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.'"

Comments

Good news for normal Wine too

[Novus]

With Wine under the LGPL (making much of CrossOver LGPL) and CodeWeavers supporting Wine development, this will probably result in standard Wine also supporting DirectX 10 soon. I can also see this becoming a DirectX 10 to OpenGL wrapper to provide DirectX 10 features on XP. Both of these would be nice.

Re:Good news for normal Wine too

[IBBoard]

I can also see this becoming a DirectX 10 to OpenGL wrapper to provide DirectX 10 features on XP.

That's the wonderful irony about this - Linux, the non-gaming desktop, is going to get DirectX 10 through open-source while Microsoft just ignore the huge majority of people on Windows XP!

Not that I use any games that are DX10, but this is definitely an interesting development.

Re:Good news for normal Wine too

[TheRaven64]

That's the wonderful irony about this - Linux, the non-gaming desktop, is going to get DirectX 10 through open-source while Microsoft just ignore the huge majority of people on Windows XP!

You seem to be missing the fact that WINE works quite well on Windows (and Mac), and so if WINE supports DirectX 10 then so does XP. A few desktop VM apps are using WINE code to provide DirectX drivers which talk to the host platform's OpenGL implementation. I wouldn't be surprised to see some game publishers investing a little in WINE development and shipping WINE DLLs along with their app to run on XP. This would also give them Mac (and Linux) ports effectively for free.

Why not work on another API?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely with the likes of IBM, Apple, EA, Sun (shudder), Valve, ATI, Nvidia, all teaming up, they could create a cross platform API, and all appropriate documentation, programming plugins etc that will make programming for it easier than DirectX?

I mean, it's not the wildest concept ever. Clean up OpenGL, make it simpler if required. Add Open sound, add openinput, and voila!

If it's simple to code for, well documented and supports all of the latest features, and is downloadable as a library for all of the major windows' and *nix's it will make life easier for gamers, developers and other open source advocates.

It could be like java in concept, but more like directx in function. (ie it works)

Re:Why not work on another API?

[kripkenstein]

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.

Is that still true? All the major 3D engines - Gamebryo, CryEngine, id Tech (5), Unity, etc., can output to DirectX, OpenGL and various console graphic systems. And at the low end even open source engines like Ogre and Irrlicht can output to multiple renderers.

Are there still a lot of Windows games that write raw DirectX code?

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[TheRaven64]

One of the interesting, but less-often mentioned, things about WINE is that it works on Windows. If WINE adds support for DirectX 10, then this makes it possible to run DirectX 10 games on Windows XP, which gives home users a reason not to upgrade to Vista / Windows 7.

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[Kazoo the Clown]

The reality is having a refresh greater than 60Hz is pretty pointless with an LCD because there is no phosphor being strobe blasted with scanlines where the eye can detect the flicker and most people can't detect changes faster than 1/30th of a second, much less 1/60th.

This is probably true if they're calculating motion blur, but pumping up the refresh rate is simpler. We're not talking about flicker of static images, but the stepped-motion of moving ones. An object that flies across a 1920 pixel screen in one second, shifts 32 pixels a frame at 60hz, and 16 at 120hz. These are differences you can see.

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[Bert64]

You can use 2003, the 32bit version supports more than 4gb of ram (xp could too, its artificially crippled and aparrently non service packed versions do) and the 64bit version works a lot better than xp64 ever did.