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Beyond DirectX 10 - A glance at DirectX 10.1
Hanners1979 writes "Although we still appear to be some way away from the release of Windows Vista, and with it DirectX 10, specifications for the first point release of the 3D graphics API, DirectX 10.1, have already been finalised and largely made public. Elite Bastards looks at what's new and what will be changing in this release, set to become available not all that long after DirectX 10 — There's more to it than you might imagine."
the next gen of videocards wait for this technology or include it so we don't have really short lived video cards.
DirectX does not seem a good standard for the industry to follow. DX9 came out how long ago? It seems as if 3D technology advances have slowed down. Yes there have been updates to DX9, but I don't really remember anything that was exciting. Yes, there has been talk about DX10 and the changes it would bring, but now it's known that it's Vista only. That's why it has taken so long. So the industry is waiting for Vista to finally have implementation of their new graphics features? Sounds like a bad move. What if MS delays Vista? What then? Are the graphic chip makers gonna sit and wait? What we need is an actual open industry standard. Bring back OpenGL so we can make improvements as they come, and not having to wait for Microsoft to lead it where they feel they can control it to make money, and continue locking out other platforms.
Just like Visual Studio and Office it's yet another thing that props up Windows.
If I were a DX developer I'd be more interested in playing "ubiquitous developer" than "Windows Sock Puppet".
I may get modded down for this comment, but honestly, what is so special about windows that makes DX infeasible to implement for other platforms?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I don't understand what everyone wants Microsoft to do with their next version of windows. Before everyone was complaining that they needed to ditch all the legacy code and clean things up, and now everyone is pissed off that new software for vista won't be backwards compatible. You've got to drop backwards compatibility sometime, if you want to get rid of legacy code.
Why would any company want to lose out on the win98,2000,XP crowd when they market their game? Only Microsoft has any interest in selling stuff that uses DX10+. To me DX10+ is dumb, stupid, and inane.
God spoke to me.
It used to be that games used both OpenGL and DirectX (especially before Direct3d had the features to compete with OpenGL), but since game developers have made windoze their PC development platform, direct3d has become the defacto graphics library to use. One of the reasons there was no Half-Life 2 native LINUX/Mac port is because there was no OpenGL development and Valve had no inclination to do MAJOR programming work to make it work with OpenGL.
Until somebody writes a game that does something on LINUX/MAC that can't be done on windows because of the underlying OS that is successful I doubt if we'll see any change.
Considering [...] DirectX10 is only available on Vista and that 50% of employers say they are not going to purchase [soon], it's a safe bet to say that we won't be seeing any games [...] for at least 2 years.
I think I found the flaw in your logic. Employers != Consumers.
The fact is, games will probably drive Vista adoption more than any other factor save factory pre-installs. We proabaly won't see much requiring DX10 for a year or more, but that is because most big games take 1-3 years to develop so that's about the earliest that we'll see stuff.
This may cause game manufacturers to change tactics since OpenGL is supported on ALL OS's.
That fact has always been true, and it hasn't made much of a difference so far, even back when OpenGL and DirectX were much closer in abilities (without needing extensions and such).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
But not for the obvious reasons. I'm tired of these articles because then the woodwork of MS bashers comes out and says the same tired comments over and over again. "MS is just doing this so everyone has to buy Vista!" "There is no reason why DX10 can't be backported to XP!" It's like these people never saw these articles posted before, and they really feel like they are making some new contribution. They are not.
After years of pushing DirectX, Nvidia is now betting on OpenGL and has promised first class OpenGL support for their upcoming cards. What does this mean? At the very least it means that there must be good reason for choosing OpenGL over DirectX. Also, keep in mind that OpenGL is an actual graphics standard whereas DirectX is not. Both will co-exist for the next couple of years but it is likely that in the long run OpenGL leaves DirectX in the dust.
...is that the vendor lock-in is FREE!
The problem is the driver model for DX10 does not work well for the XP WDDM. I assure you they, and all the game publishers, wanted 10 to be available for as many Windows versions as possible. The break with the driver model was fundamental to several things but especially multi-head/multi-device hardware acceleration, changes to the cooperative nature of the 2D and 3D aspects of the video cards (both for fundamental re-factoring of the nature of DirectX Graphics and for the needs of advanced rendering systems like the Vista UI layer.) There's a bunch of great things about DX10 that could have been put into XP but there are other, more fundamental, architectural moves which have great performance benefits and future design benefits going forward.
Personally, I can't wait to see how well displacement mapping will make real-time terrain generation vastly simpler and adaptive to level of detail (doing this now is a fair amount of work.)
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Bring back OpenGL? OpenGL is alive and well. It would be great if some of the Windows developers started using it though, since they are in the majority.
If it were in a developer's best interest to use OpenGL they would. OpenGL has a history of having mediocre drivers if you are *not* doing things as Quake does them. In other words OpenGL was of such little interest to ATI and NVIDIA that about all the optimization attention it got was whetever Quake used. Now this was a few years ago and things are better now but developers remembers this and are a little gun shy due to "spotty" support and optimizations. They all know Direct3D will be at the forefront of ATI and NVIDIA's efforts. Now consider the arguments made by other posters where the new features and tools show up first, in Direct3D.
Again, what's in it for developers? Linux gamers? No they dual boot or emulate, they are already Win32/Direct3D customers. There is no new money to be made, a port would merely move a sale from Win32 to Linux, more work, no revenue. The Linux market is really only those who refuse to emulate or dual boot. Mac OS X gamers? Well at least they have a history of spending money going for them, at least when emulation and dual boot were not feasable since an emulator had to emulate the CPU not just a gaming API. However with the switch to Intel dual booting is now an option, and to make things more confusing there is Cider for emulation. Write for Win32/Direct3D and link in Cider to translate the Win32 calls to Mac OS X. I like OpenGL, I come from a scientific visualization background, but come on, there is not much of a business case from a developer's perspective "today". It had slightly better case "yesterday"
Please, feel free to join the rest of the world.
Uh, by "rest of the world" you mean the 5% running Mac OS X and Linux? Hey, if you are discussing soccer then phrases like "rest of the world" are meaningful, but in the context of computer gamers it is a joke.
The difference is that it will be very easy to make games that run on both Vista and XP/2000/etc compared to making a Linux or Mac port. While I'm sure there will be a large market for Vista, if a company can use OpenGL (or even DirectX 9) just as easily and sell the game for other versions of Windows as well, they would be stupid not to. There'd have to be a some feature in DirectX 10 or Vista that is essential to the game, which I find unlikely.
I'm seeing a lot of comments here lamenting the fact that the majority of PC games are developed using DirectX instead of OpenGL. You have to remember that DirectX Graphics (formerly Direct3D) is just one part of the overall package. DirectX also provides simple, useful interfaces for sound, input and networking. While I'm reasonably sure that the networking support doesn't get a lot of use, the sound and input APIs do. Heck, even the much-touted OpenGL example World of Warcraft actually makes heavy use of DirectX under Windows. Just not for graphics.
If there was a good overall package that leveraged OpenGL for graphics, then you'd see OpenGL being used more often. At the moment there's really only SDL, and to be frank, while SDL is great for some things, it's just not on the same footing as DirectX having come late to the party and not had the level of funding and development.