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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.
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.
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.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
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).
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.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"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.
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.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Use opengl.
These game producers are idiots.
You got what you wanted when you only support Microsoft.
They got you by the balls.
This is the relevant part of the survey you need to look at:
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.
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.
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.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
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...
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.
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?
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.
i 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.
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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.
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_vers
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?
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#
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.
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.
-]Phreak Out[-