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

What will their NEXT version be?

[mi]

It better not be called "X11"...

Re:What will their NEXT version be?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I heard they were thinking of calling it "ClosedGL".

Duh

[csplinter]

"questions such as how different it will be than DX9, why it will only be for Vista (and not for XP)"

Oh... I don't know... It couldn't be so people will buy vista.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

This is going to be an annoying flamewar on Microsoft by a bunch of people who didn't RTFA.

I was about to comment as well on how Microsoft just wanted to force people to upgrade, but read the article and you can see it was the driver model of the older systems that was the problem. Microsoft took the Apple approach of making things better instead of sticking to the broke, buggy design of Windows that all of you seem love(I am talking about the 97% of you). Honestly, this falls right in line with all the news about Vista(driver and kernel re-designs)

So, to re-cap... The designers chose to not be hindered by the older design decisions and to look towards the future.

Re:Duh

[TubeSteak]

According to TFA, it has something to do with their new driver model, meaning less driver running in kernel mode.

That somehow ties into virtualizing access to the graphics hardware.

You can read the specifics on this page
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1982033 ,00.asp

P.S. The Printer Friendly page on extremetech leaves out pictures & perhaps more importantly, leaves out their captions.

Re:Duh

[csplinter]

"Supporting two different driver model means more complexity and less things added to DX10 in the same timeframe."

Yes but, I don't really consider time frame a "technical reason" as far as this goes. Thats more of an economical reason, wouldn't you agree?

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

The changes to the Windows driver model have far more to do with DRM than any stability issues.

Re:Duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but scroll down. These jokers think developers will be doing DirectX 10-only games within 2 years. Not only does that presume that Vista will actually be out in 2 years, it also presumes that Vista will be so massively successful in this timeframe that 90% of gamers will have it on their systems thus justifying a DirectX 10-only policy from publishers.

This is the stuff of which dreams are made. i.e. it's not remotely plausible. Look at the stats on w3schools, for example. Today, June 2006, 89% of Windows users are on XP. XP has been out for 4 years and it doesn't even make that much sense today to ignore Windows 2000 users. There are still as many W2K users as Mac users and the "port" from XP to Win2K is easy enough to make it worthwhile. Not many people would make an XP-only program today.

Two years ago, XP was on 57% of Windows machines - i.e. after 2 years it achieved 60% market share. No-one, two years ago, made XP-only software for end users.

Which OS to put DX10 onto is not a technical decision. The commercial realities forbid a Vista-only API unless MS want to wait five years for DX10 to be widely accepted by end-users.

In other words, they will put DX10 onto XP or DX9 is all we will get from most publishers until 2010. Few developers have the resources to target two versions of DX at once.

Re:Duh

[heinousjay]

They're evil anyway so why does it matter?

Because so many people here have tied their self esteem up in the success of Linux and the consequent failure of Microsoft that they have to bitch about everything.

That's an interview?

[Netochka]

Seems more like a bunch of pre-approved PR junk... Some sample 'questions':

A lot of people are complaining, "Oh, why won't we have DirectX 10 for Windows XP." There's a good technical explanation for that, where it's really not possible to do what DX10 does in the Windows XP driver model."

So if the decision had been made, "Yes, we're going to try to make all this work on XP," you'd really have to sort of hamstring DirectX 10. You'd have to say, "Then we can't do this, we can't do that..."

You could even see the graphics card having a big hand in doing some of the stuff that was traditionally done on the CPU. Things like collision detection, or calculating obscured geometry so you don't have to render it. You start to see a lot of flexibility in how developers can use both the geometry shader and the stream-out-to-memory function together.

Video is another area where you're starting to see the graphics card manufacturers doing a lot of fun stuff with their video processing using the power of the GPU. And you could see DX10, especially with the reduced overhead, enabling more powerful video processing on the graphics unit.

Why should DirectX 10 support Windows XP?

[cperciva]

From the comments so far, it seems that people feel that Microsoft is somehow failing in a sacred duty by not making DirectX 10 available for Windows XP.

Why should Microsoft make DirectX 10 available for old versions of Windows? How many new video drivers released for Linux in 2006 support early 2.4.x kernels?

Sometimes making progress means saying "sorry, we don't support that; you'll have to upgrade to something newer".

What obligation?

[spoco2]

I mean really? What obligation are they under? You have a copy of an operating system that runs everything it's supposed to now and in the immediate future. There was nothing in the deal that said "Your copy of Windows XP will continue to support the bleeding edge games for 10 years after we release it".

Come on.

How many programs only run on Mac OSX and don't run on OS9?

I hardly see how a finger is being given at all here... and it's not like you haven't had fair warning that Vista is coming out.. hell it's late, late, late... so there's no big 'whoops I bought XP because I didn't know Vista was coming out'.

The main deal is that Vista will still run all the XP stuff, so you haven't had the 'finger' given to you for buying XP, because when you do upgrade to Vista down the track you won't have to upgrade all your software as well if you don't want to... that would be giving the finger... kinda like how Apple did with OSX not really supporting old OS9 programs.

Man, Microsoft can do no right by some people, no matter how hard they actually do try.