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DirectX 10 Hardware Is Now Obsolete
ela_gervaise writes "SIGGRAPH 2007 was the stage where Microsoft dropped the bomb, informing gamers that the currently available DirectX 10 hardware will not support the upcoming DirectX 10.1 in Vista SP1. In essence, all current DX10 hardware is now obsolete. But don't get too upset just yet: 'Gamers shouldn't fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and, more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about. The spec revision basically makes a number of things that are optional in DX10 compulsory under the new standard - such as 32-bit floating point filtering, as opposed to the 16-bit current. 4xAA is a compulsory standard to support in 10.1, whereas graphics vendors can pick and choose their anti-aliasing support currently. We suspect that the spec is likely to be ill-received. Not only does it require brand new hardware, immediately creating a minuscule sub-set of DX10 owners, but it also requires Vista SP1, and also requires developer implementation.'"
OpenGL 3 is announced recently: http://www.opengl.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?u bb=get_topic;f=3;t=015351;p=0/.
Is that.. is that progress? New technology requiring new hardware?! BURN IT! BURN THE WITCH!
I didn't think I'd live to see the day where new technology would be unwelcome to the slashdot crowd. I guess it isn't surprising, though, it being a Microsoft product, and slashdot degenerating into a zealot sandbox.
DirectX 10.1 is going to be released about a year after DirectX 10. DirectX 9.0c was released about a year after DirectX 9.0b, and DirectX 9.0b hardware was also incompatible with DirectX 9.0c spec. That didn't create a whole lot of mainstream uproar, as people are generally positive towards new technology. I guess this being Vista and all, people can ignore pesky facts like those and continue their circle jerking unabated.
Macs may be nice machines in many respects, but let's be honest- the range and quality of Mac games is poor in comparison with that available for Windows PCs. And then to imagine that hardcore gamers are going to replace their massively-powered PCs and $600 graphics cards with an off-the-shelf iMac and be happy with its performance...?
Seriously, get real. Nice computers, but no-one ever bought a Mac as a games machine.
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Wow, what a load of FUD. OpenGL is completely supported under Vista and is in no way routed through DX:
http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/
Microsoft announced 10.1 as a side-by-side update - DirectX 10 is not obsolete, they are both fully supported. Developers and manufacturers have the option of coding for 10.1 or sticking with 10. The real quote: Direct3D 10.1 is an incremental, side-by-side update to Direct3D 10.0 that provides a series of new rendering features that will be available in an upcoming generation of graphics hardware.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
That DirectX 10.1 is incompatible with 10.0 (along with new WDDM interface) has been known for at least a year now. It's a bit late for people to be in shock about it.
Slashdot even covered it before.
Just because Microsoft officially announced it at a conference doesn't *exactly* make it new news, since they made it very clear on roadmaps and everything else exactly what was going to happen, and why it wasn't the best idea ever to adopt DirectX 10.0 hardware, rather than hardware capable of 10.1 (or 10.2) and whatever the new superset of OpenGL happened to be (3.0 as it turns out).
Also, the reason to bother with DirectX 10.1 isn't so much that it offers "brand new super features" to games, but the WDDM 2.1 bits, which would allow for far finer-grained context switching and task management. Being able to immediately switch from rendering one small bit, to starting to render something else, which would theorhetically make all of the compiz/Aero type stuff be able to run much more smoothly in conjunction with real 3D rendering (ie, games, CAD).
It all seems an exercise in futility to me, as far as the "DirectX 10" hardware goes. I like faster, I like more features, but there just seems no real reason to upgrade beyond my Geforce 6800 for the price point (which I got 18 months ago). Not to a 7800-series or comparable, and certainly not to an 8x00 or upcoming 9x00 Geforce, unless driver stability improves dramatically, and they can add more real-world-useful features, particularly without the need for Windows Vista. I'm back using WinXP "for a while" again, but I generally won't buy hardware anymore unless it's a notable and drastic improvement in Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.
I digress, but the point is, the news has already been covered before. If it apparently wasn't that attention-worthy a year ago, is it now? New DirectX versions *always* require brand new hardware, whereas most minor OpenGL revisions have almost always included new features that also work on old hardware (OpenGL 1.5's Vertex Buffer Objects humming along happily on a Geforce 256, for instance), and while full compliance is the best, all you really need to care about is if something implements certain clearly defined extensions, rather than wondering if Nvidia or ATI have 'misinterpreted' specifications over DirectX. Both have been panned in the past for 'creative' adoption of pixel shader standards and bizarre interpretations of DirectX 9.
I'd just hope that eventually, there's more actual competition again, and both companies (and new companies) actually respect and care about standards compliance and that both they and the standards bodies start to care about what customers actually doing with their hardware.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
You're reading it wrong. The -games- aren't required to support 4xAA, the -hardware- is. It's great that you hate AA and all, but there are plenty of others that insist on it. By requiring the hardware to support to be '10.1 compatible' they are merely pandering to the majority of gamers out there.
They haven't forced you to do anything, and they haven't forced developers either.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
> 'Gamers shouldn't fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and,
. 0109.1737.15034.htm?Page=1
> more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about.
Actually it's even better. DirectX 10.0 doesn't add anything you will care about either. Game developers are finding Shader 3.0 (DirectX 9.0c) gives them more than enough to do. There's no need to move to DirectX 10.0 for quite some time. Now add to that DirectX only running under Vista, because someone at Microsoft marketing thought it'd help Vista sales (it hasn't). Well, Why would you bother? Here's an interview with John Carmack (DOOM, Quake) on many things, including why DirectX 10 is a big bore:
http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200701/N07
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No, they are not comparable. On all platforms that it supports, SDL is a layer built on top of that platform's sound and graphics and input device services.
On Windows, SDL uses DirectDraw for graphics, DirectSound for sound. On Linux, it uses X11 for graphics and OSS for sound.
Mr. Carmack has said the later versions of DX (specifically 9) are just as good if not better then OpenGL, OpenGL no longer has anything serious on Direct X. Direct X is no longer the crap it once was.
n _carmack-quakecon-keynote-2007.mp3
Here's Johns 2007 Keynote from Quakecon(?) I believe.
http://www.3ddownloads.com/Action/Rage/Movies/joh
All serious gamers are happily running Windows XP with latest service pack. I have not yet seen a single gamer liking Vista unless he/she got a true monster machine which you can't tell difference whatever you do. Some game companies have guts to say "We do NOT support Vista at least until SP1 ships".
Actually this is changing with the drivers from NVidia and ATI from the past few months. The Vista gaming performance even at launch with CRAP drivers was only doing about 3-6fps slower than XP, and when you are running 30-60fps, the difference is NOT noticeable.
However with the current generation of drivers, Vista is out performing XP in gaming, not only in Video performance but in load times, etc.
And this is JUST NOT people with monster systems. We have test 'gaming' machines here that our techs use that have everything from Athlon +2000 and an NVidia Geforce 6600 that conquers all of today's games with acceptable performance. And YES faster in Vista with better overall performance than running XP on the same system.
The only catch to good gaming results in Vista is 1GB of RAM, and since MOST gamers already have 1GB, this is not a big requirement.
As for newer systems and higher end GPUs, the results are even more dramatic, as Vista utilizing dual-cores more efficiently and RAM more efficiently to cut down the Hard Drive and other bottlenecks, the games not only perform but load and 'instance' at 5 to 10x as fast as they do on XP with the same hardware.
I am actually kind of tired of the Gamers hate Vista Myth, as it is a bunch of crap. And 99% of the gamers that continue this myth, have never used Vista to even know what the hell they are talking about.
Considering that the entire Vista video subsystem is NEW, it is quite astounding that games and applications run as seamless as they do in comparison to XP, and then add on the fact it has more features, and gives users better quality in games and now is giving them better performance with the latest drivers.
(Yes I am specifically talking about DX7-9 and OpenGL games here, this doesn't even bring into account what DX10 will bring to games for more performance and quality.)
This also doesn't even factor in some of the things Vista can do with games that are impossible on XP or other OSes, since it pre-emptively multi-tasks the GPU and does do VRAM Virtualization.
On a Vista machine you can open a high performance OpenGL game (in a window) and a couple of DX8 or DX9 games in a Window as well, and they will all run side by side with virtually less than 2% FPS drop in all games because of Vista flipping GPU control between the games and even the Aero desktop. You can even Flip3D the games and not lose FPS while they are running in a perspective Window in Flip3D mode on Aero.
You can also do other 'cute' tricks, like grab a tranparency utility and set the game's Window Transparency to 75% and see the desktop and other games running behind while you are actively playing, again without FPS loss in the game.
Our techs even leave a 1080HD wallpaper running on the desktop while doing this with games that are set to 75% transparent, and neither the games nor the desktop Video wallpaper glitch or lose performance. And again this is possible even on medium end systems like a system with 2GB of RAM a 3Ghz processor P4 and an NVidia 6800 GPU. (Oh and have Windows Media Center playing a Show or Movie on the other monitor at the same time.)
Vista is actually a gamer's dream architecture, especially if you run multiple instances of a MMO or run in a Window so you can use Vent and Messenger, etc while playing. It also rocks for single player games like Oblivion that is damn demanding on a system.
One thing that 10.1 DX addresses is the Sound APIs that developers felt lost without, MS's Sound technology that is used on the Xbox 360 is being added into 10.1 DX, and this is more of what DX 10.1 is about than anything else.
Sadly though, sound is one area Vista gets no credit, yet is one of the best selling points of Vista.
With the new Audio subsystem in Vista, if you are running 5.1 or higher you can turn on your Mic and it will auto tune the speakers and environment sounds for an outstanding experience.
Another great thing about Sound in Vista is that even with an old AC'97 sound card and just stereo speakers on a desktop or laptop, the sound fidelity is significantly better than XP or OS X by several factors. For example a Wav,mp3,wma played on the same hardware and same speakers will sound incredibly more rich and defined on Vista than when you are playing it in XP. Even putting the same speakers on a Mac and 'trying' get the fidelity up, the sound quality was NOT even close to what Vista was doing with an old sound card.
And DX10.1 adds back in DirectX level APIs for game developers.
If anyone really wants to understand the Audio in Vista, do a search on Vista Audio Subsystem, or Sonar Vista. There are great technical pieces on why Vista redid the Audio system and also some good examples of why developers of audio products like Sonar continue to choose MS and Vista as their platform of choice for high quality production.
Not only does Windows 2000 have DirectX 9.0c (the latest and greatest before DirectX 10), but even Windows 98 does. In fact, up to and including DirectX 8.0a Windows 95 was still dragged along. So this being some standard Microsoft tactic, having been used to try to sell XP, is just plain false.
Nah there are excellent portable third-party libraries for this stuff now, such as Miles (sound), Bink (video), DemonWare (networking). The components of DirectX that are not Direct3D are pretty much irrelevant today.
I hate to gripe, but there are a few glaring misconceptions that need to be addressed in your post. Mainly this claim that DirectX/Direct3D is "pointing and clicking in Visual Studio." You're probably thinking more along the lines of XNA, but core Direct3D is a pretty basic interface to the graphics hardware (you're dealing with vertex buffers, texture objects, vertex/pixel shaders and their associated inputs, and a number of state parameters). Functionality wise it offers essentially what OpenGL does, except wrapped up in a platform-specific COM interface. There is a higher level library called D3DX that adds some helper functions for loading textures and meshes and doing vector and matrix math, but even that's quite a ways from the "pointing and clicking in Visual Studio" you mentioned.
DirectX isn't "easier" than OpenGL/OpenAL (in fact, OpenAL is higher level than DirectSound or XAudio, if you've ever used any of those APIs). The extra price of OpenGL comes not from "the fact they are intended for real developers" (whatever that means), but rather from the fact that it's not exactly the cleanest API at the moment (but that will change in a few months when OpenGL 3.0 finally hits). In combing through this thread I'm surprised I haven't seen mentioned that one big reason Direct3D took off over OpenGL on Windows is because OpenGL is notoriously difficult to write stable, performant drivers for. An article in issue #2 of the OpenGL newsletter mentioned how the old object model caused unnecessary driver overhead, for instance: http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol002_3/
Back in the late 90's when all this stuff was taking off, major games like Half-Life, Quake 2, and Unreal had several graphics renderers encapsulated in DLLs. Half-Life had software, OpenGL, and Direct3D. Quake 2 had software, OpenGL, and I think PowerVR or something. Unreal had a heck of a lot of different renderers, I know software, D3D, Glide, and OpenGL were among them. They did this because driver performance and compatibility was such a big issue back then, by writing to more than one API they could cover all the bases (card X doesn't run GL well but does run D3D well? Then we support that scenario. Card Y runs D3D poorly but does GL well? We support that, too). At the end of the day, the major graphics vendors ended up putting out really excellent D3D drivers and that helped the API out significantly. D3D was the only hardware-agnostic solution back then aside from OpenGL (ATI wasn't implementing Glide), and the API mapped to the general hardware case well enough that it was relatively easy for most vendors to write good drivers for.
Like pretty much everyone else who isn't a Microsoft employee, I do wish Microsoft would have adopted OpenGL as the sole hardware graphics standard instead of running off and creating their own thing and creating yet another obstacle to porting games over to different platforms (and to be clear, there are MANY more issues to porting games to different platforms than I/O APIs, for some reason I'll never understand that point is lost on a lot of people), but painting game developers who use DirectX as corporate Microsoft shills isn't the most honest or productive characterization of why things are the way they are. What is productive is looking at the technical flaws present in OpenGL and rectifying them, which is something the Khronos ARB Working Group has done an excellent job of.
As far as id is concerned, Carmack is using the Direct3D-only Xbox 360 as his benchmark development platform at the moment (you can go back to his Quakecon 2005 speech for a reference on that). That doesn't mean he's turned into a D3D fanboy, the Windows version of Rage is still going to be OpenGL. What it does mean is, these days he's probably more concerned with things like efficient multicore utilization, robust and productive content developer toolsets, and having a nice stable platform with excellent developer support as a testbed (something Mic
The performance and features may be about equal, but if you're writing just Windows games, I'm sorry, DirectX is a better choice, for lots of other reasons. First, you don't just get a graphics API, you get DirectSound DirectPlay DirectInput and DirectDraw(the depreciated version), rolled into one. That makes things much, much easier. With OpenGL you can use SDL, or a hybrid DirectInput, OpenGL type thing, maybe OpenGLUT or something, it's somewhat ickey... I've done some OpenGL work in Linux with SDL, and thought, I'll use VS, thanks.
As someone who has actually used both, I prefer the DirectX.
And lastly, say what you will about Microsoft, but their DirectX development tools and help are unmatched. Right now, you can get the express edition of Visual Studio, the latest Directx SDK, and write awesome games, for $0.