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What Game Developers Think about DirectX 10
mikemuch writes "In the last of his series of interviews with the stakeholders in Microsofts upcoming DirectX graphics API, Jason Cross speaks with the developers of Hellgate, Crysis, Flight Simulator X, and Age of Conan. They seem pretty stoked about the new technology's ability to get visual detail to a much higher level of realism, and to offload physics and AI to the CPU." From the article: "Without hardware, it is hard to evaluate which features will really make the biggest performance impact. The geometry shader looks pretty full of potential. So does the fact that you can write to buffers from any shader and then read them into another shader. Texture arrays look like they will make a big dent our batch count, which should lead to much better frame rates. At this point I feel like I'm looking at a shiny new toy through a shop window: I can't wait to get my hands on it and play with it, but I don't really know what it can do."
So in fact, it offloads (even) more graphics processing to the GPU; it does not offload AI and physics processing to the CPU, it reduces the CPU's load so it can focus on that sort of task.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
In Vista, GPU resources are virtualised by the operating system; it's similar to the transition between real and protected mode operating systems on x86. It's kind of like asking for DirectX 9 on Windows 3.1. You could argue that it's just a different driver model, like 98->XP, but I would imagine that adding virtualisation would make the transition much more difficult than that.
Thats the whole point of DirectX and an API! So the game developer doesn't have to worry about the underlying hardware. All that's required is porting DirectX itself to the Xbox OS and hardware, so most of the work is done by MS themselves.
Are you really a game developer? Because you seem to be a ill-informed one at that. OpenGL will work the same way it did in XP: GPU manufacturers provide an OpenGL ICD in their drivers. The only part that is being dropped from Vista is the crappy software OpenGL ICD, which no one used.
but when you plop down a DX10 title next to a DX9/whatever-else title in the end, they will not be noticably different.
It's up to developers if they want to use geometry shaders or not, even if you're a lazy developer and re-use the same shaders from your DX9 title, you'll be able to benefit from the more effective DX10 API that supposedly gives a nice 20% performance boost.
I don't know what you do as a game developer, but I'm guessing you're not a programmer.