Slashdot Mirror
Doom Creator Says Direct3D Is Now Better Than OpenGL
arcticstoat writes "First-person shooter godfather and OpenGL stickler John Carmack has revealed that he now prefers Direct3D to OpenGL, saying that 'inertia' is the main reason why id Software has stuck by the cross-platform 3D graphics API for years. In a recent interview, the co-founder of id Software said, 'I actually think that Direct3D is a rather better API today.' He added, 'Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns. Direct3D handles multi-threading better, and newer versions manage state better.'"
Is Slashdot not for nerds anymore? I never thought I'd see the day when John Carmack was described on Slashdot as "Doom creator".
it would be nice. but open source isn't about nice.
... is how old Carmack looks now! I still remember him from the Doom days and I haven't seen a picture since. Came as a bit of a shock.
They work with the GPU manufacturers. Basically when new GPUs are in development, so is the new DirectX. So MS has a chat with nVidia and AMD. They tell the GPU makers the kind of things they want, the GPU makers tell them the kind of things there hardware is going to have, and they are able to come to a standard that everyone supports. That is why when new GPUs come out they support all the features of the new DX. It isn't some amazing coincidence. Also it is proper support, a single standard that works well with the abilities the cards have. You write your DX driver, and everything works.
OpenGL functions in much more of a lagging capacity. New video cards come out, and then it gets support for whatever it is they bring to the table sometime later. Khronos doesn't seem to go out and engage the vendors during development and try to have OpenGL ready to meet the next gen cards. Also their strategy often seems to be "just use extensions for it," which means that you can have differences between vendors for how things work.
it would be nice. but open source isn't about nice.
And that is why Open Source doesn't win. Be nice and user friendly, and you are able to play better with others.
Carmack changed his mind some years ago. This report is quite late.
However, the title of the magazine is "Custom PC". It is worth keeping in mind that if the PC and Xbox are the only platforms you are targeting then DirectX is a valid choice for development technology.
Otherwise, you are better off developing in OpenGL, where you can target PCs, PS3, iPhone, iPad, Mac OS X, WebGL, industrial Unix (not all 3D apps are games, dontchaknow?). The only thing you can't do much with is the Xbox (technically possible, but deliberately closed by Microsoft).
Also, the pace of change in OpenGL has picked up tremendously with the stewardship of the Khronos group. So OpenGL is starting to have parity in features again after lagging for some time (plus, you can get those features on Windows XP for those still on it).
GoldSrc (the Half-Life 1 engine) was a fork of the Quake 1 engine. Source is a continuously upgraded version of the GoldSrc engine. The most recent version of the engine in a released game is the Left 4 Dead 2 engine, which added a few new features that weren't present in earlier version, such as the AI Director and the fog simulation.
Having said that, at some point OpenGL was dropped from Source, and finally re-added when the OSX version shipped.
I've heard that EA also added OpenGL support when they ported Orange Box to the PS3, but I don't think Valve reincorporated that into their own games, but instead wrote the OpenGL support from the ground up.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
It's been true for almost 10 years. In fact Microsoft's support for DirectX has always been better than what OpenGL had. Microsoft made it easy to use with all their programming tools and languages and had a great documentation. The API was always cleaner too. There were tons of books written for DirectX. This is the area Microsoft handles extremely well - their Visual Studio development environment is the best IDE on the market and they create great tools for developers. Their mobile development tools kick Apple's and Google's (C#, Visual Studio and Silverlight against Java...).
It would be nice to see open source community wake up and start developing a competitor, as just now Microsoft is the driving force that innovates new technologies for PC and Xbox360 graphics and gaming. But for once it looks like the fact they're the only one doing so isn't slowing them down - they do a good job.
We know who you are!
We have you surrounded!
Step away from the chair and come out with your hands up.
Say what you will about the confusing configuration dialogs and lack of build config options. Visual Studio + Visual Assist is (so far) untouched in terms of features and stability.
(And I'm saying this as a full time developer of Gnome apps...)
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
So back in the Doom days, there was no such thing as DirectX. OpenGL was all their was. Of course it was high end cards only, no consumer stuff.
So move on up to 1996 and the 3dfx Voodoo comes out. It couldn't support full OpenGL, but Glide was based on OpenGL and it brought real 3D to consumers. DirectX was at 3.0 at this point and had no 3D. Glide, or a subset of OpenGL with a wrapper (how Quake did it) was it.
DirectX 5 came out in mid 1997 and did have 3D, but it was somewhat basic. I mean it could support what consumer cards could do, but lacked a lot that OpenGL had. Still no real comparison.
However by 2001, DirectX 8 was out and DX was showing some real competition to OpenGL. nVidia had been doing DX and OGL as native APIs for their cards for some time, and both ran just as fast. Also now the cards had programmable vertex and pixel stages, just like the high end pro card, and in fact nVidia was selling their consumer hardware in the pro market as Quadros.
From there, DX just started pulling further and further ahead. DX10 was a major update and brought some cool new GPU features, like fully unified shaders. Support for it was not a lot on the software side since it required Vista and games have to deal with older computers, but the GPU makers loved it. OpenGL was not fast in terms of catching up.
DX11 pushes things forward again, and again OpenGL is playing catchup and doing it in a poor fashion with extensions. Not just new graphics features either, but things like support for real multi-threaded and multi-tasking rendering. The ability to treat a GPU much like a CPU and task switch on it and so on.
Then of course there's DirectCompute, part of DirectX. GPGPU integrated in to the API and the same for all vendors. Of course there is OpenCL, a similar idea, but it is not integrated as DC is in to DX.
So back when Carmack was an OpenGL fan, it was because it was the best. However it isn't anymore and as things have changed so has his opinions.
Richard M. Stahlman says vi is now better than emacs.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Microsoft had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve the API, while OpenGL has been held back by compatibility concerns.
*tweak*
Apple had the courage to continue making significant incompatible changes to improve OSX, while Windows has been held back by compatibility concerns.
:)
And how many games are made for Apple compared to Windows?
It actually elevated him in my esteem. Nothing's worse than someone clinging to some technology akin to a sacred cow. If he deems it better and uses it because he considers it better, more power to him.
A good programmer (and a good project lead) will use the tools best suited to the project. Not cling to his pet technology. And everyone who ever had to serve under someone who had one such pet tool/technology/language will know the value of project leaders who can look past their favorite toy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
OP spelled vim/emacs wrong.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Well the interesting comment in that article is the one from AMD.
'The actual innovation in graphics has definitely been driven by Microsoft in the last ten years or so,' explained AMD's GPU worldwide developer relations manager, Richard Huddy.
One would imagine that a company that develop and make GPU accelerators would be the innovator in the field but apparently AMD is fine with being in Microsoft shadow.
Modern graphics hardware is nothing without a library and API to it. At least for gaming purposes (and excluding consoles, though they really aren't cutting edge by the time they're in the shops anyway), Microsoft controls what programmers can ask hardware to do for them, and therefore ultimately they control what hardware can be designed to do.
isnt correct; the article seems to contradict himself. carmack says direct3d is better because of incompatible updates made to the API, where as OP says its multi-platform performance is stellar? let me just load up a copy in my FreeBSD...yeah, that doesnt work.
his opinion also seems to contradict his own drive toward open source. if the thing you like only works with one vendor, how do you anticipate ever FLoSS'ing your code?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Interesting how praising a Microsoft product now gets you modded as "Flamebait."
Slashdot, where the echochamber is too fragile to be disturbed by contrary opinions.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
this is actually the reason why ye olde time programmers keep away from women and are in such scarce supply. Any erection causes irreversible instant death as all blood is suddenly evacuated from their body into their bulbous appendage. A few die off every year or so, but never as bad as when the internet first caught on, there was a relative extinction event when that occured due to the prevalence of adult entertainment...
I love to slaughter the english language.
What lunacy...I guess Linux didn't go anywhere either cause it's open source...or Chrome.....or Firefox.....
I like Visual Studio, even though I'm still not 100% sold on .NET (Java and Android developer by trade.) I'd say it's probably the best IDE out there. I've had nothing but bad luck with Eclipse, including a persistent issue where the menu bars disappear after an exit on Linux, and the only way to get them back is to clear out .workspace.
I found Code::Blocks to be awful when I used it.
Microsoft makes a fantastic debugger, but it isn't the one in Visual Studio. I'm talking about WinDbg. It's the best debugger I have used on any platform.
My problem with Visual Studio isn't with the functionality it has (although I find it slow), it's what is missing. The biggest problem for me is the lack of refactoring support. There are plugins that add this, but they add $250 to the $700 price tag (for the professional version).
"Commercial will always triumph over open, because open is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Or something like that.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
it would be nice. but open source isn't about nice.
And that is why Open Source doesn't win.
I feel like the whole idea that we had to "win" in the first place was a fallacy...
Bow-ties are cool.
You say Visual Studio is too much bloat. OK. But then you cite Eclipse as a counter-example?!?!?!? Hell, for example, Eclipse takes 10x longer to just start vs. Visual Studio (for my machine), let alone compile... Just about every IDE I've seen in 2011 has bloat, IMHO.
You mean those converted Flash games? Yea... That's like saying all my Nesticle games were made for Windows. Escape Velocity was the best Apple exclusive game, but it's no longer exclusive.
Geez, if I were an OpenGL developer and Carmack started talking about things that OpenGL should implement to make his game engines work better, I'd be like "Yes sir, Mr. Carmack!" Seriously, those game engines are what's keeping people using OpenGL in the first place. It's too bad that ID software doesn't have the resources to fork that shit and develop it to suit their needs. I'm sure that it would be better.
It's pretty obvious that the smartest Microsoft engineers are working on game-related projects, and it's smart. Microsoft might be watching its empire erode, but games are a field where their dominance might actually be growing. DirectX is a big part of that, and the Kinect has also really stirred the pot. Lots of comments here are to the effect that Carmack is stating what has been obvious to everyone else for years. Yes, Carmack was a true believer, and his (late) heresy is a sign that MS alternatives in some fields are just ... quixotic. It's not quite like RMS saying that he really should just start using Windows because it works better, but it's about 10% of the way there.
He's clearly talking about desktop environments, given that this is a thread about DirectX which is not renowned for its heavy usage on servers, and his phrase "general use". On the desktop even the most hardcore Linux enthusiast would have to admit that the sub-1% penetration is pretty lacklustre, compared to OSX let alone Windows.
Yes, there are plenty of things even in my flat that run Linux that aren't desktops/laptops; yes, Linux on the server is much bigger than Linux on the desktop is. But in penetrating the general market, Firefox has made much greater inroads against IE than Linux has against Windows. By that metric, Firefox is a lot more succesful than Linux. By other metrics you might say something different... and in assessing the general market you'd have to accept that Linux is still very much a minority interest. (Unlike perhaps parts of the GNU toolchain which with Linux and OSX combined is now hitting between 5% and 10% of the general market, depending on what figures you believe. They'd also be a candidate for "most succesful" if such a thing is at all meaningful.)
Don't forget this is slashdot where any praise of something MS does is likely to get you modded a troll, which itself is actually trolling.
:D
Like most companies, MS has done good and bad things, sometimes with the exact same action. To blindly label all Microsoft as evil and all things Linux as good is just illogical, unjust, and rather stupid. Unfortunately there's a lot of that around here.
So here's a few opinions bound to start the flaming from the mindless:
Microsoft has done many good things over the years.
Linux isn't the ultimate OS, and has less than even chance of ever becoming it.
Macs breakdown and have plenty of bugs and crashes.
Too much choice bogs things down.
Microsoft has done some rather heinous things over the years.
A properly updated and configured Linux makes a really good desktop.
Apples 'think like we want you to' design of products works well for many people.
The lack of choices can be frustrating to anyone that's creative, or knows what they really want.
The gasoline corps are laughing all the way to the bank with giant crocodiles tears for the current 'crisis'.
Asbestos Undies upgraded with Nomex PJs, I'm ready for you
What lunacy...I guess Linux didn't go anywhere either cause it's open source...or Chrome.....or Firefox.....
The Mozilla Foundation lives and dies by the add click.Where would Firefox be without the port to Windows?
Unrestricted net assets - Revenues and other support (2009)
Royalties: $101,537,000
Contributions: $50,000
Note 2 - Summary of significant accounting practices
(e) Receivables
Receivables consist primarilly of amounts due from contracts with multiple search engine and information providers
Mozilla Foundation and Subsidiaries
As a desktop client OS, the traditional community-oriented Linux distribution may not be six feet under. But neither is it in the best of health:
Net Applications (March)
Linux 0.92%
iOS 1.8%
Android 0.5%
Operating System Market Share
Statcounter (March)
Linux 1%
Top 5 Operating Systems
W3Schools (January)
Win 7 31%
Up 31% since January 2009
Linux 5%
Up 3% since March 2003
OS PLatform Statistics
Not really. I personally find the autocomplete features in Visual Studio insanely useful.
Most of my university programming was done in C/C++/Java in a Solaris environment. I run a Linux desktop at home and still do a decent amount of tinkery programming there, and I do maintain some PHP code at work. At home, I tend to use Emacs. At work, on Windows, I tend to use Scite for PHP.
Those, compared to Visual Studio, are downright painful to code in. If I need to find the name for a random function I have to pull out a quick reference or go to a website. If I want to see all the functions available under an object in C#, I just type the name plus period and then wait a half a second. A little list of all of them pops up next to the cursor. Then once I type the function name, boom - little scrollable list of all the different overload options pops up for that function. All this is done live, which means it even works for some random OSS library I might be used (ie, I've been using MigraDoc and PdfSharp a lot lately, and it's great there).
Beyond that, the whole RAD environment is just amazing for getting events associate with GUI actions. Doing all that by hand in code isn't that difficult, but man oh man is it TEDIOUS. Why waste the effort when I can double click on a button on a form and it automatically generates a function the runs on the click event?
For GUI applications, I've simply seen NOTHING that rivals Visual Studio. Now if I'm coding something without a UI (ie, a script that just processes numbers or does backend work), then it's not as valuable, but overall, while I like USING Linux more, I like developing in Windows a lot more.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
And this is modded insightful ?
Free Software is not a religion, it is a policy, and as strong political roots, altough these political roots are certainly not aligned to "bipartisan politics".
The issue with open souce and OpenGL is that a large part of the implementation of OpenGl (at least the efficient implementation) does not depend on any open source activist/developper but on the good will of video card developpers.
Now Microsoft has the "monopoly advantage" if they say now you need to cut off your left feet to implement Direct3D the videocard fabricant (Intel, Nvidia principally) will find somebody in charge of getting his or her feet cut off to keep the market.
OpenGL has to reach a concensus...
Pretty telling that you couldn't actually respond with an answer.
VS makes me want to code. It makes browsing code so much easier. Debugging is so nice that I will often fire up a debugger and step through code if I have a hard time figuring out what something is doing. I have been in several situations where my entire team couldn't find a multithreaded related crash using gdb, but I have never had a bug escape me when debugging through Visual Studio. You can actually control administer your machine a lot more efficiently through VS than you can by clicking through the control panel. Its easy on the eyes, though you don't get "hardcore" points w/ coworkers for a black background with neon text. In my opinion, coding is easier, bugs get found faster, code gets written faster. Compile error? click on the error, and it will take you to the offending line. Huge convenience. And note I am talking about raw C++ here- no managed code, .net, or any other stuff.
Clearly there are drawbacks- Intellisense just stops working sometimes, for no apparent reason. The build system is different than make, and can be annoying at times, but its way easier than fighting with autotools, though CMAKE is a little nicer (though fortunately CMAKE can generate vcproj files). Integration w/ source control other than VSS is a pain- usually I just avoid that altogether and leave them unintegrated.
I have tried alternatives- I used Emacs in college exclusively, until I got sick of a million meta commands and having to write programs just to configure my IDE the way I like it (a little exaggeration there, but not much). browsing between files on large projects was too cumbersome.
I have tried Eclipse and its god awful view system, where god forbid I click the wrong place or hit the wrong button my whole screen just gets deranged. I find the Eclipse model very awkward, the plugins are buggy, and intellisense works even less frequently than VS. For Java, Eclipse is good.
I tried QTCreator, which was alright, but seemed very focused around building QT apps. I just wanted to do general dev, and the UI was too Apple-ish for me- I don't need a shiny IDE, just one that is pleasant to look at and lets me get things done.
I have not tried net beans for C++, mostly because Eclipse CDT has lead me to believe that java IDE's shoe-horned to C++ IDE's don't seem to work that well. I could give Code::Blocks another shot as well.
So seriously, what do you recommend? And what specifically do you think your recommendation does better than Visual Studio?
It's a nerd religion. I think it is pretty obvious that expecting FOSS everywhere is unrealistic but much like creationists they already picked their world view and will now defend it even as the evidence against it piles up. FOSS doesn't have enough solutions for paying the bills, especially for desktop software. Gosling came out and said this recently but the FOSS crowd still wants to follow St. Stallman around even though he clearly doesn't have all the answers.
Now Microsoft has the "monopoly advantage" if they say now you need to cut off your left feet to implement Direct3D the videocard fabricant (Intel, Nvidia principally) will find somebody in charge of getting his or her feet cut off to keep the market.
This is nonsense.
The reality is that Microsoft works closely with the hardware and software developer so that everyone remains on the same page.
Microsoft builds a consensus around what is possible and what is desirable - not only in video and sound, but in every aspect of PC gaming.
I think if you look back a good few years (not long after doom 3 was released... just after Direct X 10 he said exactly the same thing)..
Infact Janurary 2007 according to wikipedia.
Some former critics of Direct3D acknowledge that now Direct3D is as good if not better than OpenGL in terms of capabilities and ease of use. In January 2007, John Carmack said that "DX9 is really quite a good API level. Even with the D3D side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I'm antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step—they're not worried about breaking backwards compatibility—and it's a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I'm doing on the 360, and it's probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with."
thank God the internet isn't a human right.