The People Behind DirectX 10

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."

Comments

Re:Duh

[TheRaven64]

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.