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."

Comments

Re:Thanks DX10!

[Tim C]

No, it's a really, really bad interpretation of what the article says:

By shifting more of the graphics processing tasks to the graphics hardware, the CPU is freed up to focus on other gameplay related tasks like better AI, more in-scene entities and deeper physics, thus enabling entirely new gameplay experiences.

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.

What about virtualisation?

[Corngood]

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.