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Gamers Don't Need Vista or DX 10 Says Carmack
Freshly Exhumed writes "In an interview with Marcus Yam at Daily Tech legendary PC/Console game creator John Carmack holds forth on DirectX 10: 'Personally, I wouldn't jump at something like DX10 right now. I would let things settle out a little bit and wait until there's a really strong need for it.' and then zings Microsoft's marketers over DX10's mandatory use of the Vista OS: 'Carmack then said that he's quite satisfied with Windows XP, going as far to say that Microsoft is artificially forcing gamers to move to Windows Vista for DX10.' There are a few good tidbits on Xbox 360 vs. PS3 development, and a fairly clear disinterest in Wii as a platform for his company's products is shown."
This is a summary of an interview conducted by Game Informer.
Um... he did?
http://www.doomrpg.com/
Here's an interview with him on his role in its development:
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=6
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Besides, OpenGL already supports all and more features of the D3D part of DX10
Wrong. OpenGL only has an EXT extension for geometry shaders, but no superbuffers, texture arrays etc. so there is still much left.
(with better performance to boot)
Thats not the fault of Direct3D, its 100% a driver issue. nvidia cards are made for GL, hence the (slight!) performance advantage. On ATI cards, its totally different.
and vista doesn't even support DX10 yet since you need the DX10 graphics drivers that hasn't been released yet
You need new HARDWARE for this functionality, not just new drivers. Get a 8800.
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DX10 by itself doesn't require Vista, but they decided to get rid of the legacy cruft and re-wrote the entire graphics system. This allows neat things like multi-tasking and virtual memory handling for GPUs, but requires completely new drivers. This also supposedly enables a much higher performance, a game running on DX10 should be a lot faster than the same game running on DX9, assuming that they both use the exact same shaders. So yes, they could port DX10 to XP, but this would require two different kinds of DX10, with different features (no virtual GPU memory on XP = lame), and with different levels of performance. IMO the clean break is a good thing, but the HDCP bloat makes me hesitate to upgrade.
"You can get ten times the graphics power, and you can make a prettier picture, but when somebody makes a new IO device that really changes the way that people interact with the game, that's going to have a larger benefit there.
"So I'm really pleased with what they're (Nintendo) doing with the Wii and with the DS-and they're doing innovative things,"
"But our current generation of game technology is not targeted at the Wii. Maybe that was a mistake on our part originally, but we have been looking strictly at the 360, PS3 and PC as what we want to simultaneously develop on. We probably aren't going to be able to hit the Wii with the same technology platform."
I think he is very interested in the Wii. Just the projects and engines they have are not a fit for the platform.
Personally I believe the GFX on the Wii are grand. I luv the controller and the who package is sweet.
Source.
This is actualy a dupe of an older
So yes. Carmack (and thus ID) have stayed away from Nintendo because of bad dealings, and no real NEED to work with them. This time around he is thinking it might have been a bad idea to stay away from the Wii.
My bet is that once they have the current Tech that they are working on up and running he will look into making stuff for the Wii. And I for one look foward to it.
Also, he is looking to port Orcs and Elves to the DS. Source
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
I can understand John's sentiment. I just started doing Wii development this week. It doesn't have stencil support, pixel shaders, or vertex shaders -- even the PS2 had vertex shaders; which I'm already missing the general "funkiness" of the PS2. Faking the stencil with such hacks as the alpha buffer is getting kind of tiring.
One of our other developers jokingly called it a "GameCube 1.5" -- which is very appropiate.
The nunchuck (controller) is cool, and while it would be up to design to come up with some innovate uses, the hardware by itself, just isn't that impressive. Of course, it is always the games (or lack of them) that make (or break) a platform.
Cheers
What you're forgetting is that the mentality of using a PC has changed over the last 10-15 years. Back in the standalone DOS days, people typically would boot up a PC to perform a specific task - use a word processor OR work on a spreadsheet OR play a game, and turn it off when they were done.
These days, people tend to use a PC as an always-on, networked multifunction device that is booted once at the beginning of the day and left running as they switch back and forth between tasks - check email THEN use a word processor THEN look something up with Google THEN play a game THEN check email again THEN play the game some more THEN search the web for a walkthrough...
Forcing the customer to turn his PC into a single-function device to play a game makes him change his entire routine, and would likely be a dealbreaker for most people outside the hardcore gamer crowd.