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DirectX 'Getting In the Way' of PC Game Graphics, Says AMD

Posted by Soulskill on from the stairs-in-the-way-of-getting-to-the-basement dept.

Bit-tech recently spoke with Richard Huddy, worldwide developer relations manager of AMD's GPU division, about the lack of a great disparity between PC game graphics and console game graphics, despite the hardware gap. Quoting: "'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.' Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is: 'Make the API go away.' 'I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers,' he says, 'and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all.'"

2 of 323 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Yeah right by perpenso · · Score: 4, Informative

    And Mac, much to the delight of the four people who want to play games under OS X.

    Last I heard you are about 5 orders of magnitude off with respect to Mac users playing World of Warcraft. :-)

  2. Re:Yeah right by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Informative

    > Let's do a quick comparison of how stupidly inefficient game development is...
    > 2. Wii/Gamecube - OpenGL,C/C++
    > 3. PS2/PS3 - OpenGL, C/C++

    Your facts are wrong. I've _shipped_ games on Wii, PS2, amongst other consoles. Currently, I do compiler support on the PS3 and am familiar with the rendering APIs that drive the RSX.

    * The Wii does NOT use OpenGL. I personally know because I wrote an OpenGL implementation over _top_ of the native GX calls. While the GX*() API _is_ strongly _based_ on OpenGL, it is NOT OpenGL.

    * The PS2 does NOT have OpenGL. You either
      a) manually build a packet to set the GS registers,
      b) use the sce*() calls, or
      c) write your own API.
    At one job, where I wrote the Wii-OpenGL, we had an in-house implementation of OpenGL running on the PS2, but that was, again, over _top_ of the native GS registers.

    * There are 2 rendering APIs on the PS3. CGM and OpenGL. I could probably count on one hand the total number developers that have shipped their game with OpenGL. Almost no one ships OpenGL it because it is SLOWER and LESS EFFICIENT then CGM.

    Please get your facts straight before looking like an ignorant fool.

    Cheers