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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."
I think that says it all. All we have now are lofty marketing claims and unfounded speculation. I am as excited as anyone to see what it can do (I admit to being a fan of flight sims) but this does not really help me understand any better. Since this is
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Woo hoo! I hope 'offloading' MS Office to the CPU is next!
Seriously, though, is this supposed to be a feature?
FUNK!
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.
For the past few years I havent had nearly the urge to upgrade that I did in the past. Most games have become so gpu dependant that upgrading the video card has been sufficient enough to keep the latest games running on even a 2-3 year old machine. From what I read it appears that dx10 is more of an attempt to make the rest of the hardware insufficient than any real improvement in the gaming experience.
With all the talk of physics engines and vista exclusivity it has me concerned that what is already a small market is just going to get smaller. My last video card upgrade was $400 and it was an upper mid-range card (x850 xt platinum) not top of the line. My friends and family thought I was insane since many of their pc's cost less than that. I cant even count how many clients I have that get pissed off that their new dual core system cant run a two year old game because the video included was an onboard intel gpu.
IMHO thats whats wrong with the PC gaming world and what pushes users to "casual" gaming. Most folks I know dont even bother to look at the new games on the shelves because they assume they cant run it and refuse to put up the cash to upgrade what they see as a minor part of their pc. I understand Microsofts and their vendors desire to get people upgrading again but unless computer manufacturers either start uncluding decent video cards or intel increases their integrated performace by leaps and bounds the market is just going to dwindle even more.
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.