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.'"

Comments

Re:Where is OpenGL when we need it?

[MrCoke]

OpenGL 3 is announced recently: http://www.opengl.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?u bb=get_topic;f=3;t=015351;p=0/.

Oh no!

[mikkelm]

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.

Re:I'm not really sure this matters all that much

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:Are they TRYING to shoot themselves in the foot

[Macthorpe]

The summary and the Inquirer article are, well, wrong.

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.

A Bit Late To Notice?

[Zephiris]

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.

Re:Mandatory 4xAA is this a joke?

[Aladrin]

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.

Re:More juice!

[TheRaven64]

On many games, I can run at a much higher resolution without AA than with. In my opinion, high resolution > antialiasing. This is especially true on displays like LCDs, which have a fixed pixel size. Running at a lower resolution than native will add scaling artefacts, and AA can make these even worse. Of course, the spec only make support for AA mandatory; it doesn't force you to use it.

Re:For the extra features, I'm guessing

[seaturnip]

You missed the root cause of DirectX's success, which is that Microsoft has been a lot more quickly responsive and to the concerns of developers and hardware designers. They listen to the API fixes and new features that game developers ask them for, and they work with graphics card manufacturers to expose new capabilities as soon as they are available, and release new DirectX SDKs every few months. Meanwhile OpenGL's committee decisions are always a step behind.

So if you want to make your game portable by not using any DirectX stuff, well, you'll have to write your own equivalent for that other stuff. That translates directly into higher development costs, plus God knows if your own stuff will work as well, and what bugs will it have.

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.

Re:Where is OpenGL when we need it?

[returnofjdub]

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