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/.

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/

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.