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DirectX 10 Coming To Linux and Mac
twickline writes "Jeremy White posted the 2009 roadmap for Crossover, and wrote, 'We've just shipped a lot of those "under the hood" improvements for games out in CrossOver Games 7.2. We're really pushing Direct X 9 support pretty far along, and getting ready to move on Direct X 10. ... In addition to our normal work of broadening and deepening our application support in Wine, we're going to try to dramatically improve the CrossOver GUI itself. First, the Linux version will get a fresh new look. But both versions are going to get an interface that we hope will bring the power of the Compatibility Center right into the installation view. The key idea is to make it easier to distill the gathered wisdom on unsupported applications and make it far easier to use.'"
As long as DirectX is still in use, *nix will always still be a step behind Windows in gaming. Personally I would be pushing for game developers to support OpenGL more than WINE developers to support DirectX
Direct X 10 coming to Linux and Mac falsely implies that MS would be making it possible for Direct X 10 to be run natively on Linux or Mac. A much more accurate title (though one that many would read and say "who cares" without clicking on the link) would be "Crossover Games to support Direct X 10.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
Oh, and ponies please while you're at it, m'kay?
Unfortunately, this is much less of a technical issue than a business issue. Developers are entrenched in DX development, and Microsoft will try to keep it that way. That's the real problem that needs to be solved.
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Not really, everything has gone towards shaders, and it's trivial to port a GLSL shader to a HLSL one and vice versa.
The real problem for GL developers is that the API is lagging behind DX, and has been for a number of years. So, new features get added to D3D, and then ATI/NVidia will implement extensions for those into GL. About a year later, those may be unified into a single ext or arb extension. About 3 years later, they may find their way into the core SDK (at which point D3D would have had those in the core SDK for 3 years).
Developers aren't entrenched in D3D, they just find a much nicer API to work with.