DX11 Coming To Linux (But Not XP)

gr8_phk writes "As reported over at Phoronix, the Direct X 11 API now has an open source implementation on top of Gallium3d which should ease porting of games to Linux with or without Wine. While still in its infancy, you can see where this is heading. All this while Microsoft hasn't offered DX11 for their own aging WindowsXP. Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?"

Comments

At Long Last

[TitusC3v5]

Microsoft has finally give us some cheese for our wine is not an emulator is not an emulator is not an emulator is not ...

Re:At Long Last

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is a pickled cucumber called a pickle, while a pickled pepper is called a pickled pepper?

Re:At Long Last

[SQLGuru]

Pickled okra? Pickled eggs? Pickled Pigs Feet?

Re:At Long Last

[Anonymous Coward]

and a pickled brisket is called "corned beef", when it's never even seen maize?

Re:At Long Last

[Anonymous Coward]

Because otherwise you wouldn't eat it if you saw where she kept her cucumbers.

Re:At Long Last

[skine]

Because "corn" means a large grain.

Such as peppercorns, barleycorns, maize corns or (such as in the naming of corned beef), salt corns.

Re:At Long Last

[Anonymous Coward]

recursion fail! The actual name is WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW[10888.164363] kfmclient invoked oom-killer: gfp_mask=0xd0, order=1,
oom_adj=0

Re:At Long Last

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn, wake me up when a 10 years old Linux OS plays DX11 games better a 10 years Windows OS.

Re:At Long Last

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is a raven like a writers desk?

Gre

[Anonymous Coward]

The world is upside down.

Re:Gre

[Frosty Piss]

Not really. Microsoft has made it clear that support for XP is coming to a close.

Re:Gre

[Anonymous Coward]

The world is upside down.

Given my location, everything is now the right way up.

Response to rampant speculation

[Tetsujin]

"Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?"

Yes. It seems very likely to me that an open-source implementation of a Microsoft API, and implementation "in its infancy", will soon surpass Microsoft's own offering.

I mean, if you're comparing DX11 support on Linux to DX11 support on XP - well, some support is better than none, right? So, OK, sure.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[ifiwereasculptor]

"Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?" Actually Linux could soon support Microsoft's latest API better than XP. That's possible. But not better than Microsoft. That's like saying Linux has always supported DX9 better than Microsoft itself because it wasn't present in Windows 3.1 (and neither in 3.11).

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Fulg]

Yes. It seems very likely to me that an open-source implementation of a Microsoft API, and implementation "in its infancy", will soon surpass Microsoft's own offering.

I was about to post the same thing. The summary is amazingly hasty in its conclusion... I mean, WINE has been at it for what, 10 years? They still don't have it working as well as the original. Not dissing WINE, but I mean, implementing the entry points of a published API is easy. Making it do the correct things under the hood is the hard part...

That being said, I can certainly applaud the effort, but this should be news once it's working otherwise it's meaningless.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[jkxx]

Yes, as wine often runs games better than linux itself, or to phrase it differently, windows exe's through wine have a better chance of running properly than native binaries, at least on linux. Unfortunately the game makers themselves are unlikely to consider Linux given its small user base, so even if this happens it will benefit Linux or dual-boot users only.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[armanox]

I'd say WINE has done quite nicely. Remember when WINE emulated Win 3.11? WINE's biggest problem is that it will forever be playing catch up.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Gadget_Guy]

I had a quick look at the system requirements for this project, and it said: "The following are required for DRI-based hardware acceleration with Mesa...Linux 2.6.28." This version was released nearly two years after Vista. I don't think that it can be said to support DirectX better than Microsoft when it can't run on a version that dates back to XP days.

Now I think that it is great that they are doing this project, but saying it supports the API better than Microsoft only distracts from the developer's achievements.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Fulg]

Oh, I certainly agree, WINE is quite an achievement. My point was that it's much too soon to celebrate an open-source DX11 implementation because they haven't started doing the hard part yet; look at how long it took WINE to get accelerated DX9 to a "mostly working (with limitations)" state...

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

And if it's treated like other Linux software and actually open source, then one of the devs may even be nice enough to port out a win32 build. (In other words it will become available to XP. But will probably require a registry hack or some other trick to get around arbitrary software version obstructions.) Obviously there wont be one at the start, but given enough time - OS diversification happens more often than not.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

"Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?"

I'm a *nix guy, but that line is stupid. XP is from 2001. The Linux kernel then was 2.4, and early versions at that.

When the 2.4 kernel gets DX11 support, then that comment will make sense.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[commodore64_love]

I haven't tried WINE lately but in the Ubuntu 2009.0 days, it couldn't even run my Netscape Dialing program or the included Web Accelerator properly (it crashed). If it can't run something that simple, I don't trust it to run MS Word properly either.

And it looks like it's time to get rid of my XP machine. Which is a shame because it still works perfectly but if it can run various DX11 videos that I download, then it will be frustrating to operate.

MS is adopting the Apple tactics (don't support the 3rd to last OS, thereby forcing people to spend money on upgrades).

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[JesseMcDonald]

I don't think that it can be said to support DirectX better than Microsoft when it can't run on a version that dates back to XP days.

Irrelevant. The latest Linux kernel is available for free, and can be upgraded without any compatibility issues or changes to the UI. Why would this project waste time redoing all the work which has already gone into kernel development? The odds that anyone would be interested in DX11 on Linux and simultaneously have a good reason not to upgrade their kernel are rather slim.

Not to mention that the whole kernel is open-source, so if you really wanted to make it work you could probably backport the necessary DRI changes to an older kernel.

There are good reasons for retaining XP on existing systems, not least of which are the facts that upgrading would cost several hundred dollars and force a major change in the user interface. You can't upgrade an XP system to a Vista or Windows 7 kernel with DX11 support while leaving the rest of the system intact. The situations are not comparable.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't remember Wine supporting 3.11. Are you sure you aren't thinking of DOSBox?

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[cjb658]

It seems Wine works pretty well on very popular apps, but not so much with obscure ones.

And those are the ones that usually keep people stuck on Windows.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[TheRaven64]

You must have a poor memory then. WINE implemented the Win16 API before they started on Win32. There was a time in the late '90s when you were more likely to get a Win16 app working on Linux than on Windows NT 4.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[MBGMorden]

There are good reasons for retaining XP on existing systems, not least of which are the facts that upgrading would cost several hundred dollars

Windows 7 Home Premium is only $99 from Newegg. Actually $89 today on sale. While I'm a die-hard Ubuntu user, I keep a copy of Windows around for gaming. As obvious, the price isn't what's keeping me from using Windows on my main machine. It's more an issue of Linux constantly improving in quality, whereas Windows seems to be going slowly downhill post-XP. Eventually they met in the middle and I found myself less frustrated in Linux compared to Windows. If I could get my gaming done on Linux, I'd love to toss the Windows machine completely.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[rgviza]

Not really. MS won't support it on XP because they are trying to get gamers to buy Windows 7ista. I'm sure the Windows 7 support for DX11 will be on par with the linux support.

*note I'm not a windows fanboi, I just happen to have a firm grasp of reality. I do game on windows, but my development work is entirely FOSS based on linux systems.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you manage to get so much tard into a single post?

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[JesseMcDonald]

Windows 7 Home Premium is only $99 from Newegg. Actually $89 today on sale.

Fair enough, although a comparable Linux system would have Enterprise/Ultimate features which were omitted from the Home Premium edition. The Ultimate edition is priced over $200.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[oh_my_080980980]

Oh dear god you trolls. The point about the comment is that DX11 is not supported on Windows XP. Microsoft has no intention of supporting DX11 on XP and they want to kill XP. Thing is a lot of users still use XP.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The one saving grace for Wine, in its eternal game of catch-up, is that individual programs that people care about are either static targets, or relatively slow moving(depending on how often they see patches/updates and how compulsory those are).

Unless Wine reaches a userbase high enough that devs start targeting it that won't be much of a consolation to anybody trying to treat Linux as a cutting edge gamer's system; but (since Wine has no commercial "upgrade treadmill" incentives) there isn't much stopping it from maintaining support for $LEGACY_PROGRAM forever(especially since multiple Wine configs can coexist, with different ones for different programs)...

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

299 and 320 in stores for Pro and Ultimate. Or 270 and 299. Regardless while not worse than Win 2k Pro/Xp Pro were back in the days, who has 300 bucks to throw down on an OPERATING SYSTEM in the current economy? That's 6 release day videogames, 18+ movies, up to 3 months of gas, half a month's rent. 3 dates with a gold digger, etc.

There's a lot that you can do with 300 bucks besides get to see a windows logo and then find out you need a bigger hard disk and more ram :D

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[h4rr4r]

So because it can't run some program no one uses you don't trust it to support an application that they sell support for?

I think you have been huffing to much old commodore fumes.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[tibman]

I hope your XP machines have been updated since 2001.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

XP still gets official support and IIRC still has a huge majority of the market share, so it's not really anything at all like DX9 on Windows 3.1

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[drsmithy]

There are good reasons for retaining XP on existing systems, not least of which are the facts that upgrading would cost several hundred dollars and force a major change in the user interface. You can't upgrade an XP system to a Vista or Windows 7 kernel with DX11 support while leaving the rest of the system intact. The situations are not comparable.

Can you posit a reason why someone would want/need DX11 support, but where a) cost of upgrading is a meaningful concern and b) the minor changes in the interface are relevant ?

To put it another way, basically the only people who care about DX11 are hardcore gamers, who are happy to spend $hundreds on video cards and somehow manage to deal with the wildly different UIs in every game.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Robert Zenz]

Why do you want to run a Netscape Dialing program...and a "Web Accelerator" (I wouldn't trust such software except if it uses an outbound server which works like a proxy and compresses everything)? But both application are sounding like they have some pretty ugly API-Hacks in them...so no wonder that they don't work. And MS Word is running quiet good on WINE.

And..."DirectX11 videos" which you download...you might wanna rephrase that sentences.

Regarding the upgrades, that's the goal of Microsoft: Making more money with the customers they have. It's called a "for profit company", that's how capitalism works. Many have the money, all want it, but only one gets it.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Extide]

Lol, DX11 videos, yeah...

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[The Mgt]

MS won't support it on XP because they are trying to get gamers to buy Windows 7ista.

Doesn't work though. Look at how many Windows games are written for the Xbox360 and are therefore run fine with Directx9.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[h4rr4r]

OEM versions are only for new machines that will be resold. You cannot build your own machine this way.

http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/licensing_for_hobbyists.aspx

OEM System Builder Software
Must be preinstalled on a PC and sold to another unrelated party.

You are "pirating" the software if you do that.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[tuppe666]

"Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?" Actually Linux could soon support Microsoft's latest API better than XP. That's possible. But not better than Microsoft. That's like saying Linux has always supported DX9 better than Microsoft itself because it wasn't present in Windows 3.1 (and neither in 3.11).

Your absolutely right it does the. subtle difference is XP is the majority OS; is still being sold. A more relevant example would be IE9 not working on XP but Firefox4 does.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a distro from XP days, I'm pretty sure upgrading it to latest kernel version in a corporate environment is going to be a *real* pain. If sometimes a single version distro upgrade breaks, upgrading a bunch of them and maintain full compatibility with custom binary applications from 10 years ago and nobody remembers must be hard.

Microsoft is obsessed with backwards compatibility from the Windows 95 days or before; I don't think anybody has done such efforts to maintain such a degree of compatibility with binaries so old. In the free software world, nearly nobody cares about binary compatibility; it's the "write once, compile everywhere" meme.

It is said half the budget of Windows 95 went into the compatibility hole; I can imagine later versions are even worse. Making fun of Microsoft for not giving suport of the latest and shinniest graphics library in a legacy 10-year-old version they have been 4 years trying to get rid off doesn't make any sense.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[commodore64_love]

I imitate you
.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[omnichad]

There's a difference between the OEM system builder kits and the OEM software you get at an online retailer.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Hadlock]

I think "support" here is a weak word, in most cases a lot of games have dx 9 mode and dx 11 mode. Support just seems... like, "well, we stripped out some features and got it to work.. but only most of the time".

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[commodore64_love]

>>>Why do you want to run a Netscape Dialing program...

So I can connect to Netscape ISP
.

>>>and a "Web Accelerator" (I wouldn't trust such software except if it uses an outbound server which works like a proxy and compresses everything)?

That's exactly what it does, through netscape.com's proxy. It speeds-up a 50k connection to look as fast as a DSL line, somewhat similar to how Opera Turbo works but much faster. So Direct X isn't about displaying video on the screen? I don't know much about DX but I figured that was the point
.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[commodore64_love]

>>>more likely to get a Win16 app working on Linux than on Windows NT 4.

So why not use Windows 95 or 98 instead. Both ran 16-bit apps flawlessly. (Well, until the app crashed and hung-up the system, due to braindead cooperative tasking.)

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is quite frankly something I would be happy about, if this project continues successfully.

The only reason I stick with a Windows machine at home is my tendency to waste inordinate amount of time on games. Since I have no intention of supporting the new MS approach (or rather, new implementation of the old approach) and still run XP, if the alternative is Windows 7 or Linux, my choice is clear.

Mind, if they did release DX11 for XP, I'd stick with that (less hassle to get my games up and running).

Way to go, Microsoft.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[kikito]

I'd like to point out that comparing linux with Home Premium isn't fair either.

Linux only comes in one version: Awesome.

You should compare it with the Win7 Awesome version, whatever it's called.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

To add to that, Vista doesn't even run on a my machine, but XP does, and so does even the latest Linux version. So yes, at least on my machine (which isn't even that old in my opinion) Linux supports DX11 better than Microsoft does, because Microsoft doesn't support it at all.
Granted, most games that require DX11 won't run on my machine, but still, some support is better than none at all.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[h4rr4r]

There is not. Go ahead and order it and see. It will say on the box that it is system builder software.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[im_thatoneguy]

Maybe Microsoft isn't so much "trying to get gamers to buy Windows 7ista" as they just don't see a reason to invest a considerable amount of resources on an operating system a decade and 2 releases old.

"Adobe today announced that they're 'trying to get artists to buy the new Photoshop' by not adding all of the new features for free to Photoshop 3.0"

I mean how far back do you want them to go? Win 3.1? Is Microsoft pressuring people to transition to 7 from 3.1 by no longer offering any new features?

Since when was it onerous for a software company to not give away all of their new features for free? Windows XP even got a considerable upgrade in the form of SP2 for free. That back ported a huge number of Vista features.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[marcello_dl]

You should compare it with the Win7 Awesome version, whatever it's called.

it's called windows seven professional. I have it on the company's new laptop since a couple days.

Let me tell how professional It feels at first glance.

The system and non-MS software do the autoupgrade, so it's a very popup-whack-a-mole experience like XP was. I have preinstalled AV software and the suggestion to install windows defender came nonetheless. Actually this is not a big problem, IMHO trying to change everything would be worse, like office2007.

The funny thing is when you want to install linux: all four primary partitions are taken. (it's an Acer, extensa the name IIRC).

So, the DATA partition goes, it's empty. The idea is to resize the C: partition as I don't need much space for linux. Googling seems the faster way to reach the partition manager. I'd rather have it accessible from a disk properties panel, but nevermind maybe I just missed it.

Deleted the DATA partition. Tried to increase C: a bit. Well, you don't do that by increasing the C: partition dimension, you decrease the free space. Sigh.
Then tried to make a new partition. Easy. Wait, it's a different color. Hm it's not a primary partition. I briefly look for relevant options, find none. Maybe if i find a shell and run fdisk... no, no, made the new partition and installed using gparted, recalling I warning found somewhere on the web some time ago which said not to round partitions with vista/7. Linux boots but I haven't tried rebooting 7.

Hopefully I won't have to system restore and try dualbooting using a stick with grub.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[paedobear]

Windows 3.1 is still supported by MS (admittedly in certain embedded sitations rather than as a Desktop OS...)

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[nschubach]

I'm (unfortunately) one of those gamer types that spends money on video cards and can adjust to a vast number of gaming interfaces and control schemes and I still hate the Windows 7 interface.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[tuppe666]

I liked your answer..your deserve points. The answer is marketing. The only people who can afford full price;fully featured Windows 7 are people using other peoples money, and you know who they are..you pay for it. Anyone who matters(can hurt Microsoft's image) from reviewers to teachers gets a heavily dicounted copy. Which is why you get you get the "I got mine for X amount" or "Only a idiot would pay more than X".

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[fractoid]

Surely there are a substantial number of Wine developers who want to run games. There's a reason that World of Warcraft is at the top of the supported apps list...

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[porl]

Well, until the app crashed and hung-up the system, due to braindead cooperative tasking

i think you answered your own question...

"but wait", you may say. "put it in a vm"

that will stop a whole system locking up, but it's a pain to boot a whole vm up just to run one app which runs under wine anyway (if it doesn't then the question is irrelevant anyway).

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[fractoid]

Eventually they met in the middle and I found myself less frustrated in Linux compared to Windows. If I could get my gaming done on Linux, I'd love to toss the Windows machine completely.

This is what happened with me, about 3 years ago. Recently I've been playing my way through Valve's Orange Box - last time I tried this, a year ago, the Source engine didn't work too well at all. Now, everything I've played so far (Portal, HL: Source, HL2) has run flawlessly.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[fractoid]

Shit, you don't use much petrol. $300 would barely last me a month, and I only drive 40km a day. Gold diggers are more expensive here in Australia too. :P Try dating a country girl, they're a much better deal all round.

But yeah, there are plenty of things that I could spend money on that would give me more joy than a copy of Windows 7.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[fractoid]

What? Why does DX11 have to run on the 2.4 kernel? That's like saying that, for MS to support DX11 on XP, you'd have to be able to install DX11 on XP without it updating any system components... which is stupid. If MS offered a free download for XP that enabled DX11 support, even if behind the scenes it replaced the entire kernel with a new one, that would be fine.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Belial6]

And XP is still being sold on desktop computers. Not most of them, but as long as it is still being licesensed for general sale by MS, not supporting it is bad support.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[YoshiDan]

Not since November 1st 2008.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[aiht]

Um... "a time in the late nineties ... Windows NT 4... "
I don't think that many people were using desktop virtualization back then.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Gadget_Guy]

If your system can't run Vista, then you don't have a hope of running DirectX 11 games.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[porl]

that's very true. i was, however, responding to the way commodore64_love worded 'why not use', which is generally read as present tense. the main point though was the fact that running 9x was not a viable solution for most who just needed one or two legacy apps running in a 'stable' environment. the fact that virtualisation wasn't really available back then made a stronger case to use wine where it worked.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[darthdavid]

Honestly, stop dicking around and just use gparted or something.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Robert Zenz]

I'm not a 100% percent sure, but I think that an established Internet-Connection within WINE won't do you any good. You might wanna have a look at the native solutions.

And nope, not directly, DirectX is a graphics layer (between Software and Hardware) similar to OpenGL, with the target to let you easily develop 3D games and applications.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[dbIII]

Unless Wine reaches a userbase high enough that devs start targeting it

There are a few. The geophysical program SeiSee for instance is written with WINE compatability in mind. For the last couple of years it's looked like the World of Warcraft patches are tested against WINE before release.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[quantumphaze]

Wine's aim is to be binary compatible with windows apps as much as feasibly possible. There are apps that use subsystems that Wine can never emulate, for example the 3rd party wireless WAN dial-up manager that came with your cellular USB modem and things that sit between the hardware and Windows subsystems. It works fairly well for well behaved apps that don't use obscure APIs.

Wine really shows it's usefulness when a developer wants to port their Windows app to Linux/Mac. They have the source and know what things are having problems and can change it or even fix Wine itself. This new DX11 API is meant to assist developers in porting Windows games to run in Linux natively. When you are porting you can adjust your code to work around holes in the implementation. Whether working around the incomplete DX implementation is easier than porting to OpenGL is yet to be shown. If in 2 years this becomes mature enough to work reasonably well and Nvidia get Gallium3D working we may see a few more indie shops port to Linux (The big publishers sadly never will for the foreseeable future).

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[BitZtream]

The latest Linux kernel is available for free, and can be upgraded without any compatibility issues or changes to the UI.

Without any compatibility issues? Uhm, no, sorry. Free yes, 'upgraded without any compatibility issues', no. Thats a retarded statement, pretty much any kernel change of any usefulness requires upgrading system libraries at the bare minimum. I'm fairly sure you've never had any software development experience. Pretty much EVERY change you make in a kernel causes compatibility problems if theres actually software written to use it. You can think what you want, but binary compatibility tends to be rather difficult and its an area that pretty much every free OS completely sucks at, hence the practically non-existent amount of commercial software written for an impossible to hit target. You're confusing minor kernel patches with major kernel upgrades at best.

The odds that anyone would be interested in DX11 on Linux and simultaneously have a good reason not to upgrade their kernel are rather slim.

I'd be willing to bet actually that the number of people interested in DX11 on Linux is considerably lower than those on XP.

Not to mention that the whole kernel is open-source, so if you really wanted to make it work you could probably backport the necessary DRI changes to an older kernel.

Which is roughly as likely to happen as my fixing Windows XP without the source. Clearly you don't understand that source code is only one part of the equation. It doesn't just magically combine itself and work like you want it too with the source. When will you fanboy stop making such retarded statements. The source IS NOT EVERYTHING, it actually takes someone putting some work into doing something with that source. It really isn't magical beans.

You can't upgrade an XP system to a Vista or Windows 7 kernel with DX11 support while leaving the rest of the system intact

What? Seriously what do you mean? You're saying that you can upgrade Linux ... but not really upgrade it at the same time? But you can't do that with XP? Please explain how they are different?

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Richard_at_work]

Why? Yes, XP is currently sold, and its sold with a given set of features - it does not come with any guarantee that you will get more features in the future, although MS has provided more on occasion (.Net, IE8 etc).

People buying XP now are not entitled to anything more than they actually bought, and that is what is happening.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Belial6]

I didn't say that they are 'entitled' to anything else. We are talking about how well MS supports their OS after the sale. It is perfectly valid to say that MS does not support some of their software after the sale without saying that you are 'entitled' to it. It is also valid to use the after the sale support to gauge the quality of a product in comparison to it's competition.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[tehcyder]

300 bucks to throw down on an OPERATING SYSTEM in the current economy? That's 6 release day videogames, 18+ movies, up to 3 months of gas, half a month's rent. 3 dates with a gold digger

You have fucking cheap gold diggers where you live, what's the name of your town again?

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[tehcyder]

Granted, most games that require DX11 won't run on my machine, but still, some support is better than none at all.

Why? If you can't actually run DX11 games what is the point of having DX11 anyway? What else does it do apart from make games look better?

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[JesseMcDonald]

(I know, I know—don't feed the trolls. I just can't help it.)

I'm fairly sure you've never had any software development experience.

Actually, I'm a professional embedded software developer as well as a hobbyist programmer. I've been working with software in general, and Linux in particular, for over a decade. I run Linux exclusively on my home PC and build and install my own kernels regularly. In other words: yes, I do know exactly what I'm talking about. And you don't have to install "updated system libraries" to use a modern Linux kernel.

Userspace binary compatibility is actually quite good under Linux; old applications will generally run unchanged provided you have the original dynamic libraries (or static binaries). Binary formats haven't changed much, and remain backward-compatible. All the old system calls are still supported. In short, you can indeed upgrade a Linux kernel in most cases without changing the rest of the system. Changes which break normal userspace applications are few and far between.

I'd be willing to bet actually that the number of people interested in DX11 on Linux is considerably lower than those on XP.

Agreed. This makes my statement more likely, not less.

Which is roughly as likely to happen as my fixing Windows XP without the source.

On the contrary, it probably wouldn't even be all that hard. The graphics modules are already designed to be compiled outside the kernel tree, so at most you might have to work around some minor kernel API changes—trivial for anyone familiar with low-level software development. I would really like to see you or anyone else try to backport the graphics driver support required for DX11 from Vista or Windows 7 without access to the source code. I can be done, of course, but it would certainly be much more difficult.

What? Seriously what do you mean? You're saying that you can upgrade Linux ... but not really upgrade it at the same time? But you can't do that with XP? Please explain how they are different?

I already explained this, but for the benefit of the slow-witted: Yes, you can upgrade the kernel component of a Linux distribution to a version which supports this DX11 project without changing any of the user-space applications the user actually interacts with. There is no way to upgrade just the kernel and drivers of an XP installation to those shipped with Vista or Windows 7 without also replacing the entire desktop environment and the bundled system utilities. You want DX11, or any other core feature, you have to accept the entire package.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[vilanye]

Wine does not emulate anything. All it does is reroute function calls and puts things where the app expects them to be.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[m50d]

I actually found myself trying to install wine on my 64-bit vista machine, so that I could run the Riven installer.

(Unfortunately I couldn't compile it, SUA can get a bit confused about 64- vs 32-bit. Wine does (or at least did) run on 32-bit windows XP)

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[commodore64_love]

I haven't tried WINE lately but in the Ubuntu 2009.0 days, it couldn't even run my Netscape Dialing program or the included Web Accelerator properly (it crashed). If it can't run something that simple, I don't trust it to run MS Word properly either.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[marcello_dl]

I know I know, but I wanted to try out 7 we bought the damn thing you see.
Anyway it dual boots so gparted with no rounding to cyl/MB and grub2 performed well.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[Richard_at_work]

But MS *does* support XP - they release security and bug fixes. The fact that MS does not also give XP new features does not mean the OS isn't supported.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[quantumphaze]

I know, it's just easier to say "emulate" than to say "provides a win32 compatible API conversion layer on top of Linux and X11" or whatever is technically correct.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[DaVince21]

Um, where did you get this information from? Binary versions will usually run much better than they would in Wine, at least according to personal experience.

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[gagol]

Assuming 30 days and rounding to 1$ per liter... You spend 10$ for about 40km... which bring you to 25 liters per 100 km. Do you drive a big rig or what? My old Ford Taurus 95 consume half of that when I forget to put oil in the engine...

Re:Response to rampant speculation

[fractoid]

Try $1.35/L for 95 RON unless you get very lucky in which case it sometimes gets down to $1.25/L. I probably didn't include all my weekend driving, so call it 50km/day average for 1550km/month. I said 'barely' so say $260/month to account for a bit left over. That gives us ~8km/L which is roughly right for my car in city driving. Not too far off given that my initial numbers were very rough estimates...

Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[mark-t]

Because I can't help but think that this may be some sort of scheme to put OpenGL out of the picture....

I'm generally not one to presume conspiracy right off the bat, but there's something about this that just doesn't quite seem on the up-and-up, IMO.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[yincrash]

make sure you have your tin foil hat for the coming opengl-pocalypse

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Beelzebud]

Except this isn't being done my MS. Like it or not, modern game companies are using Direct X more and more. OpenGL is already out of the picture, for the most part. With people like John Carmack now even coding in Direct X, it makes sense to try to get a solution for Linux.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[ChienAndalu]

This is what the developer wrote in the commit message:

Thanks to a very clean and well-though design done from scratch,
the Direct3D 10/11 APIs are vastly better than OpenGL and can be
supported with orders of magnitude less code and development time,
as you can see by comparing the lines of code of this commit and
those in the existing Mesa OpenGL implementation.

As somebody who only has little OpenGL coding experience I can't really comment on this.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[mewsenews]

OpenGL is already out of the picture, for the most part.

OTOH, Macs run OpenGL and are stereotyped as having an affluent user base. Blizzard still releases Mac versions of games. Steam for Mac launched in May. Not really "out of the picture" yet.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Beelzebud]

Of course it's not totally out of the picture, but it's definitely taking a back seat. Blizzard and Valve are the anomalies that still recognize a bigger world than Windows. Let's hope they remain committed. I don't want to see OpenGL die at all.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeap that's why ever Wii and PS3 developer now uses Direct X.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Beelzebud]

Yeah and look at the lineup on those systems compared to Xbox360...

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

On top of that all the iOS and android devs are all using direct x also.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[MoogMan]

It doesn't make a lot of sense to me to implement this into the driver, considering no windows code can interface with it.

Wouldn't it have made more sense to just implement this at the Wine layer?

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[EyelessFade]

And all who make games for Consoles. Remember only Xbox uses DirectX, all the other uses OpenGL or a derivate from it.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Beelzebud]

Point to me where I said OpenGL was dead. Did I claim that no one was using it? The fact is that mainstream game development is using Direct X more and more. Like how John Carmack wrote the new id graphics engine in Direct X first, and is porting it back to Open GL for other systems. Five years ago, people would have laughed at the idea of Carmack coding in D3D.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I only have a little GL experience myself, but I can tell you that the DX10 API is *vastly* better. Basically it takes all the OO pieces of GL like which is what modern GL code uses anyway (VBO's, FBO's etc) and throws out the requirement for you to have to deal with the very non-OO GL state machine. It's like the difference between C and Forth in that you no longer have to manage the stack of states yourself. Architecturally speaking, OpenGL's shaders are kind of weak (it basically requires the GLSL compiler as part of the driver) but in real-world terms it's pretty much a wash.

That said, OpenGL has a far superior extension system where DX has bupkus, which lets OpenGL keep pace and sometimes set the pace. Someone seems to have lit a fire under Kronos, because OpenGL is iterating very fast (I'd even say too fast!) these days. But in API terms, it's still way behind.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[robmv]

and PS3, Wii (OpenGL like AP), iPhone and iPad, WebOS, Android ....

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[icebraining]

No, because this will help to convince producers to port games (not having to use OpenGL is a big bonus), and this is not a layer "on top" but a proper tracker for Gallium, meaning it'll have much better performance than any proxy Wine could implement.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the Wii uses Nintendo's in-house graphics API, not OpenGL.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Bobakitoo]

In the Wine layer, Direct3D is only a warper to user-space opengl. This will allow Direct3D call, from Wine or otherwise, to talk in the most direct manner to the hardware. I doubt anyone will use Direct3D natively on Linux, except for the Wine developpers. Which already got all the missing DirectX parts that make Direct3D useful...

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[3vi1]

>> With people like John Carmack now even coding in Direct X,

Wrong. The ID tech engine isn't tied to DirectX at all. Sure, it has a DirectX9 backend renderer, but it also has an OpenGL renderer.

The DirectX backend was a necessary evil, since MS had announced that Vista wouldn't have OpenGL support, and when they backtracked they made sure the implementation would be sufficiently fragmented as to not compete with their own proprietary (i.e. "lock you into Windows") API.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the comment carefully, he mentions D3D10/11 explicitly, not D3D1 to D3D11, because that would result in a similar headache as you have with Mesa, which has to support all the old and new OpenGL versions. Writing programs using the new OpenGL interfaces is pretty straightforward and easy as well. I remember having a lot of fun with OpenGL/ES 2.0, for example, which is more or less the basic 3D library in all newer smartphones, car headunits and so on.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Bobakitoo]

It all the little Micro-Soft shill studio that are the anomalies of this industrie. They produce many shit games that wont be played by anyone 6 month later. The Blizzard, ID and Valve are the pillars of pc gaming.

The only ones that are using directx are windows and xbox developers, and those are really the same platform. Also where you conting Nintendo and Sony developpers as Direct3d users? The market for Direct3d are limited to the Micro-Soft monopoly. OpenGL is far from been endanged, and certainly not by some direct3d games that wont run on up-to-date systems 5-10 years ahead.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw no sign of it in the commit but hopefully a --disable=MSCrud option will be forthcoming, to make sure that no part of this is built and installed.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[fnj]

As the developer claimed:

the Direct3D 10/11 APIs are vastly better than OpenGL and can be supported with orders of magnitude less code and development time

I call BULL SHIT. I call it loudly and I call it with a big raspberry. Because: OH REALLY??? ONE HUNDRED or more times more code and development time? Thats what "orders of magnitude" with an "s" means.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectX 10+ is vastly superior to what is available on Linux for writing apps,

1. Direct3D - OpenGL is OK. It's not the largest problem after all!

2. DirectInput - what is the Linux analogy? Using X.Org shitty API? It's akin to using Windows' WM_KEYPRESS and similar messages to do keyboard interface, except it's even more cryptic. X.Org is OK for desktop apps, like Win32 API is OK for desktop apps, but that's about it.

3. DirectSound - let's not even get started on the horrendous crap ALSA has become. It's a prime example of *over-engineered*, unusable project. Hell, even my headset returns multiple interfaces while in fact it is 2 channels OUT, 1 channel IN. Yet in Alsa it has a shit ton of options that are completely useless, like emulating 7.1 input. WTF??

Here's more proof how crap ALSA is,
      http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/index.html

Even the documentation is a mess. Click on high level control interface and you get a blank page!
    http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/hcontrol.html

Going from a different path (modules => high level interface), thus ignoring the main navigation page gets me a page with NO overview, *nothing*.
    http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/group___h_control.html

ALSA is one of many OSS projects that makes me ashamed of OSS. You look at projects like PostgreSQL that has *clear* and *concise* documentation available,
      http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/index.html
to something like ALSA, and you want to cry. ALSA looks like overengineered project by a 20 year old that simply ignored making any documentation. Winsauce!

DirectX is NOT only about graphics. It's too bad that Linux/XOrg tends to be barely about graphics and almost nothing about the rest.

And I'm speaking as someone that uses Linux 100% of the time.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[TheThiefMaster]

The PS3 has both a slow opengl implementation and a faster native API. Guess which one gets used.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Narishma]

Nobody uses OpenGL (or derivatives) on consoles. Everybody uses low level proprietary libraries specific to particular consoles, except the Xbox which uses DirectX.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[ChienAndalu]

I doubt anyone will use Direct3D natively on Linux, except for the Wine developpers.

I wonder if they won't because of technological or ideological reasons

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[PhrostyMcByte]

What he says is a criticism of what happened with OpenGL 3. Despite hopes that the old fixed-function API would all be removed in favor of the modern programmable API, it was all left in--along with the *massive* API and all the extra state and complex code it took to implement it. The Direct3D 10 API was, functionally, what most developers were hoping OpenGL 3 would be--a clean break. Smaller, optimized, easy to use, and easy to implement. OpenGL 3.1 eventually removed all the old fixed-function APIs, and OpenGL 3.2 brought rough feature parity with Direct3D 10.

Unfortunately, OpenGL was so backwards- and forwards-compatible with itself that many games were made using some mix of the old and new functionality, so even modern games can be found that won't work without an implementation that supports the older stuff. Direct3D is a pretty rigid API without extensions, and Direct3D 10 was not backwards-compatible at all, so code that is written for it is unable to be anything but simple to implement.

From an implementer's perspective, supporting modern OpenGL use can be a much larger problem than supporting modern Direct3D use. Of course, many games also use older Direct3D versions, and that API is bound to be much more complex too--something he didn't mention.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

So he says the smaller the driver implementation, the better the API?? By this logic a simple forward-everything-to-hardware driver would have the best API.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just more than ten. As it's a logarithmic scale, something like 1.2 orders of magnitude.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[fibonacci8]

You people and your decimal system. He could be talking about binary. It could be slightly more than a 50% improvement.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[KarmaMB84]

OpenGL support is achieved exactly as it was in Windows XP: with an OpenGL ICD provided by the graphics card vendor.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[brainnolo]

What about SDL? They seem to handle those aspects pretty well

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you are a wonderful human being.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[poetmatt]

one of many large groups of windows users is gamers, another is the folks who are now switching to apple to a degree (clueless users).

If their games ran under linux, you could scratch a lot of word of mouth support and a lot of marketshare right there. So I'd love to see this work, but I'll remain extra skeptical because Microsoft will intentionally change DX calls once wine is able to use them, and has done that for a while.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Dark_Matter88]

Every time OpenGL is mentioned, the John Carmack argument is raised too. OpenGL has been playing catch up since this argument was relevant, whilst it will most probably never catch up with D3D, the support for OpenGL ES within OpenGL 4.x has made it a more attractive effort, as porting to and from mobile devices is a lot easier. And on that thought of mobile devices...Mobile games are on the up and up...(they use OGL ES)

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[brezel]

had i any modpoints you would get them. full time linux user and coder here too.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[TheRaven64]

Gallium drivers are in several layers. The majority of a modern GPU is basically a general-purpose processor optimised for running floating-point heavy, branch-light, programs in parallel. The back end of a gallium driver is just a compiler and runtime that takes TGIR programs and runs them on the GPU (or the CPU if the GPU can't handle them). The front end of the driver generates TGIR programs.

Because modern GPUs are so flexible, Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 3 are basically APIs for launching shader programs, which do the real work. The front end of the driver compiles GLSL or HLSL programs to TGIR and passes them to the back end. The back end then compiles them for the native architecture and runs them.

When you use OpenGL 2 or DirectX 9 on Gallium, you have something like Mesa that implements the older, less-flexible (but simpler-to-use) APIs by generating fairly static TGIR programs.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[retchdog]

Base 1.01 - when you need to make drastic improvements fast.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[tepples]

the Wii uses Nintendo's in-house graphics API, not OpenGL.

If the Wii graphics API (GX) is anything like the DS graphics API (also called GX), it's OpenGL with the serial numbers filed off.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[psbrogna]

Don't you get the Hyperbole Times? "Orders of magnitude" is the new "literally" when it comes to marketing's abuse of language (c.f. David Cross bit on the misuse of "literally").

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[TheRaven64]

Sounds about right. Direct3D uses COM interfaces. This means that each version require an entirely new interface. All of the new stuff is in a separate function pointer table (COM object) and all of the new stuff is in the old one. OpenGL, in contrast, uses C functions, and new versions just add new ones (although with 3.x they've started deprecating / removing them).

This means that the DirectX 11 API can be very clean, however the DirectX11 library also includes the DirectX 1 to 10 interfaces. Implementing DirectX 11 is probably an order of magnitude or two easier than implementing OpenGL 3.0 or 3.1, but implementing DirectX 1 to 11 is probably about as hard. If you only want to support the new APIs, then it's easy. OpenGL ES 2.0 is probably about as complicated.

The latest versions of both APIs dispense with all of the old fixed-function stuff. In slightly earlier versions, the driver was responsible for basically providing a complete software emulator for an old fixed-function card that ran on newer completely programmable ones.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[tepples]

Remember only Xbox uses DirectX, all the other uses OpenGL or a derivate from it.

Also, among consoles made by Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo, only Xbox 360 has anything like XNA Creators Club. This means that only the console with DirectX is friendly to two- and three-man teams or to companies working on their first title. The others require a proper business with a dedicated office and a track record on some other platform (source). Or are you counting Apple's iPod touch as a handheld console?

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[DrgnDancer]

If anything the Mac is becoming a slowly but steadily larger platform for games. Valve just started supporting MacOS after seeing its growing market share. Now that some significant number of games are coming to the Mac, Apple is also trying to optimize their drivers for gaming too, hopefully that will further grow the market. Blizzard has kept making Mac versions of its games through the worst of Apple's nears death experience, and is starting to see real return on that investment. I don't see either company giving up on the platform now (at least not unless Apple flounders). The real question is starting to become, "who else will follow them?"

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[TheRaven64]

Not sure why you'd compare DirectSound to ALSA. The direct analogue is OpenAL, which works on *NIX, Windows, and OS X. ALSA is a Linux-specific abomination driven by the NIH mentality prevalent among Linux kernel devs.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[V!NCENT]

Lol, OpenGL 4.0 is on feature parity and out there (Google Unigine Heaven Demo). Comparing OpenGL 2.1 with Direct3D (not X) is extremely unfair.

And BTW; OpenGL is an industry standard and can be mixed with all the other thousand Khronos API's to reduce resource wasting at its best.

This Direct3D State Tracker is a hobby project and D3D 10/11 has _nothing_ on OpenGL 4.0; both by means of features and usefulness. OpenGL can be mixed with OpenCL, EGL, OpenGL ES, OpenMAX, WebGL, OpenVG and OpenWF.

Technologically Direct3D 11 is freaking joke compared to OpenGL 4.0... But politics and marketing >.#

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Cyberax]

"ONE HUNDRED or more times more code and development time?"

One hundred? Quite possible. Legacy OpenGL stuff is quite complex and has a lot of nastiness.

Ten times - absolutely.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Bobakitoo]

Because Direct3D is useless without the Windows api. Just as OpenGL is useless without X11 and glX. Wine has that missing componement avaible and will probably have great use for this... I call Troll on your comment.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Steam is now opened to Mac games. Also, portability between game consoles and other devices is increasingly necessary. The Iphone (even if some subset) and ps3 (the wii, too I think) use OpenGL, for example. Maybe opengl has some share in this area.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[El Lobo]

Sure, Sherlock. What is next? Maybe MS will start a nuclear war to destroy the evil Linux empire? How can people just vomit words just when they here the word Microsoft? Ignorance? Perhaps.

MS cannot change DX calls. DX is implemented atop of COM technology wich means that what is done is done. The interface cannot be changed. If changed, it will then be a new version, call it DX13 , whatever... but the current version interfaces cannot be changed. Whatever, here is the word again: Microsoft... keep vomiting words without thinking.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what "orders of magnitude" with an "s" means.

No, that's what order of magnitudes means.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[poetmatt]

why don't you take a look at what wine has had to deal with as far as directx, not just how directx works. You're missing the forest for the trees, or whatever the expression is.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[magus_melchior]

That does explain, however, why (non-Blizzard) Mac game ports are often released much later, and tend to be buggier and more costly than the originals-- the D3D OpenGL porting is surely the main thing that most dev houses consider prohibitive (unless you're a company with tons of cash from the most popular MMORPG of all time), and they can only release a Mac port through a third party-- hence, the long delay and many bugs.

Valve's ports of Source games are impressive thus far, and it remains to be seen if they could pull off the same cross-platform quality that Blizzard does on a regular basis.

I hate to say it, but Mac gaming is the single largest consumer market for OpenGL. Apple can (and probably should) demonstrate some leadership and put forward a framework akin to DirectX that is APL or GPL licensed (think CUPS), but I'm afraid much of those resources is going into iOS instead.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Robert Zenz]

I think DirectX is used for the same reason as is Windows used for servers: Because an admin/developer generation is coming out of school which got planted into their heads that Windows is the same thing as a PC and that all you need to write an application is MS Access.

After all, their marketing strategy to place their products in school was the best (for them, for the rest of the world maybe the worst) thing they ever did. I still wonder why we don't have biology education sponsored by Bayer or Ratiopharm or sports education sponsored by Nike...but we still have IT education sponsored by Microsoft.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, "order of magnitudes" would refer to the arrangement of more than one magnitude.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Maltheus]

Every other upgrade breaks ALSA for me, but for some reason, I'm still no expert on fixing it. The last time sent me over the edge. Of course I checked with alsamixer to make sure my sound levels were unmuted (not sure why it doesn't default to that), but it turns out that some idiot added two new hidden sound level that only show up in alsamixer by issuing some esoteric command that I only found after days of googling. I love linux, but alsa very much needs to be replaced by something cleaner.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Barefoot Monkey]

1. Direct3D - OpenGL is OK. It's not the largest problem after all!

Agreed. OpenGL works very well, and Direct3D versions 10 and above are also top-notch APIs if you don't mind the fact that they don't work on XP.

2. DirectInput - what is the Linux analogy? Using X.Org shitty API? It's akin to using Windows' WM_KEYPRESS and similar messages to do keyboard interface, except it's even more cryptic. X.Org is OK for desktop apps, like Win32 API is OK for desktop apps, but that's about it.

Do you realise that xlib is not equivalent to using Windows' WM_KEYPRESS; it's more like using Windows' ntdll.dll. Either way, you're not actually supposed to use that.

On Windows, you should generally never use DirectInput ever. It's a pain to program with, it eats into performance far more than it should, it pollutes the registry, it returns incorrect data sometimes, it hasn't been updated since DirectX8, and even Microsoft advises strongly agains using it. Instead, Microsoft recomends that you should use the standard Windows message system (i.e. WM_KEYPRESS) and maybe the Raw Input functions from the standard Windows API, or alternatively use the newer XInput library if it is available. Many developers use other solutions, such as SDL.

On Linux SDL is very popular, but some developers choose to get input from frameworks Qt, KDE or GTK if they are using such a framework to build their app. The closest equivalent to DirectInput in Linux AFAIK is udev, except that udev is actively mantained and actually works properly.

3. DirectSound - let's not even get started on the horrendous crap ALSA has become.

Why are you comparing DirectSound to ALSA? ALSA is a driver. You don't write games using Windows Sound System do you? Why would you choose to work with ALSA? That's not what it's designed for.

In Windows you should avoid DirectSound because it has been discontinued for years (the last update was for DirectX8) and it doesn't even work on recent versions of Windows except in the form of an extremely poor software emulation which doesn't even allow 3D effects.

For Linux and Windows alike I'd recommend OpenAL. There's also XAudio2 for Windows.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Sark666]

Then why is the PC version of Rage opengl?

A post from JC on the subject, albeit an old one.

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=302231&cid=20671657

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[edxwelch]

DirectX is only about graphics. All that other stuff is obsolete:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectInput

"DirectInput forms a part of the DirectX library, it has not been significantly revised since DirectX 8 (2001-2002). Microsoft recommends that new applications make use of the Windows message loop for keyboard and mouse input instead of DirectInput"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectSound
"DirectSound runs in emulation mode on the Microsoft software mixer. The emulator does not have hardware abstraction, so there is no hardware DirectSound acceleration...
XAudio 2 is a cross-platform (Windows and Xbox) common low-level audio API, intended as the replacement for DirectSound"

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

... a simple forward-everything-to-hardware driver would have the best API.

If it works, then that does sound like the best API!

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Mad Merlin]

Even if that's true, none of it matters, they've only implemented Direct3D 10 and Direct3D 11. That doesn't include any other DirectX APIs... DirectSound, DirectInput, and DirectEverythingElse are all still Windows only.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that DirectSound is deprecated (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee415700%28v=VS.85%29.aspx), and DirectInput hasn't been updated since 8, and Microsoft advices that you not use DirectInput for anything other than non-xbox360 game pads (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee417014.aspx).

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenGL is not exclusive to platforms with X11. See WGL and CGL.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Bobakitoo]

Stay on topic idiot, this is about Linux. Intelligent been would have figure he need to replace "X11" and "glX" for the windowing system and windowing api of his favorite platform. What the point of trying to be a smartass as anonymous coward anyway, geting modded up wont do you any good.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[DavoMan]

and the oatmeal's cover of this topic

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[NotBorg]

How will it help? Isn't this DX11 implementation exclusive to Gallium drivers? It's kinda a weird place to be considering most Linux gamers are probably going to be using the blobs from Nvidia and ATI for their distinctive performance gains over the open source offerings.

The type that are going to be interested in the closed source games from big gaming are not going to have a problem with using the closed blobs from Nvida and ATI. They probably already use Wine for some of their gaming and need the GL performance offered by the blobs to do it. This is an odd group that likes Linux, doesn't want to dual boot, and doesn't mind some closed software. Are they going to want to reload a different graphics stack (and their whole desktop environment that goes with it) just to run a different game?

Am I missing something?

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[DavoMan]

or the magnitudes ordered at a magnitude restaurant

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[seeker_1us]

DirectSound ...

DirectX is NOT only about graphics. It's too bad that Linux/XOrg tends to be barely about graphics and almost nothing about the rest.

And I'm speaking as someone that uses Linux 100% of the time.

Bullshit. You say you use Linux 100% of the time but somehow you know nothing about OpenAL or SDL (both of which are cross platform, widely in use, and address all of your bitching points)?

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[cynyr]

Isn't the iPad basically openGL ES? as well as most andriod phones? ohh and anything with the tegra2 in it... and lots of ARM based devices.... and ...

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[cynyr]

and it works on all major open platforms (OSX, Windows, linux) embedded devices will vary.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

What's TGIR?

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[yoshscout]

This... Like it or not OpenGL has been out of the picture for a while. When you look at the tool-chain Microsoft supplies for developers in comparison to what is available for OpenGL, it's no reason why developers have sided so strongly with DirectX. Even those projects that do work cross platform do so with DirectX and OpenGL through some kind of abstraction layer.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

> ALSA is one of many OSS projects that makes me ashamed of OSS.

A little ambiguous, considering the context, don't you think... ;)

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the funny thing about the OSS abbreviation used in this post is that it stands for Open Sound System too, which is a competitor to ALSA. I will not go into the entire OSS vs ALSA history here, though.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[91degrees]

There's more to 3D graphics than PC games. Last company I worked for used touchscreen display systems and used OpenGL since that let the vendor give us a choice between Windows, MacOS and Linux. The company I'm working for right now also uses OpenGL because that's what our 3rd party APIs use. The commercial aviation flight simulator company I interviewed with also wanted openGL. And the extremely similar OpenGL ES is supported by Android and iPhone.

OpenGL isn't going to go away until something an adequate cross platform replacement comes along.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[TrancePhreak]

If you're smart you still precalc your display lists, otherwise you end up rebuilding them each frame. Kind of fatal on a DS.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

Direct3D 11 has DirectCompute which is already shown to be faster than OpenCL. EGL/OpenGL ES/WebGL.. how many times did you need to list the different ways to draw with OpenGL? We could put Direct3D 11, XNA, MDX.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[TrancePhreak]

That's not at all what it's about. Programming with OpenGL is often like shooting the Wumpus. He could be in the next room, but you're not certain. The tools and resources tied to DirectX development are what often drive developers to it. Just look at the major shift game companies took. They realized they could better develop with a given technology and ran with it. More support, less guessing.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[mjwx]

OTOH, Macs run OpenGL and are stereotyped as having an effluent user base.

There, fixed that for you.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[TheRaven64]

Tungsten Graphics Intermediate Language. It's a bytecode for compiled shaders. Front ends of the driver generate it from something API specific, back ends compile it into something hardware specific.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[V!NCENT]

"how many times did you need to list the different ways to draw with OpenGL?"
It's not just to 'draw', it's an entire multimedia standards environment. The duplication where ever possible ensures skipping resource wasting. It's the end-to-end-all for graphics that is available on every platform, unlike DirectShit.

Yes it has had it's primetime with Direct3D 10 for a while, but OpenGL is now at version 4.1, kicking ass.

And that DirectCompute; I'm sure a lot of devices will ship with it. Well actually not, pardon the sarcasm.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Anonymous Coward]

GX for Wii is a thin wrapper around the graphics hardware. There's no abstraction layer at all. So there are some very large differences between GX and OpenGL.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[tepples]

GX for Wii is a thin wrapper around the graphics hardware.

And the OpenGL (ish) in libnds for DS homebrew is a thin wrapper around the DS's graphics hardware: each entry in a display list corresponds roughly to one GL command. How is this possible?

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Threni]

> Because I can't help but think that this may be some sort of scheme to put OpenGL out of the picture....

If it's better than OpenGL, so what? May the best API win.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[Yfrwlf]

Why would they do that? You'd think that proclaiming it to be OpenGL instead of hiding that fact would help encourage development on their platform.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[DaVince21]

People are excited to see DX even being possible on Linux now. Don't worry, the wind'll blow over.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[exomondo]

If you're smart you still precalc your display lists, otherwise you end up rebuilding them each frame. Kind of fatal on a DS.

That's more 'common sense' than being smart.

Re:Does this smack of a hidden agenda to you?

[gagol]

Amen

Support MS APIs better than MS?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like CIFS as supported by SAMBA...

Re:Support MS APIs better than MS?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would think a clean-room implementation of Microsoft's APIs would always be better than Microsoft's own. Their APIs are always full of ambiguities and mysterious cruft.

Re:Support MS APIs better than MS?

[shutdown -p now]

The point is that D3D10 was a clean redesign of the API, so no cruft. Which usually has a beneficial effect on any cruft that might get accumulated in the implementation, as well.

Sound API is the issue now

[Anonymous Coward]

Graphics are an issue but Sound is the item holding back games for Linux.

If this can include a universal sound API then Microsoft will be in trouble.

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[Anonymous Coward]

It will spawn at least 4 universal APIs that are almost completely but not quite incompatible.

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectX consists of Direct3D / DirectDraw and DirectSound. So a full support would include both sound and video.

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[eldepeche]

routed through Pulseaudio to the ALSA driver.

Or to SDL to Arts to OSS.

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[GameboyRMH]

Well that's what OpenAL is for. Plus there's OpenCL, which would be the open-source equivalent of PhysX+CUDA.

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[MBGMorden]

Sound already works OK in Linux. A little bit of a headache, but most users don't notice it.

Trust me, it'll take a LOT more than adding a sound API for Microsoft to be "in trouble" regarding this.

I'd be happy with just getting a few native ports, which would probably put Microsoft into the "just barely concerned" category regarding gaming.

Microsoft may well be afraid of Linux, this ain't the area spawning that fear.

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[tepples]

routed through Pulseaudio to the ALSA driver.

Until a major desktop Linux distribution screws up the transition PulseAudio. This has happened with all games using the Allegro library (similar to SDL but slightly higher-level) on Ubuntu.

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[TheRaven64]

OpenAL. 3D audio for Windows, OS X, and *NIX.

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[cynyr]

OpenAL, or SDL. SDL handles networking and graphics as well. It is the open equivalent of DirectX.

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[Anonymous Coward]

you mean like OpenAL or SDL_mixer?

Re:Sound API is the issue now

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong, DirectX used to consist of 3D, input and sound. Now they're focusing on just being a 3D library.

Seems sensible enough

[Anonymous Coward]

D3D 10/11 are pure shaders, the API does little more than compile, upload, and bind data to those shaders.

So the only 'trick' is to automatically convert HLSL to GLSL, which again, is pretty straightforward, since concepts and structures should pretty much map up 1:1.

Oh, BTW.. It's not DX11 it's D3D11, DirectX is no longer versioned or packaged as one big 'thing', each component carries it's own version number and release schedule.

Re:Seems sensible enough

[KarmaMB84]

You should probably tell Microsoft to stop calling it DirectX 10 and DirectX 11 then....

Re:Seems sensible enough

[TheRaven64]

So the only 'trick' is to automatically convert HLSL to GLSL

Not quite. It's converting HLSL to TGIR. The OpenGL front end converts GLSL to TGIR too.

Day I thought I'd never see

[DrunkenPenguin]

This is a day I thought I'd never see. Wow! I started with Suse 5.2 back in 1998 and all those wasted years we dreamt of something like this and it's finally going to happen. World will never be the way it was if this will really happen. Too bad I'm too old now to actually enjoy this, but I will rejoice anyway just to support this. Now I'm a middle aged man, almost 40 years old, not interested to play Max Payne on my Slackware linux-box any more. All those wasted years.

Phoronix

[Kjella]

So on a scale of 90-100, how many percent of this article is bullshit?

Re:Phoronix

[Anonymous Coward]

100-x where x is the number of linux steam installations

Re:Phoronix

[Beelzebud]

LOL no doubt. The sad thing is that even when Valve's VP publicly said "no Linux client in the works", the guys at Phoronix STILL insist it is coming. Apparently 1 sentence, attributed to an anonymous source, and printed on a website in the UK, carries more weight than Valve's own VP making a public comment.

Re:Phoronix

[natehoy]

I tried to do the math, but kept getting an "out of range" error. Can I increase the upper bound by a couple of orders of magnitude, please?

Re:Phoronix

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently 1 sentence, attributed to an anonymous source, and printed on a website in the UK, carries more weight than Valve's own VP making a public comment.

Possibly. It all depends on which one will get more pageviews. In fact, this is our criteria for all decisions relating to the site.
I hope this clears up any misunderstanding, and that it restores your trust in our exciting, made-up stories.

  Yours, the Phoronix team, formerly editors of the Weekly Worlds News

(P.S. Hey, remember Bat-Boy? A source at Adobe confirms that he's been hired to port Photoshop to Linux!)

(P. P. S. Said source may be a homeless guy living in the parking garage.)

Re:Phoronix

[vintagepc]

While I"m skeptical we'll see a Linux steam client any time soon, don't forget there WERE legitimate packages and shell scripts on Steam's servers that appeared to be an early alpha-phase client. There are two conclusions here: 1) They tried it and decided to drop the project, hence the VP's statement. or, 2) It's not a priority project and possibly even a test to see how the userbase responds... so while it's not actually in the works, they may be considering it/keeping it secret.

Re:Phoronix

[MrHanky]

$cd tmp/mesa
$ git pull
$ ls src/gallium/state_trackers/d3d1x/
d3d1xshader docs dxgid3d11 gd3d1x Makefile.inc tools
d3d1xstutil dxgi gd3d10 gd3dapi mstools w32api
d3dapi dxgid3d10 gd3d11 Makefile progs

Only about 11%, it seems.

Re:Phoronix

[jgtg32a]

Agreed clicked the link immediately after seeing the title then read the summary or started to read it.

"As reported over at Phoronix"

That's when I stopped reading.

Pimp my linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello sir, I have been told that you enjoy compatibility. I took the liberty of installing a Direct X compatibility layer on top of your WINE compatibility layer. Now you can have a compatible user experience while having a compatible graphical experience.

Wait, did I do that right?

Re:Pimp my linux.

[Anonymous Coward]

I humbly request that you not require me to approach you and unseal this tin of whip-arse upon you.

Interesting.

[Beelzebud]

I'd love this, if it's true, and it performs on par with windows. However, I've learned to take Phoronix hype with a grain of salt. They're gaining reputation for making bold claims based on no facts.

Re:Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

They're gaining reputation for making bold claims based on no facts.

That is a bold claim, without supporting basis, that scored you +1 Insightful.

I see what you did there.

Re:Interesting.

[Beelzebud]

Except it's not a bold claim at all, to anyone that has read Phoronix for any amount of time. How's that Linux version of Steam coming along?

Re:Interesting.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1794670&cid=33653090 Faggy faggy fag fag cock smoking copypasta karma whore.

fuck off an die dipshit.

Re:Interesting.

[tuppe666]

Phoronix, is a site that has matured. I used to hate Phroronix so much. Their poor benchmarking annoys me as they never seem to understand better! ie I don't want to know how much faster openarena funs on one kernel to another. I want to know how it runs compared to everything that has changed; GCC/X/Linux...a distro snapshot, across the three main graphic vendors, and an assortment of Apples, XP/Vista/Windows7...but their reporting of happening is X/Mesa/Kernel graphics make them a must read site, also their love of a decent mouse is something I share.

Re:Interesting.

[tuppe666]

What is interesting is the ability for Ubuntu sotware centre to make purchases. I think its going to be interesting times for gaming on Linux. I think that is potentially better news than that and this.

No... (or at least, probably not)

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?

A: No: I'm willing to assert that any operating system released post-2006 will not surpass Microsoft's own support for DX11.

For operating systems compiled before 2002, I GUARANTEE there aren't any that support DX11, let alone do so "better than Microsoft".

Under the NT6.0 (and newer) kernel, it's virtually certain *nix will not surpass MS' internal support for DX11, unless and until it is itself shuffled off in favour of the next implementation.

-AC

great idea

[ILuvRamen]

If they seriously release some really nice games for Linux that use it, people will be all over this at least as a dual boot system. Gamers love it when they do something that takes their current hardware and makes it way faster without spending any money. Judging by how fast Ubuntu ran on a Pentium 3 I had, I'd say Linux frees up a little ram for gaming. I always thought they'd take off as a gaming platform if they really pushed it because it's free and fast which is always a plus for gaming.

Re:great idea

[ifiwereasculptor]

Is RAM that relevant to gaming nowadays? Especially given that Linux dosn't free that much memory? Here I run the base system at 120Mb and Win 7 might need 350Mb. But what's 280Mb in a system that's required to have a badass, ultra expensive video card? Surely no one has craving RAM for gaming for a long time.

Re:great idea

[Beelzebud]

RAM is still extremely relevant, it's just that a lot of PC's sold nowadays come with plenty. RAM becomes relevant when you don't have enough. :)

Re:great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

RAM becomes relevant when you don't have enough.

At $40 per GB or less, wtf doesn't have enough?!

I don't even waste my time on a machine w/ less than 4GB, which I consider to be an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM, and usu spec my hardware w/ 8GB (2x4GB) or 16GB (4x4GB)... again, wtf would you screw yourself in the ass to save a measly coupla hundred $$ on RAM? (and if you HAVE done so, you've really no-one to blame but yourself for the resultant woes...)

-AC

Re:great idea

[tepples]

At $40 per GB or less, wtf doesn't have enough?!

People who still use old, paid-for PCs whose motherboards can't take big RAM sticks. Or people who rely on peripherals for which no 64-bit Windows driver exists. Or people who prefer the portability of a 10" laptop; are those up to 4 GB yet?

Re:great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

At $40 per GB or less, wtf doesn't have enough?!

I don't even waste my time on a machine w/ less than 4GB, which I consider to be an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM, and usu spec my hardware w/ 8GB (2x4GB) or 16GB (4x4GB)... again, wtf would you screw yourself in the ass to save a measly coupla hundred $$ on RAM? (and if you HAVE done so, you've really no-one to blame but yourself for the resultant woes...)

Slashdot should require a minimum age for posting.

Re:great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

If I've got a dual boot system, why do I need WINE?

Re:great idea

[ILuvRamen]

Okay, fine, hard drive IO time then. Linux certainly frees some of that up compared to windows! All that indexing and auto-defragging and system restore point creation and other nonsense that goes on the background of Vista and 7 are huge game loading time killers.
Also, you could make the arguement that massive AI script upscaling that maxes out a processor (Like Starcraft 2 with 8 players, 4 being comps) would run more smoothly with less OS CPU time being used in the background in random spikes like Windows.

Re:great idea

[Anonymous Coward]

*shrug* - such people are clearly as anachronistic as the proverbial WW2 Japanese soldier who stumbles out of the forest believing the war to still be going on... and are about as relevant...

They're beneath notice or care, I don't acknowledge them as sentient, let alone as mattering about anything of significance... call me when you catch up to at least 2008 (as long as it's before 2011...) :)

-AC

gaemen

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it be? Could this mean that Linux will finally have gaems?!?
It doesn't matter to me if they're dev'd by a real studio or not, I'm just sick of everything have the graphics from Quake 3.

Re:gaemen

[Anonymous Coward]

No, because the open source video drivers still blow, the sound APIs still suck, the APIs for game input still suck. The dev tools suck. Not to mention why would any big company cater to Linux when pretty much any company who makes Linux ports of games are either dying or dead.

Re:gaemen

[Anonymous Coward]

Could this mean that Linux will finally have gaems?!?

In a word: No.

News?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought official support for XP from MS was done or currently being phased out. How is this news? Oh, WAIT! I just whipped up an article detailing how Linux is better at something than Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Cue the zealots...

Re:News?

[Beelzebud]

It is quite amazing the standard MS is held to by people who claim they're a shit company.

Re:News?

[TheRaven64]

The point is that Direct3D 10 and 11 did not get ported back to XP because Microsoft claimed that it was impossible. Not that it was hard, not that there was no business case for doing it, that it was impossible to support the APIs. This was clearly nonsense at the time, but now having the APIs implemented on other platforms demonstrates how much nonsense it was.

Interestingly, the windowing-system-specific part of of Gallium is quite small. Part of the point of the design was that it made it easy to use the same driver on Windows, *NIX, and so on. This means that it is possible that this implementation actually will provide support for Windows XP.

Re:News?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, clearly it was nonsense that MS found it impossible to support an aging API.... or, perhaps it was a sound business decision to find it impossible to support an aging API.

Re:News?

[StayFrosty]

I'm amazed that various OSS projects are held to the same standards as their proprietary counterparts despite the huge disparity in cost. Photoshop may be better than GIMP but is is $658 better?

Re:News?

[Anonymous Coward]

but is it $658 better?

Yes. That's why people are willing to pay money for it.

Re:News?

[mister_playboy]

Yes. That's why people are willing to pay money for it.

I disagree. The majority of Photoshop users did not pay any money for the software.

Wine

[RenHoek]

Doesn't WINE already have a reasonable Direct X implementation? And with that I mean it's still quite iffy for a lot of games, so it looks like it's pretty hard to get a good implementation done..

Re:Wine

[msclrhd]

Yes, but only upto DirectX 9. Direct X 10 (and possibly bits of 11 too) are in the works, but it is slow going.

Just having the shader part of DX10/11 is not enough. It interacts with other Windows APIs like HWND (to create windows and process messages), HDC (to do some 2D drawing), Direct2D (for accelerated 2D rendering), DirectWrite (for accelerated text rendering), GDI+ (the XP-era acceleration APIs) and other APIs. Therefore, you need to pull in a lot of Windows APIs and behaviour to get games working properly.

Re:Wine

[TheRaven64]

WINE implements Direct3D on top of OpenGL. For shaders, with the Gallium stack, this means that:

1. WINE translates HLSL into GLSL.
2. Mesa translates GLSL into TGIR.
3. Gallium compiles TGIR to the native GPU instruction set.

With the new driver:

1. This code translates HLSL into TGIR.
2. Gallium compiles TGIR to the native GPU instruction set.

This is faster and less prone to errors.

Re:Wine

[cynyr]

well this is just short of the hardware level where WINE is using DX -> Userspace OpenGL right now.

no

[RWarrior(fobw)]

not better than microsoft. microsoft has merely made a well-announced, long-planned strategic decision to stop supporting XP on new products. this isn't a surprise, and anyone who complains about it needs to stop living in 2001.

In ten years

[Citizen of Earth]

In ten years, Linux will be a better Windows than Windows.

Re:In ten years

[Anonymous Coward]

It's more like: In ten years, Linux will be better than Vista but that will be at a point when anyone involved will no longer care and those still clinging to Vista for dear life won't be worth saving anyway.

Let's not get too heady over something that is mostly insignificant.

Re:In ten years

[geminidomino]

Extrapolating from past trends trends[0], in ten years, a moldy peach will be a better Windows than Windows.

[0] (yeah yeah, I know... ObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/605/)

Re:In ten years

[SpeedyGonz]

And we'll have fusion power...

Re:In ten years

[psbrogna]

Which is convenient because in ten years that might be the minimum power plant required to support a PC running the latest MS O/S.

Re:In ten years

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than Windows 3.1, maybe.

Re:In ten years

[dunkelfalke]

You mean it takes the same path as OS/2?

Re:In ten years

[dbIII]

Had that fifteen years ago when Win95 was a disappointment, and at least twelve years ago when the Enlightenment window manager had Win7 style window thumbnail pics in the icon box.

An insider view

[DMiax]

Disregarding for a moment the fact that this was announced a few months ago, here is an explanation of what this actually means for developers from a developer of Gallium3D. It explains why there will be no flood of games ported from Windows, and why we should still support a truly open API like OpenGL.

Re:An insider view

[eXlin]

That were great blog post from him and i agree, we are better off without directx

"not XP"

[airfoobar]

I thought Gallium was mostly cross-platform, so it may be possible to port DX10/11 to XP.

Re:"not XP"

[MostAwesomeDude]

Gallium requires some sort of adapter to interface with hardware. There are no such adapters for any MS kernel, save for the closed-source VMWare stuff.

Re:"not XP"

[airfoobar]

If you are describing what I think you are describing, then they may not be too difficult to write. If you consider the market share that XP still has, it would be a very worthwhile project.

Re:"not XP"

[BitZtream]

They could always write one.

A kernel driver has pretty much free run to do what it wants in XP. If not worked with the graphics side, but for other forms of hardware it isn't even that hard.

VirtualBox probably already has an OSS example.

"better than Microsoft itself"

[Hierophant7]

What a dumb comment. It's not like DX11 is being left out of Win7 and Vista. Why don't you go start a petition to have DX11 support for DOS 6.22?

slashdotted?

[russlar]

is phoronix slashdotted, or did MS take them down?

2011 is the year of the Linux desktop

[electron sponge]

nt

XP is end-of-life

[heavyheaded]

And there is no EXT4 support in Hardy Heron's stock kernels.

That damn Linux is at it again...

[Picass0]

... taking an established technology - embracing, extending, and finally engulfing, and uh... wait a sec. Wha?

Apples to Oranges

[Wrath0fb0b]

Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?"

Not until they backport this project to work with kernel 2.2.19, which was current when XP was released 9 years ago. Failing that, they should at least be honest and compare support among current implementations.

It's one thing for people to chose XP for their recent builds -- more power to them for choosing whatever they like best. But when you deliberately chose a 9 year old OS, you lose the right to complain that you cannot run the latest DirectX in the same fashion that people still on kernel 2.2 (I'm sure there are in-use servers still running that) can complain they cannot run the CFS.

Re:Apples to Oranges

[PenisLands]

That comparison isn't fair. Windows XP has been heavily updated with various service packs and etc, and so the XP of today isn't the same as the original XP that was released in 2001.

Re:Apples to Oranges

[Tsuraan]

Microsoft didn't create a viable replacement for XP until Windows 7, which was released in the end of 2009. Since XP has only been outdated for about a year, shouldn't you compare it with Linux kernel versions that have also only been outdated for a year?

Re:Apples to Oranges

[PenisLands]

Hah hah, yea man. Nice thinking. BIG PENIS. COCKIN' Maximum.

Re:Apples to Oranges

[im_thatoneguy]

Weird. And here I thought Vista was working just fine for me. I guess I didn't know my computer hadn't been working for several years.

Don't get too carried away...

[joelholdsworth]

...this probably won't help Wine much. As this post explains http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine-devel/2010-September/086885.html : "IIRC, it's been discussed before, and it simply wouldn't work. D3D has too many ties to the Windows API that a non-Windows based implementation wouldn't be appropriate for Wine (try getting an HDC from a D3D resource, or passing an HWND to D3D). Gallium would have to substitute these for X11 resources, or custom resources that tie into X, so wouldn't reflect the Wine's internal state. Additionally, not all drivers will support Gallium (eg. nVidia binaries), so a D3D10->GL path will still be needed."

Re:Don't get too carried away...

[TheRealMindChild]

That is because Display Contexts and Window Handles are part of the GDI paradigm, which DirectX not built on top of. Of course they wouldn't get along, just like passing a Qt widget pointer to a GTK function isn't going to do what you would hope.

Nothing to see here.. move along

[kazade84]

This isn't really that exciting. Firstly it doesn't benefit Wine at all. Wine supports other platforms than Linux and other drivers than Gallium3D and Mesa and so this is useless to them, if that isn't enough the Wine source structure isn't built for this kind of swap out, specifically because Wine limits X interaction to a single DLL, winex11, and the WineD3D stuff doesn't have direct access to X. The Wine D3D developers have long said that a D3D state tracker won't help them.

Secondly, it's not gonna help porting games to Linux either. D3D is only one part of the DX API and a game does a lot more than just draw stuff. Arguably swapping out D3D for OGL is relatively straightforward in comparison to swapping out sound API, file IO API, network IO API, message handling, etc. etc. that's why some games allow you to switch between the graphics API.

Re:Nothing to see here.. move along

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't Gallium3D cross platform also? No one said this is a solution for wine, but doesn't it make it a little easier? I don't know anything about it,so just asking. But fwiw, I hope you are at least a little wrong.

Re:Nothing to see here.. move along

[kazade84]

Gallium3D is cross platform - you could write winsys layers for Haiku or whatever, but OSX is one of Wine's main targets and I don't see them shipping Gallium3D anytime soon. Unfortunately no, it's not going to make things any easier.

Re:Nothing to see here.. move along

[cynyr]

Or they could just use SDL from the start and have all of that on all of the platforms. TBH i don't really care if you don't want to do a full port to linux, but at least list "works with wine version X.Y.Z" or something.

Uh...so?

[nashv]

In other news, DirectX 11 is not being offered for MS-DOS,Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11....oh noes - does Microsoft not care about their customers at all?

At some point, backward compatibility doesn't need to go that far back

Interesting.

[bluefoxlucid]

I'd love this, if it's true, and it performs on par with windows. However, I've learned to take Phoronix hype with a grain of salt. They're gaining reputation for making bold claims based on no facts.

With Gallium 3D?

[Beelzebud]

How could Gallium 3D run Direct X 11 in any way that could be comparable to the native Windows client, when it doesn't even do basic 3d acceleration as good as the proprietary blobs?

Re:With Gallium 3D?

[bcmm]

What do you mean by "client" here? And what about "native"? The summary seems to be talking about a reimplementation running as natively as OpenGL does on a Gallium system.

As for the performance thing, I don't believe it's an architechtural problem with Gallium. More likely, it's because the gallium drivers are pretty new and are a work in progress.

Re:With Gallium 3D?

[SpinyNorman]

From TFA:

If things could not get any better, "Fglrx and nvidia drivers can also be supported by writing a Gallium driver that talks to them using OpenGL, which is a relatively easy task. Thanks to the great design of Direct3D 10/11 and closeness to Gallium, this approach should not result in detectable overhead, and is the most maintainable way to do it, providing a path to switch to the open Gallium drivers once they are on par with the proprietary ones."

Re:With Gallium 3D?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is Slashdot. We LOVE sci-fi.

better?

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean by "support this better"? I want to bet it will require a fairly recent Linux kernel, not one that's 10+ years old like Windows XP.

OpenGL not just used on PCs

[zooblethorpe]

It bears noting that various flavors of OpenGL are used on other hardware, such as Sony's various consoles or the Wii, and it is apparently part of the underlying codebase for the upcoming Nintendo 3DS system. So it looks unlikely to die in the near term, at least.

Cheers,

Re:OpenGL not just used on PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention WebGL.

Re:OpenGL not just used on PCs

[Narishma]

Even though OpenGL or OpenGL-like APIs are supposed to be available on those platforms, nobody actually uses them for anything useful.

Re:OpenGL not just used on PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

Incorrect. The PS3 implemented a sort of GL like library at first, which has now been mostly forgotten in preference for libGCM - which is a library for writing directly into the RSX's command buffer. The Wii implements a library that looks a little like GL at first glance, but is actually vastly different in so many areas.

Re:OpenGL not just used on PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe Nintendo uses a proprietary platform. The OpenGL web site lists notable implementations.

Re:OpenGL not just used on PCs

[TheRaven64]

Not to mention OpenGL ES, which is supported by all of the current and last generation of smartphones (except for the 5-10% that run Wince), and has JavaScript bindings called WebGL.

Re:OpenGL not just used on PCs

[zlogic]

Don't forget Android, iOS, webOS and WebGL - all use OpenGL ES.

Re:OpenGL not just used on PCs

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the games industry, yes there is an semi-implementation of OpenGL ES for PS3 but it's written on-top of a lower-level API and (almost) no one uses the GL ES wrapper it in the industry. The same goes for the Wii I believe.

Re:OpenGL not just used on PCs

[TrancePhreak]

WinCE actually supports OpenGL ES and DirectX. You get your choice when building the app.

Re:OpenGL not just used on PCs

[exomondo]

It bears noting that various flavors of OpenGL are used on other hardware, such as Sony's various consoles

If you'd actually looked at those results, or even the summaries, you'd see the PSP doesn't use OpenGL, in fact PSPGL is a 3rd party OpenGL-like library for it. The PS3 doesn't use OpenGL, it uses PSGL, which is based on the first version of OpenGL released nearly 12 years ago so it's not relevant to OpenGL at all. So those devices have absolutely no bearing whatsoever on the life of OpenGL.

Re:Comment: No Computers on TV Show HOUSE

[geminidomino]

Apparently you didn't watch last night's episode.

House, like apparently everyone else on TV/movies, has a macbook.

I don't get it. Does Apple encourage it (giving them away to be used as props) or are these twits just feeding the iHype themselves?

Re:Dangerous path for Microsoft

[Beelzebud]

Frankly, Windows 7 does not suck. And if you think Linux having support for DX11 would make it a better choice for a"low powered desktop", you're nuts, because no low-powered desktop PC could run Direct X 11 games with reasonable performance in the first place... Maybe WIndows 7 sucks for a low-powered desktop, but it really wasn't designed to run on outdated hardware.

A bit off-topic, but...

[JohnnyBGod]

Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?

On a marginally related note, I've actually had something like this happen to me. I couldn't get Railroad Tycoon 3 running in Vista, and it worked just fine under Wine.

Back on topic: the submitter misspelled "eventually".

To be fair...

[Junta]

To say Linux 'may support D3D better than MS' while referencing lack of D3D 10+ on WinXP is a tad disingenuous.

Unless you are saying that the community is going to meaningfully backport full D3D 10/11 to RedHat 7.2 that is (WinXP and RedHat 7.2 came out roughly at the same time). I doubt you'll see this work seriously put to use in anything even as old as Vista with respect to the linux world

XP

[rovolo]

Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?

When will people stop comparing Linux against Windows XP?

Re:XP

[CyberDragon777]

After Windows 8 is released and XP support ends.

Then they will go from touting how many features Linux has over XP to saying how fast it runs compared to Vista.

Re:XP

[tuppe666]

It concerns me that Linux is only compared to Windows7Fully featured and when comparing its often compared as just Windows. The Reality though is Linux is hard to compare...or in reality a Distro like Ubuntu which may have as many more releases before Windows8 is out...and is constantly inproving at a rapid rate. For me it one with its easy maintenance, and lack of malware which regardless of version is always will be significantly better, due to the FOSS nature of the software.

Although my favorite comparisons have been IE9 vs Firefox4 which run along the lines of IE9 great chrome is faster than Firefox4 WTF!?...but again IE9 will not run on XP but Firefox4 will.

Re:XP

[tuppe666]

After Windows 8 is released and XP support ends.

Then they will go from touting how many features Linux has over XP to saying how fast it runs compared to Vista.

XP is faster than Windows7. I am tired of the lie that Windows 7 is fast. I spent £300 (1.6 dual core 4GB 64-bit)on a computer and the program that brings it to its knees is Word. Linux is significantly faster even 3D on some chipsets is faster.

Re:XP

[Ant P.]

When Windows XP stops being the most used Windows OS.

Re:XP

[Anonymous Coward]

And DOS is faster than XP.

Re:XP

[mjwx]

When will people stop comparing Linux against Windows XP?

When Microsoft makes an OS better then XP so we can compare that to Linux.

In other words, never.

In one word...

[chrisdotwood]

No

Re:Comment: No Computers on TV Show HOUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

Many Hollywood types use Apples because they're slick and high tech looking. Naturally their preference in real life bleeds over into the shows they produce. Often the logos are covered in non-sponsored cases.

Other times it's a sponsorship thing (ie. advertising) which seems to most often be done by Apple, Dell and HP. In those cases you will clearly see the logos on purpose. If you see the logo then it is paid advertising.

But will it run Crysis

[StrifeJester]

This sounds great for what I might be able to do someday on my linux box. But will it run crysis. And even taking that seriously, when will it run it. They are writing this from the ground up it sounds like. DX12 will be out before this ready to have just D3D11. The catchup game is never going to be fast enough. Until developers use something that can run on both systems side by side this is going to be a moot point.

Re:Comment: No Computers on TV Show HOUSE

[cjb658]

My guess would be that Apple pays them to put Macs on TV, but also, everyone who is in the industry seems to like Macs.

OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[tepples]

Windows 7 Home Premium is only $99 from Newegg.

As I understand it, that's the price of the OEM version, and the OEM version is available only when purchased on the same invoice as a motherboard. Otherwise, you have to buy the retail version, which is $100 more. Besides, a lot of people who need features found only in the Professional edition don't want to have to dual boot Windows XP Professional and Windows 7 Home Premium.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[MBGMorden]

The OEM version is available with any hardware purchase. My understanding is that to meet the requirement when ordering just the software they'll throw in a tiny "hardware" component (usually a screw or a cable) to legitimize it. If you have ANY other piece of hardware in your order though then even that is not needed.

In regard to features, you have a point there, though several features that were limited to the "Professional" version of XP (such as SMP support) have migrated to the "Home" version of Windows 7. That's assuming they were even using XP Pro. I know a lot of people that were using XP Home just fine. And if you really do need Professional, then the OEM Windows 7 Pro is only $40 more than Home Premium.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[h4rr4r]

OEM versions are only for new machines that will be resold. You cannot build your own machine this way.

http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/licensing_for_hobbyists.aspx

OEM System Builder Software
Must be preinstalled on a PC and sold to another unrelated party.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[sexconker]

And I got a Windows 7 Home Premium key, AND a Windows 7 Professional key, for $30.

What's your point? That it costs too much to use Windows according to the license? Then don't use it.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[h4rr4r]

I do not use windows at all. My point is those that do should pay the correct price, not "steal" it by using OEM versions when they are not OEMs.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[Lord of Hyphens]

Unlike Vista, the different "versions" of Win7 include the features of the lower-tier copies.

So Win7 Pro contains everything in Win7 Home and then some.
Win7 Ultimate contains everything in Win7 Pro and them some.

This is in contrast to Vista, which split the features among the SKUs and required anyone who wanted features of both of the "lower tier" Business and Home Premium SKUs to buy Ultimate.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[Anonymous Coward]

OEM versions are only for new machines that will be resold. You cannot build your own machine this way.

http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/licensing_for_hobbyists.aspx

OEM System Builder Software
Must be preinstalled on a PC and sold to another unrelated party.

This would mean that any SmallComputerCompany exec that uses a SmallComputerCompany computer at home (that uses a system builder version) that he bought from the company is in breach because it's not sold to an unrelated party? I'm not sure if Royalty licensing is the same, but that would then affect the entire HP/Lenovo/Toshiba etc. workforce that use computers made by their own company.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[mister_playboy]

The OEM version is available with any hardware purchase. My understanding is that to meet the requirement when ordering just the software they'll throw in a tiny "hardware" component (usually a screw or a cable) to legitimize it. If you have ANY other piece of hardware in your order though then even that is not needed.

If you're going to skirt around the license terms in such a manner, you may as well be getting Windows for free off the Pirate Bay... because they are equally illegal.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure MS won't complain, the alternative being to buy the expensive retail.... or much more likely piratebay.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[Anonymous Coward]

In reality all that really means is that you won't get any support from MS; as the OEM, you must provide your own support :)

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[sexconker]

Then stop being WRONG.

OEM licenses sold by Newegg, etc. are NOT restricted to PCs destined for resale.

You're talking SPECIFICALLY abou tthe OEM System Builder Kit Licenses.

You've copy-pastad that post several times, yet you're just flat out wrong, and you've been called out on it by other posters.

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[asecure]

you're still breaking the EULA. why bother paying $30?

Re:OEM vs. retail pricing; pro vs. home

[sexconker]

1: I'm not breaking any EULA - I bought retail upgrade keys, not OEM keys.

2: The bullshit h4rrh4r is spreading is bullshit. He refers specifically to the OEM System Builder Kit licenses. These are priced the same as regular OEM licenses, which do NOT have to be resold to others.

3: Derp.

Re:Comment: No Computers on TV Show HOUSE

[Anonymous Coward]

I, for one, was quite thrilled to see House finally have it off with Cuddy and spend a nice day off with her. Good episode.

Hello World

[tepples]

OpenGL 3.1 eventually removed all the old fixed-function APIs

Did this come at the cost of making the program to display a spinning cube textured with "Hello World" ten times longer?

As a gamer,

[Anonymous Coward]

it is hard to get excited about DX11, just as it was hard to get excited about DX10. Simply put, GLSL/DX9 graphics are good enough, and most of the games released today are so full of malware, they aren't worth buying/playing in the first place. The only reason I need a machine better than a P4 with a 2005-era video card is to play The Dark Mod. I haven't had any other interest in any "high-end" mainstream games since 2004 or so.

Duke Nukem Forever sounded exciting, 10 years ago. Now I'm sure it will be a cookie-cutter console shooter.

This means legacy apps may move to linux

[bl8n8r]

A lot of companies have them. Applications which were written by people who left the company but the app remains at the heart of the business logic. Something like this could at least offer a hardware upgrade while maintaining the compatibility.

Re:Dangerous path for Microsoft

[rgviza]

Actually Windows 7 does run well on low-powered hardware (within reason), far better than Vista did/does. You can strip Windows 7 down pretty well by disabling the unnecessary crap, optimizing the page file and caching scheme, and turning off the desktop eye candy, killing services you don't use, etc.

It runs comparably well to XP if you do the same thing on XP.

Windows 7 starter edition will run on a 400Mhz pentium III(?). Not as well as linux will, but you can do it:
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=3236969&pn=1

Gaming on something like this with Crysis? I think not.

I agree that windows 7 doesn't suck. It's definitely better than Vista or XP ever was. I work on linux OS for a living, as a software developer, but I'm not an evangelist one way or the other. For gaming, I like the fact that you can just install games and not need fuss with it, tweak out WINE for hours etc to get things to work right.

When I get home from work I just want to kill shit, not need to figure out why my mouse cursor disappears in my favorite game client, patch WINE and recompile it to fix the problem, then make sure to use git properly when I'm getting the latest WINE sources, so I don't blow away my patches. I've been there, done it, got the T-Shirt. Gimme my Windows for gaming.

To be fair, during the xp years, gaming on xp could be a bitch. Then again the hardware was horrendous when multi core cpus first came out. The interrupt controllers were broken on multicore nVidia chipsets etc. I had just as many problems using WINE, since the kernel used to KP on bad chipsets before the kernel crew replaced the hardware interrupt timer with a software one.

Games run a lot better these days... The chipsets are far better now than they were in 2004.

Re:Comment: No Computers on TV Show HOUSE

[flintmecha]

I noticed the Macbook appeared to be running Windows 7 for some reason, unless my eyes were playing tricks on me. It did not look like a Mac desktop.

Deliberately choose

[tepples]

But when you deliberately chose a 9 year old OS

It's not my choice. Microsoft deliberately chooses not to give people running Windows XP Service Pack 3 a copy of Windows 7 for no charge, unlike Canonical which chooses to let anyone with broadband download Ubuntu Desktop 10.04.

Linux will support DX11 better than microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux will support DX11 better than microsoft.

XP: No support

XP: Microsoft Windows

Therefore Microsoft support of DX11 worse than Linux support of DX11.

DO NOT use the generic when only a VERY SMALL subset of that generic works.

The Millenium of the Linux Desktop: Dec 26, 2012..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just puting this out there, because we know there will be no more Microsoft Windows after December 25 -- from unrelated events.

Let me guess: you aren't a fan of netbooks.

[tepples]

people who prefer the portability of a 10" laptop

such people are clearly as anachronistic as the proverbial WW2 Japanese soldier who stumbles out of the forest believing the war to still be going on... call me when you catch up to at least 2008

What native PC games are designed for netbooks manufactured in 2010?

Not coming to XP? No problem

[damn_registrars]

We can solve that easily enough:

• Install XP
• Install cygwin, with xorg stuff of course
• Compile the latest Wine (from source, because anything else would be uber l@m3rz)
• Install DX11 for Wine
• Install your favorite DX11-requiring game
• ???
• Profit!

With that problem solved, what can we fix with the rest of our afternoon?

XP? Forget XP!

[Steeltoe]

I was die-hard on XP, but then I tried Windows 7 for the last couple of days and will simply NEVER go back to XP again..

Besides, if you're gonna do SSD, Windows 7 is the way forward. XP will be obsolete, like Red Hat 5 and Windows 98SE. Do you really want to risk your data or latest gadget to fail?

Win 7 vs XP:
* Better looking
* Fast
* More options, integrated backup, it's a big mess, but most of it works. Yeah, u know the drill by now, but it *mostly* works, most of the time, and then it's "good enuff"
* More integrated recovery tools. More chances of getting back up and running..
* More robust, flexible & userfriendly install. Not as good as Ubuntu, but better than last time.
* Support
* SSD support without all the headaches necessary on XP & Vista. If you're like me, you don't want your drive to die in its infancy..
* non-admin accounts works
* UAE security, and no, it's not as annoying as on Vista
* Better driver support than Vista, runs newer hardware without slipstreaming tons of drivers
* More native drivers available on Windows Update
* DX11

Not a quantum-leap, but Windows 7 fixes most nuances with Vista, and has more OPTIONS ;-)
XP is already obsoleted by Windows 7 IMHO.

Face it, XP is dying ;-)

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[nschubach]

We all have our different opinions. I've had Windows 7 for a little over a month now and I still find hacks to revert some things back to the way XP did it.

* Reverted the "breadcrumb" address bar
* Removed libraries
* Flexible/robust install? I had no options during mine... There was basically a button that said "Install."
* Had to remove the search box from Window header, wish I could remove/move the rest
* Had to edit windows resource files to remove that stupid "command bar" with the organize/etc.
* Installed Classic Shell to get my treeview lines back. Classic start menu was a bonus.
* Had to clean up 15 or so folder shortcuts that didn't point to anything in my "user" folder.
* Had to download a tweak program to remove the horrendously huge borders. Found out theme editing is a PITA, even with a program made for it. Wanted to reduce the button sizes. Couldn't find a decent theme out there.
* Still hate going into the control panel. Try to manage things in "Computer" / Right-Click Manage so I don't have to go to the control panel.
* Notice no real speed difference. (Seriously... I had XP installed to burn in my system, then switched to Win7...) SSD performs great on both systems.
* I spent well over 10 times as much time making Windows 7 close to how I wanted it, XP was a breeze and two registry entries. Windows 7 is going on 10 registry edits + resource hacking + disabling so many services... I'm still not done.
* The only thing I like about Windows 7 so far is the >4G RAM support without crazy settings and limits.
* If you know how I can change the file click rename timing (or reverting back to the old file selection look and feel), I'd love to know it. I hate clicking on a file and hitting delete to have windows interpret that as me wanting to delete the filename.
* As a gamer, I can't think of any games I've played that use DX11... or even 10 for that matter. Then again, there's been a terrible slump in games that excite me recently so I haven't been playing as much as I used to.
* I'm sure there's more...

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[tuppe666]

Ignoring the advertisement slang I AM TIRED OF THE LIE THAT WINDOWS7 IS FAST. I hate this lie because it cost me £300 pounds and an serious amounts of frustration. The application that will bring a dual core 1.6mhz 4gb 64bit copy to its knees...Word 2007.

Oh the only external peice of equipment I have tried to attach to the machine...a scanner soesn't work either.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[Cassius Corodes]

Give it a while - with some stuff you tend to fight it and then later realise its actually useful. For instance I've never used libraries before as I like to make my own directory structure and windows usually insists on its own for libraries - but for win 7 you can specify multiple directories to link to that library - so for games - some of which are in the steam folder, some of which are in a games folder - I can use the games library as a single point of entry for both.

As for the control panel I agree with you - I've found it difficult to use (why the subtle name changes?) - however the search bar on the start menu allows you to directly access all of the things in the control panel so I have never had to go there again!

The direct x10,11 thing is a bit of a dirty trick to force the high end folk to win 7, but I guess they cannot support xp forever.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[nschubach]

With Win7, I decided to let the game install where they want, so I have two folders to get to my games: Steam's folder and Program Files. I don't need libraries to do that. I had to do a little tweaking to get dropbox to sync multiple folders (I use Dropbox for saves/characters... it's an awesome way to sync and backup.) That would have been the same in XP and 7 though.

I still see no use for Libraries. Maybe if Windows would finally move to a full on key/value file system or something like the SQLFS they were touting a while back then it might make more sense to me. As it is now, libraries feel like a bandaid fix that gets in my way more than helps me.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[fractoid]

Stop trying to turn Windows 7 into Windows 95.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[fractoid]

Windows 7 is fast. It's just that Office 2007 is a steaming festering pile of shit. Don't use it. Simple.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he's trying to make Windows 7 less like a Hasbro Barbie toy. Nothing but glitz and glamour.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently customizing an OS calls for modding overrated!

nschubach, for what it's worth, I agree with your changes and find it sad that a mod would vote you down for telling others what's possible to make your computer usable.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[emjay88]

1.6mhz

Well there's your problem.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[cheekyjohnson]

"dual core 1.6mhz"
"1.6mhz"

I can see why!

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[mjwx]

* Better looking

Debatable. I prefer XP's minimalist looks.

* Fast

Bollocks to that. I went from XP to 7 at work and now having 2 VM's running at once makes my entire system chug (E6600, 4 GB RAM, 2 windows VM's should run fine). 7 is only fast if you're doing nothing with it, utter shite resource management.

* More options,

If I want to change my network settings I have to navigate through 7 "helpful" windows wizards before being able to manually set my IP address. No Windows, I dont need you to diagnose the problem, I know the problem. What's that, you want me to contact my Systems Administrator, I AM THE SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR.

* More robust, flexible & userfriendly install.

Nothing wrong with the Windows 7 install, apart from the fact it installs Windows 7.

* Support

Clearly the GP has never tried to contact Microsft support. As an enterprise customer they've been nothing but useless.

* UAE security

Well you may consider United Arab Emirates security to be good but it's not what I look for in an OS. Introducing Windows Dubai, Burka edition.

it's not as annoying as on Vista

Its just as annoying, the only differnce is I can copy a file with just one UAC popup, not three. Still occurs far too often and takes over whatever I am doing.

* Better driver support than Vista

Win 7 default drivers for Asus and Gigabyte motherboards are atrocious, if they haven't published drivers for Vista or 7 for your board forget about upgrading.

Now for the problems

* Uses more system resources. Running VMware or playing games is severely affected.
* USB Storage is more painful. Not just the "scan and fix" dialouge with each USB Drive but I installed the Android SDK and now it refuses to recongise my milestone as a Mass Storage device (only computer in the lab that does this)
* UI demands more attention, default settings are painful.
* Important system config utilities are hidden behind bad and useless wizard.

If they can get DX 11 working OK on Linux, I'll ditch Windows 7.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[cyclomedia]

Am echoing another poster here a bit but it does sound a lot like you basically want it to be windows XP because that's what you're used to, I just turned on classic theme and apart from one or two settings (like type-in-windows-explorer-selects-file instead of initiating search) am really enjoying the experience after about 3 months of getting used to it. Don't go removing the search box from win explorer it's really handy and much less fiddly than going through the bloodhound.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[disi]

I am another poor Asus motherboard guy running Windows 7 on it :D
The branch is not as good as it was known to be?

Microsoft doesn't deserve any credit for driver support. I believe they don't give a shit and tell the manufactures to provide new drivers...

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[nschubach]

I do like the Aero theme-ability, I just don't like the borders. There's something wonky about the "Classic" theme so I don't use it. I'm still looking for an Aero theme that works for me, but I imagine it's going to be some time since the editing tools and method for making themes sucks balls.

I don't need the search. Even with the new convoluted folder layouts, I still manage to keep my data just where I want it (on another drive, opposed to my SSD, in folders that make sense to me.) It did take some time to get Windows 7 to do what I wanted, but in the end, I can now find stuff right where I want it.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazingly, XP is still the OS most like XP. No other OS has come close to being as XP-like as XP was.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[metrix007]

You're full of shit.

Debatable. I prefer XP's minimalist looks.

The default Aero interface is far, far more minimalist than the fisher-price horror that was XP. Both 7 and XP allow you to go back to the classic UI.

Bollocks to that. I went from XP to 7 at work and now having 2 VM's running at once makes my entire system chug (E6600, 4 GB RAM, 2 windows VM's should run fine). 7 is only fast if you're doing nothing with it, utter shite resource management.

Using a CPU with VT support? I am, and I know that I can run 3 VM's simultaneously with either Hyper-V or VirtualBox. I doubt I could even run one on XP without performance slowdown.

If I want to change my network settings I have to navigate through 7 "helpful" windows wizards before being able to manually set my IP address. No Windows, I dont need you to diagnose the problem, I know the problem. What's that, you want me to contact my Systems Administrator, I AM THE SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR.

Well, this is because you are ignorant. Go to manage adpaters, right click on adapter and select properties, and then modify the ip setting for tcp/ip. 3 steps. There is also netsh if you want to do it from the commandline.

Nothing wrong with the Windows 7 install, apart from the fact it installs Windows 7.

What an eloquent point of argument.

Clearly the GP has never tried to contact Microsoft support. As an enterprise customer they've been nothing but useless.

You're doing something wrong. Not surprising given the poor knowledge you have of Windows so far. Microsoft have first rate support.

Well you may consider United Arab Emirates security to be good but it's not what I look for in an OS. Introducing Windows Dubai, Burka edition.

You were probably aware he was referring to UAC, which is actually a great feature, and far more flexible than what is available in unix land.

Its just as annoying, the only difference is I can copy a file with just one UAC popup, not three. Still occurs far too often and takes over whatever I am doing.

It never "takes over". God. Try copying some files to / as a normal user on most linux distros and see if they don't do the same thing. If you're getting too many prompts, you are probably using the system incorrectly. Set up the system as an administrator and then use it as a user, is that so hard?

* Uses more system resources. Running VMware or playing games is severely affected.
* USB Storage is more painful. Not just the "scan and fix" dialouge with each USB Drive but I installed the Android SDK and now it refuses to recongise my milestone as a Mass Storage device (only computer in the lab that does this)
* UI demands more attention, default settings are painful.
* Important system config utilities are hidden behind bad and useless wizard.

*7 uses significant less resources. I would guess what happened with you is you have a non standard install, ie you bought a computer from dell and are using 7 with all the crap dell installs along with it.
*Teh scan and fix thing only comes up if you use flash drives under both linux and windows. This is because vfat while compatible with fat32, is not fat32.
*UI demands more attention? What? Have you tried Ubuntu recently?
*No important utilities are hidden at all. You're just ignorant.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[sonamchauhan]

> > Bollocks to that. I went from XP to 7 at work and now having 2 VM's running at once makes my entire system chug (E6600, 4 GB RAM, 2 windows VM's should run fine). 7 is only fast if you're doing nothing with it, utter shite resource management.

> Using a CPU with VT support? I am, and I know that I can run 3 VM's simultaneously with either Hyper-V or VirtualBox. I doubt I could even run one on XP without performance slowdown.

Its your "doubt" v/s his certainty of having upgraded his work machine.

Yes, the E6600 has VT support.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization#Intel_Virtualization_Technology_for_x86_.28Intel_VT-x.29

What does that have to do with the OS anyway? Its not like XP somehow 'hides' VT functionality from VMs.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[lostsoulz]

Introducing Windows Dubai, Burka edition

I know it's senseless to post saying stuff like "lol," and "this post is full of win," but this made me laugh out loud. If there are any NANAE lurkers, this was a C&C moment.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[Anonymous Coward]

DX11 is not a technical reason to prefer 7, since there is no technical reason why DX11 isn't running on their OS with the biggest installed base.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[vilanye]

That is funny, Linux has all the bells and whistles as 7 and yet a 1.6 mhz processor can run it fine. I can have compiz running, firefox with at least 10 tabs, amarok running, world of warcraft in wine and about 100 other processes running using under 1.2 GB ram. 7 struggles to idle with 2 GB of RAM. Windows is a bloated pig.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[Binestar]

What processor running at 1.6 millihertz (mhz) can run Linux?

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[metrix007]

Its your "doubt" v/s his certainty of having upgraded his work machine.

No, it is my certainty. 7 has amazing resource management, and is more efficient than any previous version of windows. If he is having ht eproblems he states, then he is doing something wrong. Not surprising given his ignorance of Windows.

VT support was relevant because without VT support virtual machines are significantly slower. If he was using a CPU without VT support, then that would explains his slowness with VM's, something he may have been falsely attributing to windows.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[Carewolf]

That doesn't seem that different, even back with Windows 2000 started the standard post-install/reinstall procedure:
* Folder tweaking (show hidden files, file extensions, otherwise it was impossible to see if something was an executable, icon or whatever)
* TweakUI to improve responsiveness of the UI (this is an official Microsoft tool though, just not shipped with OS).
* Registry tweaking (In win2k and winxp only to disable auto-loading of all useless services installed by required crapware like DVD-players, file archives, PDF readers, etc.)
* Enabling useful "eye-candy" (font antialiasing, and more), disable useless eye-candy (oversized borders, slow animations, etc).

So nothing much changed, it only got slightly worse.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's no wonder that the usual freetards at Slashdot tagget the parent comment as Funny.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[mjwx]

The default Aero interface is far, far more minimalist than the fisher-price horror that was XP

Minimalist means fewer UI elements, not more. Windows 7 has at least 2x the UI elements on it's most basic settings, more on its default settings.

fisher-price

All this proves is that you didn't like the default colour scheme, that does not make it bad. With XP it is easy to go back to the old Windows 2000 style interface with Vista/7 it's not so easy.

I would guess what happened with you is you have a non standard install

WTF, the Windows VLK disk is non standard, this isn't just one machine. I've deployed Win 7 across our entire business (40 PC's). Get a clue, get a fresh Win 7 install and fresh Win XP install, run a processor intensive game like Crysis or any benchmark and watch the framerates.

*Teh scan and fix thing only comes up if you use flash drives under both linux and windows.

And brand new flash drives, and portable disks formatted to NTFS (because Vfat has a 120 GB limit). I haven't had a USB mass storage device that hasn't asked for scan and fix.

*UI demands more attention? What? Have you tried Ubuntu recently?

Yes, and I'd complain about the Action Centre popping up every 20 minutes with some kind of obscure warning, a popup telling me there are new wireless networks ever 20 seconds until I disable the Wireless NIC, or about SUDO disabling all other functions behind it except Ubuntu doesn't do any of that, Windows 7 does. Have you used Ubuntu lately?

*No important utilities are hidden at all. You're just ignorant.

And you didn't read my post, I didn't say they were hidden, I said they were hidden behind bad and useless wizards. Kindly get a clue.

Re:XP? Forget XP!

[Pilferer]

"Windows 7 is going on 10 registry edits + resource hacking + disabling so many services... I'm still not done."

I am curious what changes you've made (especially the registry settings). I've installed Classic Shell and ShellFolderFix, but there are still a lot of things about Win7 that bug me.

Mod parent up!

[n dot l]

The parent is right. Console graphics are so different from PC graphics that it's absurd to compare the APIs.

On a PC, you call some functions and the driver manages memory for you and builds a nice command buffer for the GPU to execute. On a console, you obsess about flushing caches and waiting for VSync and keeping track of which buffers the GPU may or may not be reading out of at any given moment. Or you fuck it up and get some awesome crashes as the GPU tries to render uninitialized memory noise.

On a PC, your graphics API manages things like texture and vertex memory for you. You say "make me a texture of this size" and it does. You say "I'm done with that texture" and it frees it. Those functions don't exist on a console; you manage that yourself, jumping through all sorts of loops to make sure it's aligned right and in the proper memory bank. On a PC, that texture goes up to the GPU as a nice row-major array of RGBA data. On a console, you have to tile it and reorder it and encode it into crazy hardware-native formats yourself. And make sure you've flushed the CPU cache before you pass it to the GPU!

PC and console GPUs are almost impossible to drive properly using "compatible" shaders. All shaders pretty much always end up rewritten, because the console APIs don't do magic optimizations like the PC APIs do, and you're expected to write in use of specialized chip features yourself if you want to do anything particularly spectacular. God help you when you hit the Wii and it's fixed-function madness.

These differences alone impact engine design to such a degree that any residual similarities between $CONSOLE_API and $PC_API are worth nothing to a porting effort.

Incorrect. The PS3 implemented a sort of GL like library at first, which has now been mostly forgotten in preference for libGCM - which is a library for writing directly into the RSX's command buffer. The Wii implements a library that looks a little like GL at first glance, but is actually vastly different in so many areas.

Further:

The original XBOX implements an API which resembles DirectX inasmuch as the entry points are similarly named. And for most "serious" uses you just grab a pointer to the raw command buffer and dump bytes into that.

The XBOX 360 is similarly set up, only it's even more different since it uses a crazy (and pretty awesome, IMO) framebuffer setup.

The PS2 has nothing like any sort of PC GPU. You drive it with a set of memory-mapped registers and properly formatted DMA commands. The PSP is, I believe, similar to the PS2.

Re:Mod parent up!

[91degrees]

Hmmm... I never did much low level 3D code when I was in the games industry, but our XBox 360 code could be ported pretty trivially to Windows. Not quite sure why the Wii is "fixed function madness". It works pretty much like any late 90's graphics card, which makes it a little old fashioned, and difficult to port between it and XBox360 (although that's not the only difficulty - the machines are different hardware generations) but easy enough if you've been in the business for a decade or so. Implementing OpenGL 1.2 on that wouldn't be too hard. Shaders were pretty much the same on PS3, Xbox360 and PC.

Never used the PS2. PSP has a decent API which has an OpenGL state machine like approach. Considering some of the samples are clearly written for PS2 (they expect 2 shoulder buttons), PS2 can't be that different.

Re:Mod parent up!

[n dot l]

Hmmm... I never did much low level 3D code when I was in the games industry, but our XBox 360 code could be ported pretty trivially to Windows.

I can see how that's possible. The case I'm thinking of involves the realization that there's a big performance gain to be had if we could just rearrange our data and start doing interesting things with vtxfetch (or whatever the instruction was, it's been a while). The embedded framebuffer also imposed some fairly serious rearranging of the overall render process.

Not quite sure why the Wii is "fixed function madness". It works pretty much like any late 90's graphics card, which makes it a little old fashioned, and difficult to port between it and XBox360 (although that's not the only difficulty - the machines are different hardware generations) but easy enough if you've been in the business for a decade or so. Implementing OpenGL 1.2 on that wouldn't be too hard.

Well, you don't go making a Wii game intending that it look like something running a decade ago on GL 1.2, do you? A lot of the more interesting effects involve setting states that have never had an OpenGL equivalent of any sort. As you say, it's not exactly hard, but it's enough work that one doesn't save much time having started with an OpenGL engine as opposed to a DX engine (and before we wander too far off topic, the context of this thread is porting).

There are other issues, too, but they're hard to explain without getting into the sort of specifics that Nintendo's NDA covers.

Never used the PS2. PSP has a decent API which has an OpenGL state machine like approach. Considering some of the samples are clearly written for PS2 (they expect 2 shoulder buttons), PS2 can't be that different.

The PS2 was honestly a nightmare. The only way to get it to perform decently was to go straight to the hardware, which means mapped registers and the DMA unit. We did crazy things like making our model format be mostly raw DMA control commands which the CPU would minimally touch up and fire off. Manually managing texture memory was also a bit of a pain. And of course there were synchronization issues everywhere. And one of the common blend modes was broken, so that needed to be worked around...

If Sony ever put together a decent GL layer on top of that, it's news to me, because the mini-GL layer I saw was a total joke.

Aye, let the young'uns fight the war

[Steeltoe]

Hear hear! It's good to see our blood in the streets haven't been for nothing.

Reminds me of the first days of Linux experience back in '95. Black terminals, dark caves, orcs that hit you for 37 hitpoints. Experience was hard to come by, but stuck with you until you died.
Filled textures juat never had the same spark as a Two-Headed Silver Axe of Double Beheading, even with shading.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to Pong. Games these days. Still got something to learn from good'ol Pong.

Re:Macbook running Windows 7

[bobv-pillars-net]

That's actually a very common configuration. Ironically, the biggest business use for a Macbook is to run Windows apps by virtualization.

So the Macbook users suffer from double-taxation -- the Apple tax plus the Microsoft tax.

In other news ...

[Anonymous Coward]

DX11 is also not supported on Windows 98 and on Windows 95 neither. Completely unacceptable! Damn M$ and their evil plot! I want DX11 on MS-DOS too!

Also, Linux is a better DOS than DOS!

Re:Dangerous path for Microsoft

[tuppe666]

Windows 7 runs like crap on modern hardware. Its a lie. The Atom processor is simply not powerful enough to run windows7 with Office without serious slowdowns. Its why machines that use this are still running XP. Its why netbooks have had to become so expensive to cope with the processing power to run the OS they cost more than ealier versions that ran Linux/XP. Its a lie. Your Lie cost me £300 pounds to run Office badly.

2011 onwards will be the year of ANDROID

[tuppe666]

nt...Seriously though Linux does seem to be getting popular as a kernel. Windows on the Desktop has never looked shakier, although its main competitors seem to be coming from other places.

Not worth it.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Two DHTML popups (or AJAX, if you like) before I saw so much as the headline.

Yeah, fuck you, Phoronix. Not worth reading the article, since you clearly value your content so very, very little.

Re:Dangerous path for Microsoft

[BitZtream]

Atom processors are barely fast enough to run a moderately complex BIOS.

DX11

[Leon Buijs]

I thought they ment the digital synthesizer from Yamaha..

PC gaming is already on the ropes

[judeancodersfront]

Just buy a console and get better support from not only Microsoft but other game companies.

This Just In

[bipbop]

Linus refuses to offer Video4Linux support in the 1.2.x series of kernels. Could FreeBSD support Video4Linux better than Linux itself?

Nintendo can't call it OpenGL

[tepples]

Nintendo can't call the GX API "OpenGL" because it isn't 100% compatible with the Khronos Group's specs, even if it is much closer to OpenGL than to DirectX. Sony Computer Entertainment, on the other hand, came up with an actual implementation of OpenGL ES for quick ports from PC to PSN, if I remember correctly.

Whatta comparison.

[DaVince21]

Could it be that Linux may soon support this Microsoft API better than Microsoft itself?

So, what, Ubuntu 6.10 will get DirectX support too?

Re:Dangerous path for Microsoft

[tuppe666]

Atom processors are barely fast enough to run a moderately complex BIOS.

But fast enough to run Ubuntu & XP

GHD hair straighteners

[shiji007]

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shhhhh quiet

[judeancodersfront]

We don't want the VISTA BAD crowd to find out that Vista was fixed a while ago and that Windows 7 is just Vista with a new task bar.

Re:Not coming to XP? No problem

[gagol]

I was under the impression it used some recent DRI kernel calls... does cygwin does that? You may have more chances using Linux as Windows process for your setup...

Re:Dangerous path for Microsoft

[gagol]

For me, computer = work, If I was to go into gaming (but I did grow up) I would buy a console, but I chosen grown up hobbies.