DX9 features. As long as the relationship stays that way, then there is no problem, and nothing to discuss! This is all completely moot. I'm 100% sure we've all seen games that "require" Windows XP. We're basically crying that Microsoft is going to do the exact same thing again that they have done in the past.

    The printing on game boxes that read "Requires Windows 95" "Requires Windows 98" and "Requires Windows XP" will soon have a brother. Big shock guys, there is going to be a "Requires Windows Vista"

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    Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
  4. Re:The OS is the glue between HW and apps/games by Abcd1234 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That's the wrong way to look at it. The DX guys are, in essence, acting as the negotiators between the game developers and the hardware manufacturers. The game dev folks tell the DX people what they'd like, in terms of feature set. The DX people then work with the hardware manufacturers to implement those features. It really does make a lot of sense. The game developers get what they need, in terms of feature set and APIs. The DX folks then get to work with the hardware manufacturers to ensure that the required capabilities are available and relatively consistent across hardware vendors.