Valve Says Choice to Make DX10 Vista-Only Hurt PC Gaming

Erris writes "Valve's President Gabe Newell is calling Microsoft's choice to make DirectX 10 Vista-only a 'terrible mistake' that has harmed gaming. His company's latest hardware study shows the strategy has not moved gamers onto Vista. The result is that almost no one is using the newest version of DirectX, and companies are shying away from creating new input devices that support it. Nine months after release, after Christmas, after graduation, and with school mostly back in session, still only 8% of gamers are using it." Update: 08/27 21:09 GMT by Z : An AC points out that these numbers may be framed poorly given uptake numbers for XP's release.

Comments

Gaming the system for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

This exact same journal entry was penned by twitter, who had it rejected from the Firehose probably because of his negative moderation and the fact that editors are starting to wise up to him.

The original journal entry already had comments that poke holes in twitter's claim about those numbers, which is probably why it became inconvenient and forced him to switch to his sockpuppet account instead.

Ironically, the same story in Heise.de has a link to another one about a gaming convention in Leipzig drawing all-time record attendance. I suppose it's possible that DX10/Vista will hurt the gaming industry, but with the game release cycle being 12-16 months, I'd say that will be apparent later on.

Here is a direct link to the original Valve survey, which amusingly enough shows Vista as having an even larger market share among Valve gamers as it has overall (8% vs 5-6%). That means Vista's market share among gamers has been increasing at a rate of about 1% per month since it was released, which is even higher than XP's uptake vs. Windows 98/ME. I can't even begin to imagine what the relevance of Christmas and back to school as claimed by twitter is for gamers who probably switch OSes only when they switch their $3,000 boxes anyway, but I'd say that 8% share is actually not bad in that segment. That share will probably start growing more exponentially as time goes by.

Welcome to the Trolled By Twitter Club, Zonk.

Re:Gaming the system for fun and profit

[Gryll]

I would bet that Microsoft was not narrowly looking at the next 12 months when they made the decision to require Vista for DX10. This is more like a 2-3 year strategy to force people away from XP and perhaps even Wine/Cedega. DX10 itself wasn't even targeted for todays graphics cards.

That said, I don't think it's healthy for the industry and I dread the day I break down and install Vista to get the most out of Starcraft2.

Re:Gaming the system for fun and profit

[pantherace]

However, even while Vista has about 8%, Vista + DX 10 is 2.3% of users. That's about half as many as are using DX 7. About 15% use DX 8, and the rest are DX9 types.

In terms of being able to sell one's product to the most people, it then makes more sense to make sure DX 7 runs it well, than it does for DX10. Unless you want to jack the price up, to compensate. Let's see, to make a new game for just DirectX 10, that would be about... 2000$ for the same revenue stream, based on steam's percentage.

The other thing people forget, is how Microsoft's tools are no longer targetted at the PC, instead they are targeted at the Xbox. This has had rather (IMO) disastrous consequences for one game I play, Supreme Commander. GPG was being partly funded by Microsoft (or would have been, my memory is foggy), and it was intended to be the first DX10 game and use Microsoft's networking, etc.

This is great and all, but the way Microsoft and GPG used it, it has to be peer to peer. And each computer runs the sim. Which would be fine, if it weren't one of the most taxing games on a cpu currently existing. This would be fine in a homogeneous environment, such as the Xbox. However, PCs aren't. So if one person has a crappy computer, it will slow EVERYONE down.

Microsoft stands to make more money from Xbox, so they are either intentionally, or unintentionally, doing things which are killing the PC games market.

Re:Gaming the system for fun and profit

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they clearly are:

twitter comment:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24993&cid=2716 111

RazzleFrog reply:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24993&cid=2716 156

Containing the sentence "Did you even read my post?"

Eris reply:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=24993&cid=2717 040

Where he says: "Sure I did, did you?"

Smoking gun...

Re:Gaming the system for fun and profit

[PopeRatzo]

You guys can get exercised about the fact that this has been discussed here before, but it really is a pretty important issue to consumers.

Microsoft is desperate to push Vista down the throats of computer users. The big app developers like Adobe are wise to that song and dance, so despite what was probably a concerted effort by Microsoft to get one of the big apps to release a "Vista Only" version, that's not going to happen. So, MS figured that they could go after what is usually a reliably pliant population, the gamer. In the past, just the mention of some new technology that would add a few texels (whatever they are), or provide more realistic fog (for all those games that are set in London, I guess), would get the gamer community lining up to pay thousands of dollars so they could be disappointed by the first game that made use of this new technology.

But something has changed. Of course, gamers are still eager to get their hands on the hot gear, but they've been burned just enough times to know bullshit when they hear it. And Microsoft pushing a Vista-only technology for games that for some reason could never, nope, impossible, can't happen work on anything but Vista smelled exactly what comes out of the bull's ass.

It might be time to wake up to the fact that we do not exist just for the purpose of providing huge corporations with record profits. Somehow, the ideas that businesses are supposed to try to give consumers what they want has been supplanted by the idea that now the businesses are calling the tune and we either go along or get off the bus.

I think Microsoft would make an excellent example for the rest of the corporate world if we were to exert the power we represent as consumers. Every so often, we might have to take one of these corporations that have forgotten that the vendor/consumer transaction is supposed to be an equation and slam them up against the wall just to show that we can. Or, we can just go along meekly and become the consumables for the machinery of corporate greed.

Personally, I don't care if Microsoft crashes and burns. Not if it makes room for a few new players in the arena of desktop operating systems. Hell, I sold all my MS stock a long time ago.

Vista was a huge mistake. I believe it's really important not to let Microsoft weasel out of this one. For me, not using Vista is more than just being a smart consumer, it's a political statement. It would be worth sticking with XP for a few more years if only to get the message out that we are not going to be grist for their mill.

Oh, and Apple, don't get too smug. You might be next.

and yet, thanks to nvidia's incompetence...

[Anonymous Coward]

their inability to get memory virtualisation working for them caused MS to drop the requirement, and as such there is NOTHING about DX10 that makes it technically undoable on XP.

yet here we are!

Proud of game makers

[jshriverWVU]

The reasons MS made DX10 Vista only is to force people into upgrading just so they can play Starcraft 2008. The developers are luckily breaking MS's grip but telling them, we're the content providers, the reason people buy your system now do what we need or we won't follow.

Re:Proud of game makers

[Arethan]

Actually, most game companies never touch the native Direct-X code. If you've ever used both OpenGL and Direct3D, you'll know why. D3D is an extremely low level hardware abstraction layer, much more so than OpenGL. Coding directly in D3D takes, on average, about twice as much support code as opposed to OpenGL.

Not that it really matters, since any intelligent OpenGL user never works directly with the API any more than is absolutely necessary. The source code to any recent high profile game is big... No... fucking huge ass big! So to make things a little easier to follow, everything gets wrapped up in layers. Most companies use game engines that were developed by third parties in order to reduce the need to a) hire people that are really good at the low level 3D interfaces; and b) waste huge amounts of time on an engine for a single title, thereby pushing back their prospective release date by no less than 2 years. iD is one of the few companies that makes both the engine and the game. In fact, several game engines exist that are written by companies that never produced a game themselves. Ever heard of GameBryo?

On top of that, there are countless middleware libraries that address a huge gamut of issues. SpeedTree, OpenAL, SDL, GameFace, Bink, Smacker, Miles, RakNet, ad nauseam. The point is, only a very small number of games are written to directly use OpenGL and DX without some sort of wrapper, and the number of successful commercial titles in the last 8 years that wrote everything from scratch can probably be counted on one hand.

Anyhow, out of all of these libraries, there is a huge subset that actively supports Linux. Most of these libraries are written using very generic programming techniques, or at least provide a standard interface that never changes regardless of target platform, and provides the dirty system specific implementations as a run-time or compile-time plug in. It is much to their advantage to do things this way, as these libraries are expected to not only run in Windows, but also on consoles, and by that I mean pretty much all of them.

The reason they don't just release every game for Windows for Linux as well is because these middleware libraries often come with "per platform" licenses. "For $30,000, you can use this library in 1 title on 1 platform. Kick in another $15,000 and you get another platform license. Kick in a grand total of $75,000 and you can release it on all platforms it supports." The trouble is, most games are using anywhere from 2 to 6 middleware libraries, and that ends up being a lot of cash that they're expected to recoup on Linux support. Given the demographics that generally comes with Linux desktops (dual boot rigs for people that want to game with higher % of users that run cracked software, or grandparents that only check email and perform mild web browsing), it just plain isn't worth the effort, and certainly isn't worth the investment/risk ratio.

End of story.
So... what was TFA about?

Too bad Valve.

[IPFreely]

There is a lot more going onin DX10 than games. The whole driver-OS interface was changed. Those changes were necessary to put the 3D hardware into sharable mode.

Now multiple applications and games can share the 3D hardware. In DX9/WinXP and earlier only one App at a time could use the 3D hardware. It needed to be done, and it could only be done with the cooperation of the OS. This cannot be put back into XP because this sort of control and separation could not be done in XP.

Re:Too bad Valve.

[pla]

This cannot be put back into XP because this sort of control and separation could not be done in XP.

I call BS.

At the lowest level, a video driver (for XP or any architecture, really) just translates requests from applications (including the OS itself) into something the video card understands. Whether the video hardware can handle multiple simultaneous renderings or not depends only on the hardware and the API (in this case, Direct X provides the API, as exported by the actual driver).

For XP to support DX10 would require literally nothing more than compatible hardware with functional drivers supporting the DX10 API.
Now, some older apps may cause problems by trying to monopolize access to the screen, but that differs entirely from saying XP can't do it.



The whole driver-OS interface was changed.

Well... Yes, it has, because the OS changed. Which makes that something of a circular argument - DX10 will only run on Vista because the interface changed because OS changed and the only DX10 implementation uses that new interface. And Apache for Linux doesn't run on Windows, surprisingly enough.

Re:Too bad Valve.

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Yeah, because we all want to run 3 games that'll eat up the GPU at the same time. Thats a function that could have EASILY be left out for XP. It doesn't need 3D support for it's GUI.

Google Earth, Media Center, WPF apps, and a lot more uses 3D.

Why the hell shouldn't our GPUs multitask?

PC Gamers can smell a Rat - And it's Vista

[gadlaw]

Vista is what it is, a bloated, DRM filled, resource hog designed to take more of your computer away from you and in exchange it gives you unrecognized drivers, unsupported software and nothing but aggravation. The new spectacular games that were supposed to be there are not there, all we can see are promises and vaporware for sometime in the future but for now all you get is pain and misery. Tell me again why I want that? Tell me Microsoft why DirectX 10 is so much more special? I see the side by side comparisons and I don't see much difference, certainly not worth me busting everything I own now and investing in something with no real tangible difference. I hear the FUD, the hear the huckster Microsoft cheerleaders saying how great it is but this is the internet and the voices of everyone else are heard loud and clear so the lying isn't being believed. 8 Percent using it? Sounds on the high side to me. It's just a matter of how long until Microsoft admits they've created a loser and perhaps we can get to real innovation. I won't hold my breath on that second part though.

Re:PC Gamers can smell a Rat - And it's Vista

[dedazo]

Actually I'd say they are aware of the problems and are trying to fix them. Whether or not they fix them and whether or not that results in faster adoption remains to be seen.

huckster Microsoft cheerleaders saying how great it is but this is the internet and the voices of everyone else are heard loud and clear so the lying isn't being believed.

Alternatively, you can also hear the FUDsters and hysteria-inducing misleading rants about the DRM boogeyman, UAC and just about anything else in Vista. The "poor Google, they are being victimized by Microsoft" crap when Vista search is much better than GDS and all Google had to do was give the user the option to shut down the indexing service. The wailing cries by the AV snake oil vendors. And let's not forget the concerted efforts by the FSF to convince everyone that Vista is "defective by design" and directing their minions to the closest Amazon product page to astroturf and vandalize the hell out of everything. It goes on and on and on.

I sure as hell haven't seen much more than FUD coming from the groups of people who would be the most affected once Vista gains traction. I don't have a problem with people doing that so much - Microsoft is known for those types of tactic as well. The problem is that the same people doing all this are the ones that have repeatedly claimed they own the moral high ground. The ones that claim Microsoft is not "honest". FUD always works both ways. It erodes your credibility when people realize you've been feeding them soup to undercut your competitors. It happened to Microsoft, and it will happen to them as well.

Re:Huh?

[dedazo]

No, 'Erris' (whose journal this got published from) is one of twitter's (the one linked to) sockpuppets.

Re:XP unable to support dx10 or what?

[n dot l]

My understanding is that it requires significant changes to the driver model and that they couldn't back-port the changes to XP. Then again the DX10 equivalent OpenGL extensions all work (or will work) on XP (or so I've been promised by NV's reps at GDC) so that's probably only part of the issue (the other part being the Vista push).

Forced Upgrade

[ryanisflyboy]

Everyone will experience a forced upgrade. It is simply a matter of time. When your non-tech friend buys his next gaming machine it is going to come with Vista because XP won't be an option. I remember a similar reluctance between 3.11 and Win95. Eventually everyone got there - or skipped Win95 and went right to Win98. In another year the landscape will be much different. Microsoft will eventually pull the plug on OEMs who are still selling XP (Dell).

This is a great time to consider an alternate desktop OS.

Re:XP unable to support dx10 or what?

[Climate Shill]

If people buy Vista to get DX10 it's a win for Microsoft. If people are discouraged from using Microsoft's gaming competititor, the PC, it's a win for Microsoft. So it's not stupid at all.

Re:XP unable to support dx10 or what?

[Enderandrew]

Oddly enough there are projects to make Vista games (Direct X 10 games) and apps run on Windows.

http://alkyproject.blogspot.com/

It can be done, but Microsoft just wants people to jump to Vista. I think they are barking up the wrong tree. Gamers who want the best possible performance aren't going to jump to an OS that eats more resources and slows their rig down. I'll consider buying a Direct X 10 game the moment Wine/Cedega supports it.

Game developers chose this

[symbolset]

When game developers chose to standardise their efforts on Windows they bit the hook. Now they are unhappy about being on the line. Too bad.

We warned them. Now if some forward thinking company thought to maintain some cross platform efforts they are ready to seize a significant opportunity. Unreal engine? Id? Is that you?

Re:XP unable to support dx10 or what?

[alxbtk]

"I'll consider buying a Direct X 10 game the moment Wine/Cedega supports it."

You won't have to buy it. It'll be abandonware by then.

and Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln

[xigxag]

It's pretty funny that Microsoft in its stronghold (PC OSes) made the same exact mistake that Sony made in its stronghold (consoles). Sony thought that tying Blu-Ray to its new console would be a win-win for format licensing and for the Playstation sales, but instead, high prices and lack of compelling software have kept people back. Similarly, MS thought that tying DX10 to its PC OS would be a win-win for gaming licensing and Vista sales, but instead, high prices and lack of compelling software have kept people back. As a result, people generally prefer to keep buying last-gen PS2's and Windows XP.

Quit sucking off Direct3d and Microsoft

[zymano]

Use opengl.

These game producers are idiots.

You got what you wanted when you only support Microsoft.

They got you by the balls.

It's not 8%!

[Jartan]

He is talking about people who can use DX10. Not people who have Vista.

This is the relevant part of the survey you need to look at:

DirectX10 Systems (Vista with DirectX10 GPU) - 2.31% of users
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 18,005 1.65 % ##
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 3,487 0.32 %
NVIDIA GeForce 8600M 1,087 0.10 %
ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1,068 0.10 %
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 990 0.09 %
NVIDIA GeForce 8400M 461 0.04 %
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 106 0.01 %
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 2300 30 0.00 %
Intel Bearlake B Express Chipset 2 0.00 %

So indeed the author of that Journal was correct: ~2% or 1 in 50 users can't use DX10. In other words the people "poking holes" need to learn to read.

Just looking at the Nvidia card numbers we can easily see the problem is most likely Vista and not the cards themselves.

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 49,850 4.56 %
NVIDIA GeForce 8600 11,330 1.04 %

Roughly 37k out of 61k Nvidia users on Steam have DX10 cards but can not utilize DX10 because they have not upgraded to Vista. So approximately 60% out of a group of people composed of people who are cutting edge sorts, buyers of new computers, or people who've done a recent computer upgrade have not yet upgraded to Vista.

None of this is proper statistics of course but as far as this sort of thing goes that's a pretty shocking number. I want to believe gamers are being smart but the realistic side of me though says the most likely reason is simply that Vista has a lot of problems for gamers right now and they are just waiting till driver issues resolve.

Re:It's not 8%!

[David Gerard]

At the present rate of Wine D3D development, Wine will support DirectX 10 before there are good drivers for Vista.

Wine: A better Windows than Vista!

Dx10, Vista and Network Problems?

[happyfrogcow]

You'll have to excuse me for not being able to test the following. I do all my gaming in Linux (no seriously, I do!)

We all know that if you play music on Vista, it causes a degradation of network performance. What happens if you have a networked game decoding an MP3? Is this all handled in the game's own system, or does it depend on the OS to do it. Do you get a drop in network performance in the game? That would be incredible...

I don't see how it is going to hurt

[Sycraft-fu]

Most people don't switch to the latest, greatest, whatever it is. The vast majority of people aren't going to have DX10 capable hardware for quite some time. This is how it has always been. Right now, it's rare to find a game that requires anything more than DX8 hardware. That's shader model 1.x. There's even a good number of games that don't support shader model 3.0 (DX 9.0c) and can only use up to 2.0 (DX9).

There's no reason to believe this won't continue. The only change is in how it is done. Rather than having multiple different render paths you can turn on and off with software options, that maybe people understand and maybe they don't, different render paths will use different DX versions. So if you want a SM 4.0 path, you use DX10, and so on.

The idea being that in the future, you'll be able to tell what your hardware supports and if you can run a game easily. You have a card that's DirectX 11. A game says "Requires Direct X 10.1, 11, 12, or better." You then know that your card will work fine, and that you probably won't get any eye candy benefit with anything better than a DX12 card.

Right now it is more confusing since cards only support older feature sets, but can use newer APIs. So say you have a GeForce Ti 4400. That's a DirectX 8 card. However, it can use DirectX 9.0c. But it isn't a 9.0c card, it doesn't support those features, it only supports the 8.0 features. So game makers either have to list cards that work, or refer to feature sets which users probably don't know about.

This is a much clearer way of doing it.

So I don't see the big problem here. To use DX10, you must have DX10 hardware which is very rare right now. Most people don't have it, most people don't care, games will continue to target DX9 (or even older). This is going to continue for some time. I bet games will still be targeting DX9 hardware when DX11 is out. I'm sure some of them will support the newer standard for more eye candy, but they won't all mandate it.

It's moving in a similar direction to OpenGL in that respect. If you look at nVidia cards, only the 5 (FX) series and later support GL 2.0, the earlier ones are 1.5 only. Why? They can't accelerate GL 2.0. Rather than have it implemented in either a semi-working fashion, or a slow software emulation, you just support the maximum level you can. It's going to be the same deal with DirectX. Rather than only supporting part of the latest API, you'll just support the level you are capable of.

Hopefully it should make it much clearer for all involved.

OpenGL

[kidcharles]

This is what happens when you only write games for a proprietary API (and for that matter only a single OS). Newell and other game developers cannot truly be shocked about this problem; anyone with half a brain could have told you something like this was bound to happen when you are so wedded to Microsoft. If games were still developed with OpenGL, this would not be an issue. If games were written for multiple OS's, this would not be an issue.

Actual experiences vs. FUDdy the boogeyman

[kendor]

As seems usual many Slashdotters seem to be overreaching, equating their fantasy lives with what's happening in the marketplace, and what most users are experiencing.

Among machines I use regularly in Seattle and in Southern California I'm now running:

• Two machines that use XP
• A TabletPC with XP
• A Dell XPSII laptop that was running Vista RC1, then Vista RC2, and as of a week ago is running the release version of Vista
• A smaller Dell laptop that followed a similar upgrade path to the machine above
• A new Dell 9200 Desktop with a quad-core Q6600 CPU and a DX10-capable GTS8600 video card

I have used all of these machines to run a wide variety of software:

• Office
• the original Unreal Tournament from 1999
• Homeworld 2
• Visual Studio 2005
• Visual Studio 2008
• Photoshop CS2 suite
• Sorenson's toolsets
• Morrowind: Oblivion
• ...and tons of other stuff

The problems I have had to date?

• In Vista RC1 headphone support on my laptops didn't work
• Some of the more advanced developer tools I've used and plugins for VS.NET have required elevation to install correctly

That's it, folks. Other than that Vista seems like a pretty decent tool that chugs along and mostly stays out of my way whether I'm using it for new or old software. It has not been the ordeal that some of you wish it was, and if my problems are limited to issues involving beta OS releases and installation issues associated with expert-level tools, I can't imagine Joe Sixpack is tearing his hair out over ubiquitious tools like say, Office.

Part of being a good advocate for a cause like free software is having the maturity to be intellectually honest. Your hyperventilating every time the name of Microsoft is spoken doesn't make FSF any better or any more appealing. Indeed, people whose living depends on computing may shy away from free software solutions, afraid that they might attract more of your kind to the workplace. Who would want to work with such a negative personality type?

-KF

DX10 was not designed to force people to upgrade

[cookd]

DX 10 is not designed to force anybody to do anything. It was a big change in the way DirectX works so it required significant changes in the kernel's video system and significant changes in the structure of video drivers. That kind of thing is really hard to stuff into a service pack.

I think that in the long term, the change (moving to the Vista video architecture) will be a good thing. The Vista video model seems to address a lot of real issues like sharing the 3D features of the video card (previously not a real possibility). In the short term, the change is a bit painful and offers no real benefit (just nifty eye candy and effects). If I were a game developer, I certainly wouldn't develop any games that only run on DX10.

I don't think that is entirely unexpected -- most developers still support DX8. However, just like most developers can expect most of their gamers to have DX9 hardware and software, eventually developers will be able to expect gamers to have DX10 hardware and software. Then there will be benefits.

In the meantime, I can understand some frustration. For example, due to my laptop's lousy video driver, I can't play full-screen video in DX10 (Aero transparency enabled) mode. However, if I switch to the "Basic" mode, suddenly all is well. So this is certainly painful.

Win-Win for Microsoft.

[guidryp]

People are forced to go to Vista if they want DX10. Win.
PC gaming is further messed up and more people go to console (Xbox). Win.

The downside for Microsoft is what? People pissed with Microsoft tactics? Yeah that would be new...

Re:Huh?

[amuro98]

Yes, yes, yes. Microsoft making DX10 a "Vista only" feature was clearly an effort to get folks to upgrade to Vista sooner rather than later. No one was ever fooled by Microsoft's claims about how DX10 could only be implemented with Vista's "advanced" architecture...

Unfortunately, it hasn't been working out too well for Microsoft. Between the horrible driver support, expensive hardware requirements, and the general incompatibility issues you expect whenever upgrading to a major new OS, Vista has been mostly a bust for gamers (and even general users.) Furthermore, this doesn't even include the normal warnings about buying version 1.0 of ANYTHING for your PC - much less anything from Microsoft that hasn't had at least 2 SPs released for it, much less waiting for a major refresh, like Win95b.

Then there's the whole DX10.1 debacle, which promises to make all existing "DX10" video cards obsolete before they've even gotten proper support. Whee! Microsoft sure loves them some gamers!

Most gamers I know are putting off the upgrade to Vista for as long as possible - Microsoft's profits be darned. XP ain't broke, so why "fix" it with Vista which so far has proven to be more a step backwards than anything else?

In my opinion, Microsoft wants to KILL PC gaming - and is using Vista and DX10 to do it. Think about it. How much does Microsoft make off every sale of a non-Microsoft PC game? Exactly $0. All those copies of HalfLife2 - $0. WoW - $0. Civ, BioShock, Sims - $0, $0, and $0. Sure, they make money on the sale of Vista, but that's what, one sale per gamer until Vista's replacement comes out 4-5 years later? Meanwhile, over on Microsoft's XBox side, EVERY copy of EVERY game sold results in a paycheck of $5-10 in licensing fees. This includes not just the games you see in stores, but also the titles you can download off Xbox Live Arcade. There's also the money Microsoft makes from selling Xbox SDKs to the developers - since they have no choice BUT to buy it - unlike on the PC where Microsoft has much less control on what software is used. Furthermore, the console market is exponentially larger than the PC gaming market - and has been for years. Microsoft even makes money from online play on the console with its Xbox Live service - which is yet another area they're making exactly $0 off of PC gamers.

Why OpenGL should have been the de facto standard

[John Hansen]

With a thorn like this in Microsoft's side, there is certainly a part of me that hopes that we will begin to see more OpenGL games released versus DirectX.

Don't get me wrong, DirectX is a nice graphics library, but the seriousness of the vendor lock-in is just staggering -- and scenarios like this are a perfect example of a game development company's worst fears.

This situation was created because not enough effort was put into OpenGL when it needed it the most to make it a truly cutting-edge standard. The blame for that particularly lies with Microsoft and their aggressive campaign for Direct3D (and DirectX). As a result, OpenGL languished for several years, with only incremental feature updates (to version 1.5, which IIRC wasn't even a real release, but more of a vendor patchset for 1.4). In the meantime, DirectX leapfrogged its way to version 9 with a ridiculous amount of features being added.

OpenGL 2.1 finally came out last August (http://www.opengl.org/documentation/current_versi on/) to very little fanfare. About the only companies it really mattered to were the Xbox competitors, namely, Sony and Nintendo. The PC gaming industry as a whole didn't care, because they had a solution that was "good enough" -- DirectX 9.

Now, OpenGL 3.0 is "on track" to be finalized at the end of this month. Whether that will happen is anyone's guess, but it looks like the DX10 situation has finally lit a fire under their collective asses. Who knows, we may even see an OpenGL 3.0 specification by September, but I'm not really holding my breath.
http://www.opengl.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?u bb=get_topic;f=3;t=015351;p=0

Of course, even though there's a brand spanking OpenGL almost ready to again kick Direct3D's ass performance wise, Microsoft has already taken steps to ensure that won't happen. OpenGL 1.4 (yes, 1.4!) is implemented in Vista as a translation layer to run Direct3D calls on the hardware. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct3D_vs._OpenGL#P ortability This cripples OpenGL's performance advantage. Of course, if you want to run the newest OpenGL on the newest hardware, as you should, they've put another roadblock in the way with Vista: you have to use the Windows XP drivers, which disable the nice flashy Aero interface. At this point, you're probably thinking, "Wait, wasn't Aero a selling point of Vista?" Well, that certainly makes sense. Only hardcore gamers would want to trade off their interface for OpenGL's performance, but your average casual gamer doesn't care.

So even if OpenGL 3 is technically superior, publishers probably won't adopt it because of the widespread view that it's slow (thanks to Vista's emulation). iD Software will likely use it as they always have, but it'll become harder to explain to your average user why he needs to install unverified drivers and disable his nice flashy interface just so he can run said game.

It's almost sickening, really, when you think about the damage DirectX has done.

Re:Why OpenGL should have been the de facto standa

[TrancePhreak]

You got quite a bit wrong there.

Let's start with the suspense in OpenGL versions. This was caused by a board that was taking too long to arbitrate disputes and pander to everyone. It was full of many companies, all of which who were competing and would stop each other as much as possible. That's why not many OpenGL updates were issued, but plenty of things became vendor specific extensions. Now I've heard that the board has been disolved and a single entity is taking the reigns. This explains why OpenGL has been picking up lately. No disputes, just progress.

For issue number 2, the Vista / OpenGL myth. You are partly correct, Aero will be disabled. Where you are wrong is that it will be disabled while you are using the OpenGL application. I have already tested this myself and it is no biggie. It is also somewhat expected, as OpenGL and Direct3D would fight for the hardware. They work fairly differently and if the OS cannot keep context you end up with missed renders/glitches/etc.