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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."
From reality: It will require Vista. That's all Microsoft needs it to do.
The articles responses sound more like what marketting thinks about it, rather than developers.
I'll tell you what developers think about it:
DirectX 10 is supposed to be Vista exclusive. Smart people know Vista is a pile. Of course Microsoft will shove Vista down people's throats eventually, but you're still being locked into a piece of software that will tank for the first 12-18 months.
Realistically there is very little the new API will offer in this generation of games, in some cases it detracts from it (Hellgate, which looked much better without the normal mapping), because Microsoft is buying out these folks in mid-development so they can say they've got support for this API and make marketting-articles like these.
Lastly, DirectX 10 is going on a platform that will rule out OpenGL. Not many people use OpenGL in the last few years, so, sadly, this is a minor point. But it's great to have choices, and to have your choices superficially limited always gets me in an uproar.
In a nutshell DirectX 10 is not bringing anything terribly new to the table, while removing very critical freedoms from developers in the first place. They will fill pages with positive bullet points on DX10, but when you plop down a DX10 title next to a DX9/whatever-else title in the end, they will not be noticably different.
Sorry for the ranty-rant.
"From reality: It will require Vista. That's all Microsoft needs it to do."
From what I've read, technically it doesn't. I was reading an interesting article in PC Format (UK Magazine) today, and them trying to find out why DX10 will be restricted to Vista - the best answer they were able to come up is that the structure in Vista (eg. usermode rather than kernal mode) is slightly different and therefore it would require modifications to make it work with XP.
In fact, the article states that ATI are working with DirectX 10 under windows XP (with a few modifications to make it fit Vista). So the question is - if they can, and it's obviously possible, why can't we we?
If anyone has a better explanation as to why it's Vista limited, I'd be very interested in hearing it (as would many others, from the impression I've got - even ATI, Nvidia and Microsoft, who PC Format contacted, were unable to provide much of an answer.)
Agreed 100%. I dont make 'casual' games like most of the causal market (they tend to be puzzle games) but I do aim squarely at people like yourself. I'm still doing 2D stuff, and happily using DirectX7. The beauty of it is that I dont care what vertex shader or pixel shader version your card has, I don't even care what version of DX you have, because unless your on windows 95 or ME, you'll have DX7 pre-installed.
I see no real reason to even move to directx8 unless I did a flight sim or an FPS, the extra bells and whistles aren't neccesary for my genre. And why *anyone* would build a game engine around a dedicated physics card that 0.01% of the market has is totally beyond me. Still, I dont understand why Civ4 was so 3D. Was it to limit the number of people who could play? or just make it expensive to develop?
I'm sure that the vast majority of games designers (as opposed to graphics programmers) would rather the pace of API and technology releases slowed dramatically. Then we could all concentrate on this legendery 'fun' thing, that used to be the whole point of these 'tech demos' that pass for modern agmes.
Bah. Rant mode off...
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I'm not with some big studio, mind you. If anything, I'm more along the line of the currently so popular (gee, I didn't notice it in sales, to be honest) "little lunch break games".
I've taken a look at DX10 (well, at the parts you get to see if you're not one of the huge studios, at least). Yes, a few things look promising. But considering the downside, I'll think twice before switching over to DXX.
First of all, it's a new beast. The transitions between DX7 and DX8, and to a lesser degree to DX9 have been considerable. Yes, the changes were minimal, but if you wanted to go with the new flow, you had to rework your code. For rather little gain, if you ask me, since "small developers" certainly don't use the wonderful new features offered. Yes, a programmable shader is nice, HLSL was a big, big help for creating a better shader and it was a big speed boost in code creation. But, frankly, it's not something I'd wet my pants over. Whether the easier creation of some parts and more flexibility in others was worth the time input to revamp your code to the new calling conventions is debatable.
Second, and more important, Vista-only. Now, as I've said, my "target group", so to speak, are people who want to play a li'l game now and then, not hardcore gamers that spend their vacation money rather on new hardware than on a trip to the Bahamas. In other words, my clients will have second line computers, not bleeding-edge hardware. And likewise they will most likely not jump onto Vista the moment it is released, so why should I? I would lose a considerable part of my market.
It might be useful for studios that really work on state-of-the-art games, that HAVE to go to the top and grab the most advanced features available in drivers. It's likely that soon you'll only get top performance out of hardware with Vista, because driver development for older systems will be slacking, just like it was for the Win95/98 line at the wake of 2k/XP. Because test pages will always go for the most current system, so drivers for those will invariably get perference when it comes to tweaking and performance tuning.
Likewise, MS will soon start to abandon fixing anything but the most glaring bugs in older DX versions and newer features of hardware will only be supported in DX10, just like it's been with older versions of DX.
So yes, game development will shift to DX10 and Vista at some point. The question is when their target audience shifts. If consumers don't buy into Vista, studios will have to continue making games for DX9. Or MS will have to port DX10 to XP, appearantly it is somehow possible (though it's quite possible that they only ported the SDK and the runtime won't be working with XP).
Whether or not games will require DX10 is finally up to a few questions:
1. How many people will go to Vista (and thus DX10), so how big is the market?
2. What "killer" features will DX10 offer that DX9 won't?
3. Is it easier or harder to use DX10 compared to 9?
4. How much more horsepower will DX10 need to run games comparably fast with DX9?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I personally don't look at new games because they're such a pain to use. Download the new drivers, download a bios update, install the latest patch, fight through the DRM... ugh. Not to mention I only run a 6600GT, so your other point bears weight as well.
Personally, I feel like this will be a big blow to developers. MS is trying to squeeze out Nvidia for being "the friend of my enemy" in a different war. Nvidia will support XP to its dying end, while ATi will be pressured by MS to force users into a Vista purchase. In the end, everyone loses as consumers don't know what to buy, card makers don't know what drivers to support, developers don't know what DX version to target... and everyone buys a Wii.