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

Getting rid of Windows

[tomalpha]

The only reason I still have a Windows PC at home is for gaming. DirectX 10 support is a step closer to me being able to get rid of it. Can't come soon enough, and I'm happy to pay for it if that's what it takes.

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[sinthetek]

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

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[telchine]

In the end I bought a console and didn't look back.

Yeah, that's the problem I have with console games too... you can't look back very easily.

With a controller, turning around to look behind you is a slow and cumbersome task. I much prefer a keyboard and mouse because you can spin around in under a second, it makes the game feel a lot faster.

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[MetaPhyzx]

One has to weigh the push M$ has put behind cultivating coders who feel comfortable doing things in DX (with the advantage of support from M$), versus the shops that have the luxury to tool around in GL (id software and a few others).

Being able to pick up a phone and get support is huge to them, with the added bonus of writing for a select set of API's that are supposedly guaranteed to work with the varying M$ operating systems.

Don't get me wrong; I agree with you. But as the old saying goes: Money talks; bullsh!t...

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.

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[default luser]

PAE won't help with this problem, because it splits the memory space into multiple 4GB chunks, and you can only access one chunk at a time. Technically, you could have a game use more than 2GB ram using PAE, but the performance hit switching between memory spaces is astronomical, so you'd have to find a way to streamline it.

A flat 64-bit memory space is so much easier. PAE was really intended for multiple server processes to run at-once, with a small hit for process switching. Nothing real-time was ever intended for PAE.

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?

[Sneeka2]

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.

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:Why not work on another API?

[robthebloke]

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.

Good news, bad news.

[Anonymous Coward]

The good news: increased base of support for games.

The bad news: Codeweavers makes much noise about their "supported games". But what they don't make explicitly clear is that these games are, for the most part, games that have been reported to work. Don't take my word for it, go and check. Out of 174 games listed on that page, one is "known not to work", 149 get an "honourable mention" (meaning they've been reported to work, but they are not supported by Codeweavers), two get a bronze, and 22 get a silver. So that's 174 games listed, and just 24 of those are supported if there are issues.

Rather disingenuous, really, to have that information tucked away in a pop-up tooltip that only appears when you hover over the medal. I wish them luck, but I can't help but feel that they need to be a little bit more open with their customers.

It also doesn't help that that list hasn't been updated since July ... eight months. Not exactly confidence inspiring, alas.

Re:Good news, bad news.

[jparshall]

Here's the deal, guys. We're not trying to be disingenuous. But we also have finite resources, which means we have to be very careful about what we bite off in the support department. Here at the ranch, we have this funny belief that officially supporting a game means we *actually* have to care about it. That means that we have to treat our customers' questions about that game with some amount of due diligence, stoke up developers to fix bugs on it, etc. Sadly, there aren't enough support engineers on the planet to answer every 13-year old kid's questions about why this one particular sprite in Foozlewars Xtreme 10 doesn't quite render correctly on alternate Sundays under CrossOver. If we officially supported every game we ran, we'd have to put guns against our temples. And that wouldn't be good for Wine development as a whole, now would it? So, mostly, we only officially support the "big hitters" out there, the hot titles, because let's face it, for every World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2 there's about a buhzillion other titles that *may* run, but only have about 14 passionate players. This, in turn, means that "officially supporting" Foozlewars Xtreme 10 doesn't drive all that much revenue to my bottom line, whereas supporting WoW and TF2 sure as hell *does*. And the bottom line about the bottom line is that the more ca$h there is *under* the bottom line, the faster Wine gets better. But right now, today, while we'd love to support everything, we simply don't have the resources to do it. We thank our customers profusely for giving us the resources we *do* have--your patronage has directly improved Wine. -jon parshall- COO www.codeweavers.com

Misleading title

[Totenglocke]

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.

It's all lies.

[Computershack]

The last time I played a game using Crossover, it was in DX7, not 9, so I don't know how they can claim that's the case. For those still reading, it was CS:Source and Battlefield 2. Both looked truly horrific compared to playing on Windows and had poor framerates despite being run on a 9600GT.

And then there's Punkbuster support. Until they can get that working 100%, there's no point at all because you end up getting blacklisted so that money you spent buying the game is wasted as your CD Key is unusable on any PB server.

Re:Porting to XP?

[David Gerard]

Working on it!

(Status: doesn't actually, er, compile as yet. And even if it did, the program launcher wouldn't work. But more people to at least solve the inability to compile would be most welcome. Current block: Cygwin's header files are on crack.)

Re:oblig, even though it was a funny one

[Chabo]

WHOOOOSH!