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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.'"
Once again, those seven little letters get left out of a "standards" article: d-e f-a-c-t-o.
"Now" is probably an exaggeration, considering that we're talking about Vista SP1.
...I guess my DX9 card has been obsolete for a few years now, it still ticks on nicely though. Heck, all my hardware is probably obsolete.
"Obsolete"
You could sum up TFA in a single line: "Microsoft discusses future extensions to the DirectX API. The current generation of hardware won't support those."
Are anyone really surprised? Newsworthy?
How can this be surprising?
You have 10.0 hardware and want it to support 10.1?
Please stop posting such nonsense, or would you cry foul if your SSE3 CPU doesnt support SSE4 when its available?
I am running OS X here and all my games are OS X native but you don't need DX 10 enabled Vista to browse game forums
The absolute need for Vista to run DX 10 killed it from the beginning. The DX 10 and Vista respectively. I am sure lots of game developers who coded direct3d only stuff questioned their choice and started to look to recent OpenGL advancements.
I am hoping they finally started to figure risks of using a MS only technology rather than platform independent, documented frameworks such as OpenGL, OpenAL.
Did MS care to explain what kind of undocumented,hidden quantum computing (!) routines in Vista needed for DX 10 running?
You think that "Linux user" wouldn't have clue but you forget WINE factor. If I had a problem with a missing dll in DirectX, I would talk to WINE people
This isn't a tech site anymore, it's a political site. Witness all the anti-RIAA/MPAA stories, global warming stories, election stories...
No, nothing can be obsolete on open industry standards like OpenGL. At last resort, your OpenGL layer would "software render" the OpenGL 3 content instead of telling GPU to draw it. It would be dead slow but still work. Same goes for backwards compatibility. I actually have a game coded in OpenGL 1.1 ages running on my Quad G5 having OpenGL 2 specs.
.NET and upcoming SilverLight lovers too.
Nobody would dare claim "Upgrade your OS so you can run OpenGL 3 on your compliant hardware".
MS spent billions to DirectX and converting some naive/beginner developers exactly for this reason. To control. Companies/Developers like ID Software, Blizzard spent extra millions as an answer. They are using OpenGL and OpenAL not because "they are 133t", they use it to minimise effects of such crap by MS. They don't want MS dictating users which OS to run using their millions of man hours as excuse.
This should be a clue for those
The extra price of OpenGL and OpenAL comes from the fact that they are intended for real developers, not some people pointing and clicking in Visual Studio and claim they are game developers.
I don't buy a PS3 exactly because of the rootkit. But I criticized the PS3 mainly because Linux has not access to the whole hardware, the lack of ram expansion options, the braindead HD partition scheme. If new tech is crippled because of corporate strategies don't expect techies (either on slashdot or elsewhere) to like it.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
From the SDL website:
From http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/AboutGFW/Page s/DirectX10.aspx :
No, it is not a joke. Yes, they are comparable.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
First off.. technology is made obsolete??? no shit! Its hard to imagine the slashdot crowd finding this to be news. This doesn't mean your dx10 card doesn't work anymore, you don't install SP1 and your PC wont boot with DX10 hardware. If you get upset every time people make revisions and improvements to software and hardware, I suggest you packup your computer and return it to avoid further heart ache. If you are an early adopter of the latest hardware and don't read any reviews (which all from memory said it will be some time before dx10 is going to matter) then thats your fault. Microsoft have explained in numerous interveiws (and documentation of course) how DX 10 will work, they even suggested 10.1 would be out BEFORE vista shipped. Graphics card features change ALL THE TIME, you have to write miles of CAPS checking code and render paths to support the zoo of cards and features. Now with DX10 they roll all the features up and any DX 10.x card will support the featuers, even if you write a DX 10.0 and DX 10.1 path, its only two options you have to support. You didn't see "ATI MAKES LAST CARD OBSOLETE BY INTRODUCING NEW PRODUCT", even though those changes could be far, far more difficult to develop for by having a bunch of changed caps and maybe even a few new proprietary ones. A fixed feature set is what allows developers to squeze out every drop of performance from PS2 hardware to make amazing looking graphics, even though your mobile phone might have more processing power available to it. And lastly.. people who mock the, apparent, modest real world improvments dx10 is offering.. what is your point? Intel brings out a new processor every x months with ~1-3% improvements, by your logic they should just stop bothering making new processors. Of course thats stupid, you wait till the improvment is enough for you to find it compelling.
I can explain that one. I read a post a while back where someone who was in the know explained it (it was on one of the Microsoft blogs, I think). DX 10 contained virtualized graphics memory (that may not be the right term). Like system memory, each program would get it's own addresses and you could page in and out graphics data. This is a big feature. It also required kernel and GDI changes. This is why DX 10 could only run on Vista.
Someone (I think it was NVidia), couldn't get it done in time.
So it ended up optional in the spec (or moved out completely, I don't remember). The people who did do it (ATI, I think) got an unfair shake. Now without that feature, there is no technical reason DX 10 can't be run on XP without a few small innocuous changes. But they don't have time at this point (or a business reason).
DX 10 being only on Vista was based on a very valid techical reason... that they gave up on and removed.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
I've posted it before, but never really got a response. So here goes. My take is we have to look back at history. Some will argue that the reason they choose directx today is, supposedly, some things are easier vs opengl.
But way back when, I always wondered why a company like valve took an opengl engine and ported it to directx (for hl1) when no one would argue that directx was better then. Hell, carmack had his famous open letter to microsoft to ensure support for opengl. Microsoft saw how big gaming was becoming, and the best way to tie your users to one platform was to tie the developers to one platform. If hl1 was opengl only when it exploded, maybe companies like ati would have got in gear and developed better (i.e. not shit) opengl drivers. Either that or miss on out the huge hit that was/is counterstrike. I'm not saying valve was the lynchpin in how things ended up. But if big players like them stuck to opengl, more companies might be willing to port as their games would be opengl based anyway.
So why valve did that at that time I'll never understand, but microsoft understood the market in this case, all too well.
Why aren't there more game developers like id software who actually care? Carmack has said in the past he tries to keep everything crossplatform not because it's necessarily the profitable move, but because 'it's a good thing'.
Mind you, it's been almost a decade since last I had anything to do with game development, so take this with a grain of salt. Or to put it otherwise, major talking out the arse follows.
That said, AFAIK DirectX offers more features than just rendering. If you'll run "dxdiag", you'll see that it has more tabs and more DLLs listed than just Direct3D and DirectDraw. There's also stuff like DirectSound, DirectInput, DirectPlay, and a bunch of other stuff.
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.
(We all like to pretend that we can write better code in one afternoon than MS in 10 years, but that's actually hardly ever the case. That's more usually just a mixture of hubris and an excuse to write one's own code instead of learning how to use a library. The former is simply more fun than the latter. Don't get me wrong, there _is_ stuff out there that does work better than MS's stuff, but that one too wasn't written in a day or two.)
You also face the issue that, traditionally, most graphics cards have been optimized for DirectX, since that's what the lion's share of the market uses. Traditionally, Nvidia tends to do well in OpenGL too, ATI less so. (Plus, if you actually plan to port it to Linux, there ATI's drivers traditionally are an inside joke. Not a funny one, either.) So the choice to go OpenGL instead of Direct3D also means that a bunch of gamers will post "OMG, your game has crap frame rates" or "OMG, your game doesn't work on my computer." And be quite justified in doing so, btw.
So, there you go. As long as 99% of the PC gamers are running Windows, it makes no sense to annoy those to appease the fragmented rest of the market.
Being able to emulate or dual-boot Windows... well, takes even more out of the motivation there. Windows compatibility is how OS/2 committed seppuku, after all. If OS/2 people can just emulate your program, well, there's no reason for you to put any effort and money into porting it. The same applies to the Mac and Linux market currently, to some extent.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If they piss enough developers off, all they're going to kill is DirectX as everyone moves to OpenGL.