Microsoft Phases Out XNA and DirectX?

mikejuk writes "It is reported that Microsoft has sent an email to DirectX/XNA MVPs which informs them that they are no longer needed because XNA and DirectX are no longer evolving. What does this mean? If you don't need MVPs then presumably you anticipate nothing to support in the future."

Comments

Huh?

[simplexion]

Something was said in that article but I am not sure what...

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think everyone is just as confused. Its really unlikely that MS is ditching D3D. The standard joke is "embrace extend extinguish" but... extinguish makes no business sense here. It's more likely they are trying to collect everything under their "apps store" like Apple has. Presumably steam understood this better (and earlier) than everyone else, and that's why they're making another basket for their eggs.

Re:Huh?

[gagol]

My head hurts, your post makes as much sense as a soviet number station.

Re:Huh?

[Vintermann]

Premature abbreviation is the root of all evil.

Re:Huh?

[hairyfeet]

Its actually quite simple, Steve Ballmer is burning the company to the ground because he has it in his big fat head that he has a "brand" like Prada and Nike when in reality he has a replaceable good, like Coke or Pepsi.

You see Steve Ballmer thinks if you click your heels three times and say "There is no place like Cupertino" why you can just turn the company into Apple, of course those of us in the trenches know there ain't enough dope in the world to make it so, but old fathead doesn't see any value in anything that isn't just aping Apple, hence why he shit on the desktop, he's shitting on the OEMs, and now he's shitting all over DirectX which frankly is the only thing that keeps many on windows.

My only question is will Gates get tired of seeing everything he spent so many years building being burnt to the ground and step in, or will he kick back with his big piles o' cash and just watch the whole thing burn?

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

If MS is killing DX it's actually very good news! DX is the thing keeping gaming in windows world. IF games go OpenGL route we will see a lot more linux ports.

captcha: rejoice

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Q.E.D. :-)

Re:Huh?

[robthebloke]

Or at the most possible extreme, they could just be switching to GLES to help push developers towards Windows8 RT (since it's pretty obvious they're in catch up mode at the moment).

Re:Huh?

[jmauro]

From the article all that's dying is likely the name. The same technologies will still exist and be limited to Xbox and Windows only. No OpenGL.

Re:Huh?

[David Gerard]

Not even Coke or Pepsi. Microsoft is and has always been an office supply company. They're rich because they worked out how to sell an expensive box of paperclips to every business in the world. But y'know, turning pens and paperclips into a consumer shiny toy company? A bit unlikely to happen.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case it's "Embrace, Extend, Give up and let MonoGame take over", which makes no sense from Microsoft's perspective.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So chair-thrower is Michael Scott? That explains a few things!

Re:Huh?

[Nutria]

turning pens and paperclips into a consumer shiny toy company?

Exchange Server, SQL Server, MSVC and all it's attendant addons are *not* paper clips.

Re:Huh?

[GameboyRMH]

My first thought exactly, I really hope they're retiring DirectX and using OpenGL from now on.

Re:Huh?

[morgauxo]

Indeed, that would be insulting to paperclips.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

That sounds about right.

Re:Huh?

[Nutria]

Hah. Much as is pains me to say it, MSFT enterprise products are *everywhere*.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So are paperclips. But you don't think about them that much, just like you don't think about buying Office that much.

But with tighter budgets, you stopped approving the fancy paperclips long ago, and that means you're looking now at other areas to cut. That includes MS Office when other alternatives are more performant with less training. The fact they cost less is less important actually than the loss of productivity or cost to upgrade Office from prior versions (hint hint it's not just the cost of buying the software).

Re:Huh?

[imnotanumber]

And paperclips are also *everywhere*

Sometimes they are even useful...

Re:Huh?

[X0563511]

For all we know, it -is- the equivalent of a numbers station.

You've seen the random shit post that each story gets at least one of, right? Looks like segments of random sentences strung together? I would put money down that those are not just garbage.

Re:Huh?

[tibit]

Well, Microsoft's own implementation of OpenGL is not kept up to date any longer, in spite of it still running OK for fixed pipeline code, and it runs on Direct3D of course. Yet, long live OpenGL, as the ANGLE open source implementation of OpenGL ES is good enough to be used by default by Qt 5. It runs on top of Direct 3D using IIRC DirectX 9.0 APIs. Qt 5 on Windows uses OpenGL ES for rendering, but I haven't checked yet if it includes Qt Widgets or is it for Qt Declarative only.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

My only question is will Gates get tired of seeing everything he spent so many years building being burnt to the ground and step in, or will he kick back with his big piles o' cash and just watch the whole thing burn?

s/kick back with his big piles o' cash/save millions of lives in developing regions/

ftfy

Re:Huh?

[unixisc]

OpenGL won't replace DirectX on Windows, but if the latter stops evolving, then OpenGL will be the only default standard left. I really wish they update the standard to include audio, just like DirectX does, so that it would be a more genuine replacement. Call the new standard OpenX or something. That way, any new OS that comes up will automatically want to and have to support, if not solely use it.

Re:Huh?

[unixisc]

So how are the LO or OO equivalents of Excel or PowerPoint?

Re:Huh?

[GameboyRMH]

That would be OpenGL+OpenAL, a few games do use it on Windows.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clippy says, "I see you are trying to implode your company. Would you like help with this?"

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

We got a M$ $HILL here! Get the fuck off slashdot, you $hill. We only FOSS it around here. FOSS GNU FOSS!

Does anyone have a 3d printer model for Stallman's cock?

Re:Huh?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Decent. Does everything I need. The Powerpoint alternative is great, but it doesn't come with a ton of usable templates. Speaking o fwhich the excel alternative also lacks in auto formatting options. None of them end up looking that great... So you'd have to spend more time formatting output, if you're going to use it (excel table) in a presentation.

Re:Huh?

[Lisandro]

http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/default.aspx ?

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean OpenAL?

Re:Huh?

[westyvw]

Had to use Calc the other day due to an office 2010 bug in Excel that caused it to crash (doing a simple find and replace no less). Calc has always been there for me when excel wont work. Integration with Writer is better then in MS office.

Powerpoint, is way over used, and very limiting.

I have been using HTML online presentations, and I have been very intrigued by the way some people are delivering presentations using live web papge updates. You go to a web page at the beginning of the presentation and the content on the page changes with the presentor. Additional links and information are contained within, and to review in the future you just go to the web page. Additionally, if the content changes, if the presenter adds more information at a later time, you will see that when you return.

However, if you do choose to write a powerpoint like document in Libre, a simple script can update the title, date, and other information so you dont have to open it again if you are presenting in different venues or for different groups.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The open source world earn a -lot- from MSVC. (bar maybe QtCreator (no edit and continue though, and might as well get your toolchain to bleeding edge to get a less bumpy experience)
This retarded approach of debuggers are bad, use (k)printf mmkay is just plain horrible.

Re:Huh?

[Nikker]

Who really uses SQL Server without the CTO being in bed with a MS MVP? It's OK even if you have MS all the way but even then it's only still just OK.

Re:Huh?

[witherstaff]

Someone at MS is going to read that and want to revive Clippy and put it into their enterprise products.

Re:Huh?

[Nutria]

Who really uses SQL Server without the CTO being in bed with a MS MVP?

I think it's more that (1) SQL Server 2008 R2 became Good Enough, and (2) Oracle priced itself out of the mid-sized market.

MSFT gobbled market share and is now raising prices.

Re:Huh?

[rochrist]

They aren't killing DirectX as much as breaking it up into component parts scattered all over the Windows SDK. There is no more DirectX SDK. They also seem to be running away from managed code as fast as they can.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Clippy?

Re:Huh?

[Randle_Revar]

Made me think of Stross' "Halting State" where the bad guys "implemented TCP/IP over AD&D"

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Proof? Not just feel-good talking points but real proof... Waiting.

Re:Huh?

[UltraZelda64]

What? I can probably get 1,000 paper clips for less than 10 bucks, and since that's more than I'd probably ever need a smaller, cheaper pack of 50-100 would be just fine. You're right; you don't really have to think much about it... they're just little bent metal strips, they're cheap.

On the other hand, a few hundred dollars just to get a license to use a non-butchered version of Office (ie. with database functionality), on top of another couple hundred dollars to the same company for the operating system just to run it on. That's enough to just say "fuck Office." I can get a real, physical fucking desk and plenty of office supplies of all kinds for that price.

On top of that, I actually own the desk and office supplies. I am only granted the right to use Windows. Bad comparison.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

People keep saying that about managed code, but I never see any proof to back it up. I'm not saying you're wrong, but could you point us to some proof?

Re:Huh?

[Pino Grigio]

Eh? I'm developing an application on Windows 8 (desktop) that's using OpenGL 4.2. The actual implementation is from driver writers (AMD, Intel, NVIDIA), not Microsoft. All that means is I have to initialise extensions (essentially function pointers) after creating a window that supports OpenGL. Everything else is in and running sweetly. D3D doesn't have anything OpenGL hasn't got in Windows, except perhaps better shader debugging, but that should be moot when NVIDIA release their next version of NSIGHT, which is apparently going to be this quarter.

A big advantage of OpenGL over D3D on Windows, is that there are still shed loads of Windows XP boxes out there that can run GL 4.2 (with the right card), but that can't run anything higher than D3D 9, because MS in their wisdom decided to change the display driver model in Vista/7/8, making D3D 10/11 unavailable on XP. That is of course notwithstanding the cross-platform capabilities of OpenGL.

Re:Huh?

[Prune]

Having worked with OpenAL, it became clear to me that it doesn't live up to its name, which implies a status comparison with OpenGL. Nowhere close, actually. It's not merely the fact that there is very limited development activity on OpenAL. The problem is that the simplifications taken in structuring positional audio are way too far from reasonable psychoacoustic models, and there's no way moving beyond them without fundamentally redesigning the API. We need something a lot more like http://www.carlschissler.com/gsound/index.php?page=home and there's no way to do this sort of more advanced psychoacoustic modeling in OpenAL; compare, instead, OpenGL, where the API supports much more flexibility.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Khronos group maintains many more standards than OpenGL: specifically, they pretty much have an Open*** equivalent for everything DirectX does.

Re:Huh?

[hairyfeet]

Dude XP is dead as a doornail, nobody out there is gonna have a card capable of OpenGL 4.2 running on some ancient WinXP box, they just aren't. Believe me I know as i have plenty of customers with XP boxes but every damned one is a LEGACY box being used to run old applications or as a nettop/netbook NOT as a gaming system.

So if you want to talk about how you can use OpenGL on mobile phones that would be one thing but you ain't finding new hardware on XP boxes, I bet if you did a poll of the hardware a good 80%+ of the XP boxes out there are Pentium 4s, the rest a mix of Athlons and Pentium Ds, with the average box being a 2.x GHz P4 with 1GB of RAM and 80-160GB HDD, and a good70%+ of those having Intel integrated graphics NOT something you are gonna be gaming on. Unless you think Farmville counts as gaming.

Re:Huh?

[hairyfeet]

While this is true I have to say that analogy works pretty damned well, as so are chairs and pens and paperclips in your average office but its not something most think about and there certainly isn't much brand loyalty to most of that stuff. Sure you'll stick with the brand you have been buying as long as its stays reasonably similar due to apathy and because its just easier to stick with what you know but if they suddenly jack the price or make it a giant PITA to use its not like switching to another brand is gonna bother you all that much as long as it performs the same or similar.

But you can really tell by watching the moves Ballmer has made the past few years he really thinks he has a "brand" that he can charge top dollar while gimping the hell out of it and people will just pay because "They love my product so much" when in reality? Honestly nobody gives a rat's ass about Windows, ALL they care about is the software they want to run which happens to run on windows. If somebody comes up with a Wine style emulation layer so it all "just runs" or the companies start porting it all to Android and iOS? Most won't be bothered in the slightest to walk away from Windows, especially when they are trying to force a lame Windows 3.x looking UI down our throats.

Re:Huh?

[hairyfeet]

Garbage, but then again so is their version of Word for anything more complex than a grocery list. Honestly MS Office is one of the few places where there really is no competition, LO isn't even up to Office 97 when it comes to feature parity and Google docs is pretty damned basic.

But the problem for MSFT is most offices frankly don't need the "latest and greatest" MS Office, i know quite a few still on Office 2K3 or 2K7 that are quite happy where they are at. Frankly this gives the competition a static target to aim for while making it harder for MSFT to sell new versions of Office in a down economy but ATM for serious office use MS Office is really the only game in town.

don't get me wrong, LO has its uses, most of my home users are quite happy with LO and for the kinds of things a home user does, book reports and recipes and making a little slidehow for school it works just fine, it just isn't any kind of real competition for MS Office anymore than gimp is a suitable replacement for Photoshop or even Corel Draw.

Re:Huh?

[unixisc]

Okay, but is MS Office really better than whatever was the last versions of Lotus Ami Pro or Wordperfect Office? Those would certainly be alternatives. In fact, the last good version of Office I found usable was Office 2k3: after the ribbon came, I've not liked any of them. For me, in a spreadsheet, I typically need pivot tables and those data processing and charting features, while in a presentation, I need the ability to have easy to use effects, since the focus there is on less words and more pictures. People who have past versions of Office are fine, but those who don't would either have to get LO/OO: are Ami Pro or WP Office even available any more?

Re:Huh?

[mikael]

Microsoft always aimed to be the middle man between the hardware and the user, through the windows system, widgets and API specifications. For business users, that was all they needed, they didn't really want to mess about with DMA interrupt channels, extended memory, device driver memory allocations every time someone needed a new PC.

Re:Huh?

[tibit]

Yet, these days you get Direct3D on anything that runs Windows, and you're guaranteed decent 9.0c support. OpenGL is a crapshoot. You can get better performing and more stable OpenGL ES 2.0 support if you use ANGLE running on top of Direct3D than if you depend on vendor driver support.

Re:Huh?

[Pino Grigio]

I wasn't really talking about gaming. I work in industry, and corporations still have XP rolled out across their desktops in large numbers.

Re:Huh?

[badkarmadayaccount]

OTOH, no D3D means no platform dependent games (easy to port, at least). Keep on the good work balmer!

Re:Huh?

[Sigg3.net]

Don't you mean PMA is the ROAE?

Re:Huh?

[nobodie]

I work in Education and classroom computers all across the US and Asia have XP and no plan in place to move the equioment or the OS to win7, much less 8.

Re:Huh?

[hairyfeet]

While I can't speak about Lotus (and from what I understand its all but abandoned so its not like you are gonna pick up a new copy anyway) I can speak about WordPerfect and frankly? Its only really useful in the legal profession as its formatting is the default formatting for legal briefs, for everywhere else? its support of Office formatting and files is really poor and if you try to open a complex doc in it you are gonna get word salad.

As far as the ribbon many of my customers just customized the mini-bar and didn't use the ribbon at all, and if you really like the old way there are third party programs that will give you a 2K3 style UI in 2K7 or later. But if you are using spreadsheets and doing anything with any complexity AT ALL then MS Office is pretty much the only game in town, although its easy enough to pick up a copy of 2K3 and do your work in that. Again what MSFT is finding out is their previous versions are "good enough" for most businesses so they see no need to jump on the upgrade bandwagon, hell I personally still use MS Office 2K on my netbook as the compatibility pack lets me open the later formats while having a VERY low footprint, just perfect for a netbook.

But frankly unixsc you're pretty much stuck as MS Office and LO are pretty much the only games in town and Sun's piss poor treatment of Open office has left it pretty damned far behind MS Office, especially Calc and Base which I wouldn't consider an equal to Excel and Access 97, much less 2K3 or 2K7, they just aren't very good. you can of course try them free but in that case you get what you pay for, they just aren't very nice at all. Hell last version of LO I tried making a bog standard DB using Base's own wizard and damned if it didn't crash and corrupt the DB while it was at it. You can really tell that Writer was the only one getting any love from Sun, as while Writer is roughly at Office 97 or even office 2K levels the rest of the suite isn't even up to office 95, they really are piss poor.

You'd honestly be better off with gnumeric if you just had to use a FOSS solution but even then its just nowhere near feature parity.

Re:Huh?

[unixisc]

Those are the choices then. There is one more choice - Calligra Suite, which was previously KOffice: hopefully, that gets better attention and dev resources so that there is an alternative to MS Office. Yeah, I have Office 2k3, but haven't ever tried installing it on Windows 7. My other option - running it under XP Mode, just like I do Acrobat 6.

Re:Huh?

[rioki]

I think you are missing the point. OpenGL's API is really stable, even the things they "deprecated" are still there and usable. (Maybe not optimally accelerated.) You build you application with OpenGL once and that's it. With D3D you need to write different code for each version D3D, because the API is not compatible. As developer you win nothing and have much extra effort. If MS would embrace OpenGL it would be really great; not that the current situation is bad...

Nope.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing much left to add to the hardware for polygon rasterization. Therefore there isn't much left to do inside DirectX.

Re:Nope.

[Pino Grigio]

I think NVIDIA added some extensions so binding objects is no longer needed. You essentially pass memory pointers into the shader, instead of binding/connecting two end points to get the required resource. So that's one thing D3D won't have (but NVIDIA GL implementation does at the moment). I could think of quite a few more!

Another fad ends

[Animats]

Glad I stayed with OpenGL for my 3D work.

Re:Another fad ends

[roc97007]

Thank god!!

Re:Another fad ends

[Joce640k]

What a mess of extensions that thing devolved into...

Why they didn't want OpenGL ES on the desktop is beyond me - it was the chance to start over cleanly, they should have pushed it as hard as possible but nooooo....too little, too late.

Re:Another fad ends

[UnknownSoldier]

Because Microsoft had to justify their purchase of RenderMorphics in 1995 -- the company that made the Reality Lab API that was renamed Direct3D.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

Of course Microsoft didn't get it right until version 3. DX1, DX2, DX5. :-/ (DX4 was never publically available.)

At the time there was a petition of game developers telling Microsoft to support OpenGL - but typically Microsoft didn't give a dam -- they have always just wanted vendor lock in with all their technologies.
http://www.graphicsgroups.com/6-opengl/c476ebf66db4600a.htm

Re:Another fad ends

[DrXym]

OpenGL ES 2.0 might be suitable for running a desktop framework, but it probably isn't suitable for the apps running on top of it. It's too cut to the bone e.g. it only supports triangles, lines and points as primitives, lacks geometry and tesselation shaders and has various other restrictions which might be necessary in a phone but should not be when running against a PC GPU.

Anyway the full blown OpenGL with 4.x is somewhat getting its shit together and is a superset of ES 2.0 and 3.0. Just avoid the fixed function stuff and it should be fine.

Now... I just wish the documentation, tools and quality of drivers were all up to snuff for development. It's not uncommon to write a shader which works just fine on one driver but refuses to even compile on another. OpenGL needs a canonical, driver neutral set of compilers and tools which integrate into IDEs like Eclipse and reduce the hassle of development.

Re:Another fad ends

[BitZtream]

It's too cut to the bone e.g. it only supports triangles, lines and points as primitives,

Show me any hardware or software that actually does something different at the core. You can't. EVERYTHING users triangles, lines and points for a reason.

Re:Another fad ends

[Joce640k]

OpenGL ES 2.0 might be suitable for running a desktop framework, but it probably isn't suitable for the apps running on top of it. It's too cut to the bone e.g. it only supports triangles, lines and points as primitives, lacks geometry and tesselation shaders and has various other restrictions which might be necessary in a phone but should not be when running against a PC GPU.

Guess what? That's what the graphics cards do. No consumer graphics card does quads, strips, fans, big dots or wide lines in hardware. The driver has to re-work them on the fly.

OpenGL ES also needs a separate, standard library for doing immediate mode rendering, matrix math, etc. Newbies can't be expected to do all that stuff for themselves. Direct3D has Direct3DX, OpenGL ES has nothing (I suspect this is one more reason why they're trying to keep OpenGL ES off the desktop when what they should really be doing is creating that library and getting people to use it...)

Re:Another fad ends

[DrXym]

Show me any computer hardware (with the exception of vectrex etc.) which doesn't use pixels at the core. You can't. Everything uses pixels for a reason.

Just because a high level representation of a shape is decomposed into something else does not mean it's convenient to force an app through the lowest level. Forcing an app to decompose a mesh, quad or a poly into a fan, strip or individual triangles, including coping with all the degenerate cases is a needless development burden.

OpenGL ES 2.0 is meant for embedded devices where such a restriction might be a reasonable compromise. It isn't a reasonable compromise in a desktop where the GPU or the driver could do it far more reliably, efficiently and accurately than some random app.

Re:Another fad ends

[DrXym]

I don't doubt it's done in the driver. One reliable piece of code which has been tested to death which performs exactly as it says on the tin. It doesn't force apps to use it - they can use triangles if they want - but I see no reason to force them to use triangles if their geometry is something else to begin with.

I agree OpenGL ES 2.0 could do with some proper client side code for matrix calculations and so on. It's very frustrating to program in JOGL, or libgdx or Android and realise they all implement essentially the same stuff (e.g. they all have a column first matrix class) but in entirely different ways

Re:Another fad ends

[JDG1980]

I don't doubt it's done in the driver. One reliable piece of code which has been tested to death which performs exactly as it says on the tin.

What color is the sky in your world?

Video card drivers are among the most unreliable pieces of software in widespread use. (This is one reason why WebGL is such a terrible idea – the last thing you want to do is expose this crappy code to completely untrusted data from the Internet.) If video card vendors can get 1 extra FPS in the latest twitch game by adding an unreliable hack, they'll do it. And there is no way to turn these hacks off.

One of the reasons why Vista got such a reputation for unreliability was that the video card vendors outright refused to rewrite their drivers for WDM. They kept pretending it just wasn't going to happen, and didn't finally do the update until after it was too late and Vista had already hit the stores.

Re:Another fad ends

[bigmo]

I have some video display code that currently uses triangle strips. I'm planning to change to quads so that geometry correction can be done more easily in my app. I could certainly do it with triangles, but it's just a lot easier with quads. This is used on workstation machines so I'm hoping (although I haven't dived into it yet) that the driver, rather than the hardware, won't have to re-work everything piece by piece.

Re:Another fad ends

[DrXym]

Are you seriously suggesting that there are many OpenGL drivers which cannot adequately draw a polygon or quad even when presented with degenerate params? This stuff is old hat and has been part of the OpenGL spec since almost the beginning. Besides, even if you did force it in the app layer, why do you assume it would be any more reliable?

As for WebGL, I've voiced my own concern about WebGL, but since it's essentially OpenGL ES 2.0 with relatively minor differences I don't it's particularly relevant to the point I was making.

Re:Another fad ends

[tibit]

Not a problem for Qt 5 :) They use ANGLE to implement OpenGL ES 2 on top of DX9.

Re:Another fad ends

[tibit]

OpenGL, including the ES subset, is not meant for direct use. You need a library on top of it that handles the minutiae. Qt 5's scene graph is a good foundation for 2D graphics to build on, for example, but it doesn't yet provide much in the way of geometry, all you get is rectangles and circles (rectangles with rounded borders degenerate into circles). If you want fancier geometry, you need to tessellate it yourself, but it's not meant to be that way in Qt 5 for much longer AFAIK. Same goes for use in any other framework. OpenSceneGraph is good if you want 3D geometry.

Example: If your application's primitives express nicely as Bezier polylines, then you deal with that, and pick a library to tessellate stuff and push the geometry to the OpenGL stack. Nobody who's sane will write raw OpenGL ES code in an application, there's no need for it, and it's a waste of time as the job has been done many times over. It's not the job of OpenGL to tessellate stuff for you, as this would quite constrain how you represent your own geometry. Everybody's needs are different there, so there's no one size fits all solution, not really. General purposes application toolkits, like Qt, address that need for 2D applications, other toolkits address that need for non-game 3D applications, game engines solve it for, well, games.

Re:Another fad ends

[unixisc]

What a mess of extensions that thing devolved into...

Why they didn't want OpenGL ES on the desktop is beyond me - it was the chance to start over cleanly, they should have pushed it as hard as possible but nooooo....too little, too late.

Well, DirectX included, amongst other things, support for sound, which is not there in OpenGL (which is why, in Linux, one has to struggle w/ Alsa or Pulseaudio) That is one thing Khronos would do well to add, so that there is a common video AND audio standard library.

Re:Another fad ends

[0123456]

One of the reasons why Vista got such a reputation for unreliability was that the video card vendors outright refused to rewrite their drivers for WDM. They kept pretending it just wasn't going to happen, and didn't finally do the update until after it was too late and Vista had already hit the stores.

Changing the driver model was such a stupid idea that everyone hoped Microsoft would realise and change their minds. Until then, no-one was going to put resources onto debugging drivers for an OS that wasn't even released yet when they could be improving drivers for hardware and operating systems customers actually had.

Just another dumb idea on Microsoft's part, believing they could do what they wanted and the rest of the world would follow them with their tails wagging.

Re:Another fad ends

[0123456]

That's what the graphics cards do. No consumer graphics card does quads, strips, fans, big dots or wide lines in hardware. The driver has to re-work them on the fly.

Maybe not today, but the ones I used to work on certainly did. And given that today's 'pro' graphics cards are typically just 'consumer' cards with different drivers, I'm pretty sure their hardware will handle it too; they'd probably have to disable the code in the 'consumer' driver to stop it working.

Re:Another fad ends

[Anonymous Coward]

There is OpenMAX.

Re:Another fad ends

[Pino Grigio]

It isn't really a mess of extensions Joce. As long as you don't use vendor specific stuff, it's fine.

Re:Another fad ends

[lister king of smeg]

you mean OpenAL? SDL?

Re:Another fad ends

[Anonymous Coward]

What a complete cretin you are. When the functions that half-wits like you demand are made available, they are actually nothing but software operations in the driver code running on the CPU. As such, they are dreadful, sloppy, slow and utterly useless. It isn't Nvidia's or ATI's skillset to write decent high-level graphics code.

The GPU hardware processes only TRIANGLES, through ROP pipelines that have varying numbers of 'shaders' attached depending on the complexity of the shader code. To gain any decent performance from the GPU requires intimate understanding of how the hardware units interact.

Anyone wanting higher level abstracted graphic functions should be using a LIBRARY (ever hear of that programming concept, idiot).

It is bad enough that OpenGL and DirectX abstract the memory management for textures, making it extremely difficult for the programmer to predict which form of texture use will run efficiently. Extremely bad programmers (like 'DrXym') will simply tell their bosses to buy more powerful graphics cards when their code runs like crap. Decent programmers have to experiment with various texture management approaches until they find methods that work well with the 'black box' drivers.

OpenGL ES drivers should be as 'thin' and as 'too the metal' as possible. There purpose should be restricted to having access to REAL hardware functions implemented in the GPU. Higher level graphics (like 'mesh' handling) should ALWAYS be done by a graphics library of 3D engine.

The very reason PS3 and Xbox360 games are so much better today than when the consoles were first released is precisely because modern games ONLY use direct GPU control functions in the drivers, and then layer extremely well coded 3D engines on top. The early games were coded by extremely lazy programmers like 'DrXym', so most of the potential of the hardware was lost to very bad code implementing high-level graphics functions (scenes, objects, meshes, etc).

The GPU is only fast when doing low-level primitive operations. Modern desktop GPUs often include ARM CPUs, so they can appear to support some high level functions, like tessellation. However, the high level functions were only shoved in under pressure from DirectX and full blown OpenGL (as opposed to ES) developers, and run far slower than doing the same using software libraries driving low level GPU functions. In this sense, they are like the old 'complex' instructions in x86 CPUs that run dog-slow, because they have to be emulated by microcode- proper programmers never use them.

OpenGL ES 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 are designed for the future GPUs used in all high performance gaming computers. Because power consumption is now the big issue, the hideously inefficient coding used by idiots like 'DrXym' can no longer be tolerated. 'To the metal' GPU coding can cut power consumption to 1/3 or less. ES versions of the drivers will BAN helper functions that should be located in the libraries and engines, and NEVER the drivers.

Re:Another fad ends

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenGL ES has one sacred commandment "thou shalt not read back thy depthbuffer nor thy stencilplane", due to the use of rendering framebuffers using tiles.
They got rid of the fixed function pipeline as well as immediate mode rendering commands. Many existing 3D appliations would have depended on these.

Re:Another fad ends

[DrXym]

Please grow up.

Use OpenGL instead

[SplashMyBandit]

All the growing platforms use OpenGL. Even Windows can use OpenGL (although it is not tyhe favored child). If you have an eye on the future, it makes far sense to develop with OpenGL. That way you can develop shaders that will work on: Android, iOS, Mac, Linux, Windows, Unix, embedded devices (eg. commercial avionics), the PS3. What you miss out on is XBox 360 and Windows Phone. Compare the combined size of the coverage of OpenGL platforms to the Direct3D-only platforms. There is simply no contest anymore in terms of units shipping and growth rate.

OpenGL is the future of hardware accelerated graphics. The nice thing is that no matter what changes in the hardware/platform space you investment in OpenGL is never lost, it comes across as you migrate.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Tough Love]

OpenGL is the future of hardware accelerated graphics.

And the past, and the present, just to round out the hat trick.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[phantomfive]

It's worth mentioning that the entire article is based entirely on speculation on a rumor, but:

Unless you absolutely need to lock yourself into a limited, closed platform (for example, you want to develop XNA on xbox and there is no other choice), why would you ever want to do so? There is no good reason.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[cnettel]

OpenGL has been far more fragmented in terms of the numer of vendor extensions you needed to use for a long time to get access to recent functionality. However, I think that the theory in the article, that this actually refers to DirectSound/DirectInput/DirectDraw etc, is quite credible. Direct3D has changed quite a bit in recent years, including grafting Direct2D onto the 3D-style framework.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

I have some difficulties imagining a software, that uses shaders, that is equally running on a PS3 and commercial avionics.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

(for example, you want to develop XNA on xbox and there is no other choice)

Well, that is one of the most used gaming platforms on earth... it's not a small reason.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I would like this to be true, there are so many versions of OpenGL (desktop, ES, ES2) that if you want to support old hardware (OpenGL 2.1 which is not that old since I have some customers with graphic cards from 2006 that does not support anything more recent) and new stuffs you'd better rewrite the whole rendering engine for each one. Hell, even the shader syntax is not consistant. On the top of that each shader compiler does things differently. A few of them have no default gl_PixelSize value so when you draw point clouds you see nothing by default. Others act strangely when you cast float values to int to use as table index. I even found an old piece of intel hardware for which the compiler forget to execute loops when only one iteration will be done...

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

I miss the days where Slashdot was populated by actual developers. I'm a Direct3D developer and this, if true, makes me very happy. It means that DirectX is now a stable API, which makes it much more attractive. I was hoping they'd announce it some day.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

What was the last spec you used? Did it involve hitting one stone against the other? Fixed path is obsolete.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Waccoon]

I'd rather see an open DirectX spec ported to other platforms than see OpenGL take over everything.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Because XNA is actually a pretty good framework embedded in a really good toolset and there's really nothing that matches it in terms of ease, speed, and quality of development without also losing much real flexibility and power to do what you want to.

I agree with you for the most part, I'm using OpenGL now because XNA at least does have an awful lot of uncertainty under it with the fact Microsoft have chosen not to support it in RT and Visual Studio 2012, suggesting there is indeed no future for it, but if you just want to make games as say, a hobbyist, and don't really care about sales figures or market reach then XNA is your best bet, especially if you work a full time job - XNA can mean the difference between having time to embark on such a project alongside work, and not. A lot of this comes down to OpenGL's inconsistency of support meaning more bug hunting, more time and effort to setup, and the fact the API design is dated and often painful to work with and that the only language it was really developed hand in hand with - C, isn't exactly a productive language (unless you have to use it, for performance concerns). XNA being developed hand in hand with C# is partly what made it excellent to work with because it was a modern framework design melded with a modern language.

But for what it's worth I think there's another point in OpenGL's favour, Microsoft have a long history of failing to provide graphics API stability, GDI, GDI+, WPF 2D/3D, DX, MDX, XNA, and so on - so many APIs over the years have come and gone with support disappearing to a large extent or even completely. It's one of Microsoft's developer weak points.

I've always been a fan of Microsoft's graphics APIs and have always defended them over OpenGL because they haven't had most the headaches OpenGL causes, but even I'm fed up now of the fact that each graphics API has a lifespan of a few years, that if you upgrade Visual Studio you can likely no longer use the integrated tools for that API for years afterwards, if at all. It's just gotten stupid at this point and has become such an overriding concern due to the frequency of the problem that all the benefits are now irrelevant.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[non0score]

I'd rather we scrap both and start anew. Both of these abstraction layers are wholly inadequate for modern GPU architectures. Just the fact that both of these APIs are architected on the idea of single-threaded CPU cores building out a single, final command buffer is completely antiquated (even with DX's addition for parallel command buffer building).

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectX=Microsoft=portwilnothapen or portwillbepatented

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Joce640k]

All the growing platforms use OpenGL.

No, they Use OpenGL ES.

Even Windows can use OpenGL

...just not OpenGL ES.

OpenGL is the future of hardware accelerated graphics.

It might be. If they finish OpenGL ES (make it support missing desktop graphics card features), then actually allow people to use it on the desktop.

Unfortunately most of today's graphics cards will never have a working OpenGL ES driver so we're looking at five or ten years before it's worth trying to use OpenGL ES on the desktop, if ever. It's too little, and far too late.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Joce640k]

Yep. DirectX 11 is quite well finished (and it only took them eleven iterations to get things figured out...!), but I doubt Microsoft will let Apple or Linux license it anytime soon.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[dkf]

What you miss out on is [...] Windows Phone.

Oh no! Save me!

Seriously, who really cares about that platform? It's just not got the market penetration. Now, the 360 has the penetration, but the hardware there is looking rather elderly; the visual quality of the platform is noticeably worse than its competitors and it's pretty clear it needs a platform-refresh or successor, which would be a reasonable time to ramp up support for OpenGL.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Most cards supported by mesa have OpenGL ES 1.0 and 2.0 implemented with gallium.

http://www.mesa3d.org/opengles.html

Also kwin (kde window manager) can use opengl es (was added in kde a year ago) instead of Open GL. http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2011/07/running-kwin-with-opengl-es-2-0/

You may be right about windows drivers, but on GNU/linux it's really easier to support APIs (hell there's even a directx11 tracker for gallium to accelerate wine apps)

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenGL portability is only (relatively) simple when dealing with Windows, Linux, and Mac. Android and iOS however use OpenGL ES which has a lot of similarities to OpenGL, but it is not OpenGL as we know it on PC platforms. The kind of code you wind up writing to support both OpenGL and OpenGL ES platforms is very similar to the kind of code you would write to support both DirectX and OpenGL platforms.

Honestly I'm glad Microsoft pulled the plug on XNA. All the way up to XNA 3.1 the API was going strong, each new version greatly improved what it was capable of. XNA 4.0 however is tailored toward Windows Phone so heavily that it sacrifices crucial Direct3D functionality on both the PC and Xbox360.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Stuarticus]

It seems like Microsoft wouldn't.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Joce640k]

I think the abstraction works quite well for most cases.

Is it worth re-architecting for the handful of cases where it doesn't? It seems unlikely.

There might be a case to be made for delayed rendering and more frame-buffer composition, but even they'd still use the "single-threaded CPU cores building out a single, final command buffer" paradigm.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Joce640k]

....wholly inadequate for modern GPU architectures.

The GPU architectures are designed around the APIs so it's not like existing GPUs would work a lot better if driven differently.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[SplashMyBandit]

OpenGL has been far more fragmented in terms of the numer of vendor extensions you needed to use for a long time to get access to recent functionality.

Your OpenGL knowledge is clearly out-of-date. The extension mechanism still exists, of course, but is not needed to get GLSL shaders that have advanced functionality.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

But with OpenGL you get all of the other most used gaming platforms put together. That's much larger than locking yourself to the Xbox.

(Windows runs either, so if you wish to include it, it counts on both sides, thus not changing the outcome).

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Molt]

They didn't say fixed-path, they said finite state machine and stack. The stack-based part is the pushing and popping of matrices, and the finite state machine is the general approach where you change OpenGL's internal state using the API and that applies to everything you draw from then on.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[cnettel]

Note "has been". Since this is more due to the way the API is managed and developed, I would expect it to happen again whenever serious new functionality is introduced. I would also believe that this will happen. The ever increasing performance, with different constraints on computation power versus bandwidth versus expected quality makes it hard to believe that either current OpenGL or current Direct3D are fully mature and will now not change.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Just for completeness: OpenGL cannot be used on WindowsRT, as the new WinRT interface does not provide it and Win32 is inaccessible there.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[ChunderDownunder]

Well there was an implementation of Direct3D 11 on Linux but it died due to lack of interest in maintaining it.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

'Because XNA is actually a pretty good framework embedded in a really good toolset and there's really nothing that matches it in terms of ease, speed, and quality of development without also losing much real flexibility and power to do what you want to.'

Bullshit, doesn't work anywhere else, but XBOX, what flexibility are you talking about?

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Molt]

I don't think Microsoft cancelling the entire DirectX MVP program can be a good thing for Direct3D unless they then do start a Direct3D-specific MVP program. For one thing I don't think DirectX will become that much more stable as GPUs are still changing dramatically and I would prefer to see the API reflect these changes, but more importantly a good amount of the MVP awards go to people who consistently provide good answers to questions of forums and suchlike. Even when a technology is 100% fixed there will still be people learning it from scratch and those who want to strengthen their skills, and these people will have questions.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[UnknownSoldier]

> I miss the days where Slashdot was populated by actual developers.

We're still here. It is just that the signal (developers) is probably buried under the noise (fanboys) half (most?) of the time.

It is harder to stick to the facts then to go all emo over speculation which sadly /. is becoming more and more.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Molt]

OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with the parts which embedded hardware can't handle removed, and so adding the functionality to support the missing desktop graphics card features would either result in the normal OpenGL again, or an oddly forked version based on where embedded hardware is today. Also it's not that hard to run an implementation of OpenGL ES on the desktop today, it's the basis of WebGL and Chrome and Firefox both happily run it, the render loop is changed to accommodate the fact it's running in a browser but other than that it's pretty much the same OpenGL ES you'll find elsewhere.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Rockoon]

For one thing I don't think DirectX will become that much more stable as GPUs are still changing dramatically

Are they still changing dramatically? Aside from tessellation (which is debatable as far as 'dramatic'), what other 'dramatic' changes has their really been once the fixed function pipeline was dropped? Once the fully programmable pipeline took over, the bulk of what the Direct3D API still does for the developer is now simply asset management.

Hell, even the last update to the shader standard only dealt with general purpose computing on the gpu.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[qbel]

Yeah we are here.. I'm a developer here too who rarely posts. The thing is, I come here for the sometimes interesting, informative and well-vetted news article summaries, but it's the informed comments from other devs that I stay for. UnknownSoldier is dead on about the facts and speculation.. it's easier to speculate than to talk truth, and reading nothing but spec gets old, fast.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[DrXym]

I expect most developers wishing to target DirectX and OpenGL would write their shaders in Cg which is NVidia's proprietary shading language. The tool spits out the equivalent shader script in GLSL or HLSL.

Doesn't help much the other geometry stuff but I would not be surprised if the two APIs are largely analogous such that most of the differences can be abstracted away behind some utilities or some other for of separation, e.g. by using a 3rd party development platform like Unity.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

All the growing platforms use OpenGL.

You do realize XNA and DirectX are not Direct3D don't you?

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[exomondo]

Unless you absolutely need to lock yourself into a limited, closed platform (for example, you want to develop XNA on xbox and there is no other choice), why would you ever want to do so? There is no good reason.

Right, but developing for it doesn't mean you would lock yourself into it, no developer in their right mind would build a game engine relying solely on one particular platform-specific API. This goes all the way back to the days where we had to support S3D, Glide, CIF and others side-by-side. Obviously guys like the Limbo developers weren't 'locked in', it's available on XBLA, PS3, Windows and OSX.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

(for example, you want to develop XNA on xbox and there is no other choice)

Well, that is one of the most used gaming platforms on earth... it's not a small reason.

One among several of the most-used gaming platforms on Earth. The question still stands.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[binarylarry]

The stack doesn't exist in OpenGL 3+

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[jones_supa]

By the way, how much does the DX -> GL translation impact the performance of games under Wine?

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[RaceProUK]

Bullshit, doesn't work anywhere else, but XBOX, what flexibility are you talking about?

It also works on WinPhone (even WP8) and Widnows XP onwards, with the ability to share 95%+ of the code between them. So it covers the two largest segments of the videogame market, platform-wise.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[RaceProUK]

Microsoft have a long history of failing to provide graphics API stability, GDI, GDI+, WPF 2D/3D, DX, MDX, XNA

Failing? Hardly.

GDI and GDI+ still work on Windows 8 - this is what WinForms is built on. These have been stable for years now.

WPF was recently updated for .NET 4.5, so obviously that's dead in the water.

DirectX is alive and kicking on the PC, as is XNA on PC and XBox.

The only one MS don't want you using at all is MDX, which is why they created XNA.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[DrXym]

I'm actively developing OpenGL ES 2.0 for android and one constant source of frustration is the quality of tools, documentation and examples. The tools are really bad since the nearest thing to syntax hilighting is the standard C editor and there is no way of telling if a shader will work or not without trial and error. The problem with documentation and examples is of another issue - there are so many different versions, bindings and implementations of OpenGL that it is very hard to find what you want in all the noise. You might come across a seemingly good example and discover it's no use because it's fixed function or uses the wrong version of GL.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[DrXym]

All the fixed function stuff is essentially deprecated and has been for a while. OpenGL ES 2.0 cuts it completely so it's unlikely that many game devs even pay it a passing glance any more.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[DrXym]

There is barely any abstraction at all in OpenGL ES 2.0. You load the GPU with shaders and tell it to render from buffers. There is no fixed function pipeline at all which undoubtedly comes as a "pleasant" surprise for anybody trying to port code to 2.0 from 1.1.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[exomondo]

Depends on what you're doing, if you're using the fixed function pipeline it's obviously going to be significantly more than the programmable pipeline.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Joce640k]

What OpenGL needs is a library for fixed function and immediate mode layered on top of OpenGL ES. The emulator would make porting OpenGL->OpenGL ES easier without being an albatross around the neck of the API (and of the OpenGL driver writers who'd be free to concentrate on with their OpenGL ES implementations).

This is what OpenGL basically is these days. The trouble is that nobody's free to dump legacy code and go with pure OpenGL ES on the desktop, they're forced to go through all the layers. These people will prefer Direct3D instead (it's a much cleaner, more direct API).

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Joce640k]

OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with the parts which embedded hardware can't handle removed.

No it isn't.

Also it's not that hard to run an implementation of OpenGL ES on the desktop today

Still hard, though.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[DrXym]

I think pretty much everyone recognizes fixed function is toast. If you need that sort of thing then you probably need something higher level which expresses the world as a scene.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[samkass]

I'm actively developing OpenGL ES 2.0 for android and one constant source of frustration is the quality of tools, documentation and examples. The tools are really bad since the nearest thing to syntax hilighting is the standard C editor and there is no way of telling if a shader will work or not without trial and error. The problem with documentation and examples is of another issue - there are so many different versions, bindings and implementations of OpenGL that it is very hard to find what you want in all the noise. You might come across a seemingly good example and discover it's no use because it's fixed function or uses the wrong version of GL.

iOS has some really nice development tools. I don't port to Android, but for those that do I've heard an iOS-first, Android-second strategy can produce better Android apps because the toolset on iOS helps debug and optimize the software faster and better. It might be worth looking into.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

WinPhone is one of the largest segments of the videogame market? I thought it would be android or iphone games, or possibly web based ones that make you download all those cool toolbars.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[JDG1980]

But for what it's worth I think there's another point in OpenGL's favour, Microsoft have a long history of failing to provide graphics API stability, GDI, GDI+, WPF 2D/3D, DX, MDX, XNA, and so on - so many APIs over the years have come and gone with support disappearing to a large extent or even completely. It's one of Microsoft's developer weak points.

GDI hasn't gone away – it's still the core Win32 rendering API. Microsoft may be encouraging people to use its newer technologies, but GDI is still supported (even with hardware acceleration for the more commonly used features) and isn't going to be discontinued any time soon, seeing as that would break about 90% of Windows desktop applications. Well, maybe Steve Ballmer is stupid enough to try it, but I think he will be kicked out before then, and replaced with someone who understands what side Microsoft's bread is buttered on.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I don't know why I didn't switch sooner. I've got a game I've been working on for the past 2 years or so. I've been using DX 9. But before that I tried MDX and XNA. It's nothing graphically intensive, but I should have started with OpenGL so I wouldn't have to worry about this crap. Plus, I could develop on my Linux laptop. Doh. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

"but if you just want to make games as say, a hobbyist, and don't really care about sales figures or market reach then XNA is your best bet, especially if you work a full time job - XNA can mean the difference between having time to embark on such a project alongside work, and not."

This doesn't make sense. In your day job, you'd be a fool not to use the most efficient tool that your budget can afford. With hobbies, turnaround times and efficiency matter less than the pleasure you get from doing something you really like, even if it's more difficult and comes with more bugs than a trip to a nature reserve.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Thugthrasher]

Rather than flexibility of PLATFORM, he probably meant flexibility in DESIGN. You can have a very flexible set of development tools that only work on XBOX and you can have a very rigid set of development tools that work on all platforms.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[HaZardman27]

I think GP was referring to Xbox 360 and Windows.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohhh! It works on Windows Phone? So you can reach all 5 users there too? Wow!

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[RaceProUK]

I think GP was referring to Xbox 360 and Windows.

Absolutely.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[RaceProUK]

*demented gibbering*

FTFY

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[drinkypoo]

Existing GPUs wouldn't, but not because of anything about their cores, but only about the front and back ends. That's non-trivial and it would take a generation or two to realize the differences but it's probably still something that ought to happen.

I'd also like to know when I'm going to get support for virtualizing graphics drivers. My CPU has virtualization support, when will my GPU have it?

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

You also want it done this decade though. Creating is fun, hunting bugs isn't.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[KlomDark]

I used to be a developer like you, and then I took an arrow to the knee...

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[thetoadwarrior]

No it's the least used platform. More people have something else and in fact globally it's been taken over by the PS3 so even on just home consoles its least relevant. Windows phone is also dead last. The only major platform that uses D3D doesn't require it.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[thetoadwarrior]

With OpenGL I can take Nintendo, Sony and the PC. That covers many more gamers. Globally the PS3 over took the Xbox last month. So the only single platform the Xbox beats is vita and I guess the 3DS.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just false.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[SplashMyBandit]

They don't use Cg because many devices have ATI hardware (which gives better "bang for buck" performance than NVidia, in general). OpenGL will work on NVidia, ATI and Intel hardware - which is a big advantage.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[bobaferret]

I believe it's because facts can only support a limited number of commentators and threads. We reached that number about the time slashdot started requiring accounts to avoid seeing advertisements. Whereas speculation can support an unlimited number of people and comments. Obviously the more people you have the more advertising you can have, and the bigger you can get. Point being if /. got rid of the advertising like they used to, then there would only be a few thousand of us and very little noise. I wonder if this can be worked into a theory that facts are cheap and free, and lies are a valuable currency. W/O lies and speculation no one would have anything to say.

</pointless rambling >

 

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for revising your comments. I was getting confused for a minute.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[mcrbids]

It is harder to stick to the facts then to go all emo over speculation which sadly /. is becoming more and more.

Having hung around here for a *long* time, I can say that the signal/noise ratio isn't significantly worse now than it was 5 or 10 years ago.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

And Up is Down. Black is White. Freedom is Slavery (apropos).

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. You really are an idiot aren't you. You make a case for MS supporting half a dozen APIs simultaneously and actually view this as a good thing. Your sig is irony bordering on the Hemochromatic.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[SoftwareArtist]

OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with the parts which embedded hardware can't handle removed

Not true. OpenGL ES is essentially OpenGL with all the obsolete cruft removed. That's especially true of OpenGL ES 2.0, which ditched the entire fixed function pipeline. OpenGL has been around for a long time, and it's accumulated dozens of specialized features that were needed to take advantage of some particular capability in the greatest new GPUs of some ancient generation. Today, those features are completely unneeded, because you can do the same thing with two lines of shader code, but they can't remove them without breaking backward compatibility. But since OpenGL ES wasn't trying to be backward compatible, they took the opportunity to give the whole API a thorough cleaning.

There are no "missing desktop graphics card features". In fact, there is very little difference between mobile and desktop GPUs anymore, except for having different clock rates and different numbers of compute units.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

...except for one little nagging detail, opengl es which IS used on virtually every mobile platform's GPU. Even v2.0 is not so similar to full opengl(esp. shader capabilities) that it is not simple to port opengl -> es, after some experience with raspbian and opengl es 2.0.

I'm going to have to go with the D2D/3D probably just being absorder into the main OS/display subsystem as I really can't see M$ doing the smart thing and just throwing in the towel on D2D/3D and going back to opengl. Opengl was quite well supported and maintained in windows at one point, but sometime during the 90s they started pushing DX. Remember most games until a few years ago did opengl or opengl+DX support. Look at all the opengl ID games, for easier portability IIRC.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[RaceProUK]

You'd prefer them to drop all old APIs instead, shafting millions of users?

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[Anonymous Coward]

In your day job, you'd be a fool to use an unsupported technology, even if it's the most efficient tool currently available.

If your hobby is making games, not debugging graphics pipelines, then you'd want to reach for an easy-to-use API. That's what GP is getting at.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[spiralx]

Agreed, it may even have improved from the penis bird days of yore.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[mikael]

That's not the fault of Microsoft - many other vendors brought out their own 2D and 3D API's

Borland - BGI - Borland Graphics Interface - designed for monochrome, 4-color and 8-color graphics CGA and EGA screens. Disappeared when VGA came out.
TIGA - Texas Instruments Graphics Architecture - designed for 256, 16-bit and 32-bit VGA, Super-VGA screens. Featured programmable pixblitting, point and line-drawing chip. Up to four TMS34082 floating-point coprocessors could be paired with the .Disappeared when Intel brought out the video bus
Phigs - An early high-level 3D API.

Many have evolved - either an API evolved or it went extinct.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[mikael]

OpenGL ES is adding the following features which were on desktop GL:

Framebuffer Objects - you can bundle up a color buffer, depth buffer and stencil buffer into a single framebuffer object. Basically the equivalent of a SDL surface. You can have as many as the hardware supports. This eliminates the need to render-to-backbuffer and read-into-texture for shadowing effects.

Multiple Render Targets - now you don't just get one framebuffer color buffer, depth buffer and stencil plane as destinations, you can get as many as the hardware can support.
New Compressed texture formats (ASTC) - requires the use of external texture compression software to get 1-bit per pixel, working with 2D, cubemap and 3D textures. But you can't use compressed textures as render target destinations.
Shaders are evolving too - there are precision specifiers for floating point (high, medium and low), You can also have uniform blocks which are a bit like C++ namespaces.
Transform feedback with varying values - you can tap into the data being sent out from the vertex shader.

OpenCL is also becoming available in order to allow mathematical algorithms to be implemented as kernels, rather than mangled into shaders.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[mikael]

What would replace them? The obvious architecture would be a node based system like a scene graph or composition editor that would allow data-flow programming. Most of the components are already in place.

At each end of the systems, you would need framebuffers objects (GL Framebuffer Objects, GL multiple render targets), uncompressed and compressed textures (GL Texture Objects), geometry objects (Vertex buffer objects), program objects to transform vertex and texture data (GL vertex, geometry, fragment shaders). You would need occlusion culling (GL occlusion queries).

You could add mesh objects which would define the type of connectivity (regular square mesh, regular triangle mesh, either open or closed, list of triangles), though for the desktop GL these are represented as display lists. You have transform feedback, but geometry feedback and fragment feedback could also be added.

Re:Use OpenGL instead

[DrXym]

The Cg compiler can spit out GLSL. It's possible the GLSL is optimized for NVidia hardware but using Cg makes it portable to OpenGL or Direct3d. Tools like Unity use Cg for that reason.

nice date..

[Anonymous Coward]

"As a result, effective April 1, 2014 ..."

It Means

[Greyfox]

Too many people got too good at writing DirectX emulation layers. Obviously someone fell down on the job, or Valve wouldn't have managed a Linux port. Watch for new incompatible "standard", soon.

Cynical? This isn't my first rodeo. I watched them kill off OS/2, pretty much exactly the same way.

Re:It Means

[baderman]

Sad but most probably true. Unfortunately, I don't have mod points to give You +...

Re:It Means

[gl4ss]

it just means their public pr relations dev money is being targeted towards Metro so they're shutting down older pr programs.

however.. keeping the mvp system alive wouldn't cost them a damn thing if they didn't do anything with it... and obviously it's not assumed that sw with these techs would be removed from pipeline from all companies.

it's just a reshuffle of their developer PR though. hard to say what it really means.

Re:It Means

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the hardware that got too uniform. DirectX or OpenGL, both have the same feature set. It's like comparing Oranges and Oranges.

Re:It Means

[mvar]

So very true. I really hope they do this and it backfires

Re:It Means

[Bearhouse]

True. Having said that, IBM did not really help. While OS/2 was in many ways a 'better DOS than DOS', as they promised, it fatally lacked support for non-IBM devices in the early days... I remember trying to install on a very-standard config beige box, and sixteen disettes later getting nowhere.

Called up an ex-colleague in IBM, who got me through to a senior dev in the OS/2 team. "Ah, we've never tested it on a non-IBM machine...better buy a PS/2..."

Re:It Means

[Anonymous Coward]

Except one only fits in an "Orange" hole, while the other fits in any round hole.

Re:It Means

[hairyfeet]

For THAT to be true MSFT would have to have a CEO with vision, evil vision but vision nonetheless, and what we have seen in Ballmer is just "What is Apple doing? Lets do that but poorly" so until I see some proof i'm gonna have to call bullshit. If Gates were running the show? then I'd be right there with ya but frankly Ballmer couldn't pull off the EEE maneuver if you drew it out in crayon and came up with a little song to go with it.

More likely they had trouble getting DirectX to run on his precious WinPhone and God fucking forbid that the whole shitty company isn't 110% behind WinPhone so anything that doesn't run on WinPhone? Probably gonna be getting shitcanned.

I'd say the only positive is when the WinPhones and Wintabs hit Woot! for dirt cheap those of us who missed out on a TouchPad might get a shot but knowing Ballmer's ego he'll probably bury them in NM next to the ET carts rather than admit his "brilliant" Windows 8 plan is a big giant failwhale. If this turns out to be true though Valve really ought to send Ballmer a nice moist delicious cake, after all he'll have done more to get the game devs to leave Windows than anybody as nobody is gonna want to develop for a dead end.

Re:It Means

[Rockoon]

it fatally lacked support for non-IBM devices in the early days...

Indeed. IBM viewed OS/2 as a way to promote PS/2 hardware, and in fact the /2 in each was not a coincidence. It was a common belief not just with IBM but many companies at that time that software was just a necessary feature for moving hardware out the door.

Apple never really gave up that theory and almost died because of it, and if it were not for the emerging portable market they'd still be just a bit player, and now we see again that Android is doing the same thing to them in the portable space that DOS/Windows did to them in the desktop space.

Re:It Means

[DrXym]

OS/2 2.1 onwards were pretty easy to set up on non-IBM hardware. I didn't encounter a machine which didn't work with them. That said, OS/2 had so many other issues that hurt its own chances of success that someone could write an essay on the subject.

Re:It Means

[Greyfox]

Oh, yeah, IBM didn't help, and the attitude inside the company was that PCs were toys and if you wanted to do real computing or real multitasking you'd buy an RS6K and run AIX (At a minimum.) People wanted to run their windows apps, and for a while around the Warp timeframe, it seemed like Microsoft was rolling out new versions of DirectX and other APIs about once a week.

Re:It Means

[Fr33z0r]

That's a shame, I wonder if they fixed it by Warp - I ran that on off-the-shelf components back in 1995 and it was awesome. It could run Windows in a Window no problem, even games would run fine.

I was sad when it died, it was a number of years before I saw another OS handle running an OS within an OS as gracefully as Warp.

Re:It Means

[Anonymous Coward]

It admit that it is a bit embarrassing when people emulate DirectX on top of OpenGL, and make it run faster than native DirectX.

Re:It Means

[drinkypoo]

IBM viewed OS/2 as a way to promote PS/2 hardware, and in fact the /2 in each was not a coincidence.

That sure would have made more sense if a more significant fraction of the PS/2 hardware base could actually run OS/2. There were too many 286s lurking around running one or two DOS apps and the stuff that they normally would have run on a terminal for too long for that to make sense, especially given the enormous cost of the 386-based PS/2 hardware. As well, long before they killed off OS/2 they had killed off the PS/2 name, and were selling PS/ValuePoints. Snicker snort. What POSes.

Re:It Means

[Bearhouse]

Yup, they fixed that with warp but it was too late

Re:It Means

[Bearhouse]

Hmmmm, apart from printers, modems, network cards etc...yes

But I suspect you are referring more to the marketing issues, in which case I agree totally.

Re:It Means

[Bearhouse]

Nah, real men reckoned the minimum was a 9370. What a POS!

Re:It Means

[DrXym]

I don't profess to have tried every brand of PC, but I had no trouble installing OS 2.1 and Warp on random OEM boxes in work and at home that I tried.

Luckily..

[Anonymous Coward]

..there's MonoGame.

DirectX is fine

[TonTonKill]

Microsoft is not getting rid of DirectX.

Re:DirectX is fine

[Rogerborg]

So, were they lying then, or are they lying now? Either way, we seem to be getting different story from anonymous PR bunnies in unspecified divisions.

Me, I get the vague impression that Uncle Fester is losing his grip, and that Microsoft's System Lords are preparing to carve mini-empires out of the wreckage when it comes off the rails.

Re:DirectX is fine

[Sulphur]

So, were they lying then, or are they lying now? Either way, we seem to be getting different story from anonymous PR bunnies in unspecified divisions.

Me, I get the vague impression that Uncle Fester is losing his grip, and that Microsoft's System Lords are preparing to carve mini-empires out of the wreckage when it comes off the rails.

Is that PHBs?

Re:DirectX is fine

[rk]

If there were a "+1, SG-1 Reference" mod, you would've gotten it.

Unlikely

[RenHoek]

It's very unlikely that Microsoft will abandon DirectX. It is afterall the reason why most games for the PC are Windows-exclusive. If they OpenGL becomes king, porting to Linux will be a lot easier. Windows will be dumped by a lot of people whose only reason to keep a Windows desktop is gaming.

Re:Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem was never porting to Linux. The problem was supporting Linux. Saying your game supports Linux is like saying your cute dog collar supports "dogs": people will be pissed because they can't put it on their enourmous St. Bernards. And some nerds are going to complain because they can't put the collar on their bear.

Re:Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

People tend to forget the DirectX is more than Direct3D. They will retain Direct3D but pretty much the entire rest of DirectX (e.g. DirectInput, DirectPlay, DirectSound) has already been deprecated in favor of APIs that are also used by the Xbox 360 (XInput, WinSock, XAudio2).

Re:Unlikely

[Pinky's Brain]

Sure, but every PC game sold is potentially one less XBOX game sold, some forces in Microsoft actively work against PC gaming ... the Windows 8 team hard selling the upgrade with a new windows 8 exclusive DirectX version and Windows 8 exclusive games isn't helping either (with Windows 7 they had the courtesy of porting the new driver model to Vista, courtesy is lost on them now).

Re:Unlikely

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, I'm one of those people who has Windows largely for gaming. But, look, I bought Windows 7 some time back, and many years before that, I bought XP. Does MS really care about the market of people who only have Windows so we can play games? I mean, if we're in a position where we'd be interested in switching to some linux if we could game there, then we're probably capable enough to be upgrading the Windows boxes we have, rather than throwing them out and buying a new one (and therefore buying a new copy of Windows).

Do linux-inclined desktop PC gamers really spend that much money on Windows? I don't anticipate buying another copy for some years. And I think that vast majority of less hardcore PC gamers are probably perfectly happy with Windows, and wouldn't switch even if all the games *were* openGL.

Re:Unlikely

[Common Joe]

Unlikely? I don't know. They're smoking some pretty potent stuff in Redmond right now.

Re:Unlikely

[VirtualJWN]

windows8 is tanking badly this is the ONLY reason they would even consider abandoning it. If Microsoft thought they even had a chance of maintaining their long held monopoly, they would keep DirectX and FUD attack OpenGL. DirectX ceased being relevant to future about 10 years ago anyway. Plus, it has NEVER been on par with what OpenGL can do (i.e. run on virtually anything) and being extensible. OpenGL is and always has been the future.

This actually only relates to XNA

[SpazmodeusG]

As anyone who deals in this knows XNA is a dead end and DirectX most certainly is not. They are retiring the XNA part of the XNA/DirectX MVP.

Link

"if the email is valid and authoritative"

[eksith]

Did we learn nothing from the x-surface debacle?

Nebulous spokestalk alert!

[game kid]

One thing that the NBC Universal--Comcast thing taught me was that "inaccurate" != "false". (They said news about the merger was "inaccurate". They merged anyway.) Here we go again.

In short, I'm not convinced that either system will survive the axe, and you should probably just polish your HTML5-optimized-for-Metro-or-whatever-it's-called-now (or OpenGL?) skills if you still want to make games for Windows:

1. They never reversed the actual decision to retire the two from the award program.
2. They did not mention that XNA or its MVP award...status...program...thing would not be axed.
3. "Microsoft is actively investing in DirectX as the unified graphics foundation for our key platforms, including Xbox 360, Windows Phone and Windows. DirectX is evolving and will continue to evolve. For instance, right now we’re investing in some very cool graphics code authorizing [sic] technology in Visual Studio." - it's great that they're still developing it now, before April 1, 2014, but what about after?
4. "We have absolutely no intention of stopping innovation with DirectX, and you can quote me on that." - this didn't start because we thought would somehow "[stop] innovation with DirectX" (a concept as nebulous as fuck, because they could be taking it to mean that, e.g., they'd try to actively prevent people from using a newly-deprecated API, instead of just deprecating it). No, we wondered whether they'd stop developing, supporting, and maintaining the platform after the stated date, aaaaand *crickets and a coquí or two*.

So will both die on April 2014? In the words of $got_talent_judge, "I vote Yes."

Re:Nebulous spokestalk alert!

[atomicxblue]

So, is DirectX "continu[ing] to evolve" or is it "DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology"? It sounds like Microsoft is speaking out of both sides of their mouths.

Re:Nebulous spokestalk alert!

[Anonymous Coward]

Coquí?? R u Puertorrican?

Re:Nebulous spokestalk alert!

[Anonymous Coward]

Only a slashdotter could go through enough mental gymnastics to take a clear statement like that and try to contort it to mean the exact opposite of what he said. Good work.

Re:Nebulous spokestalk alert!

[shutdown -p now]

In short, I'm not convinced that either system will survive the axe, and you should probably just polish your HTML5-optimized-for-Metro-or-whatever-it's-called-now (or OpenGL?) skills if you still want to make games for Windows.

The official way to make Metro games for Win8 and WinRT is ... wait for it ... Direct3D (and C++).

April Fools

[Anonymous Coward]

"As a result, effective April 1, 2014 XNA/DirectX will be fully retired from the MVP Award Program..."

Yeah right !

This is not relevant

[Anonymous Coward]

http://ventspace.wordpress.com/ XNA is dead anyway ...

Good news for Linux

[luxifr]

If MS eventually ditches DirectX completely and with Steam coming to Linux, in a few years Linux could improve on desktop market share substantially. I mean: Gaming is THE major reason so many people still use windows. I sure wouldn't use windows if it wasn't the os that runs all of my games.

Re:Good news for Linux

[Rockoon]

I use Linux, but a spend more time in Windows and its not just because of games. If Linux natively ran something as good as Visual Studio + C# + MSDN, I'd be running Linux far more often. I don't have the time or the patience to exhaustively sift through API references any longer.

Re:Good news for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

What? Haven't your heard of Eclipse and Java?

Re:Good news for Linux

[Rockoon]

What? Haven't your heard of Eclipse and Java?

Yeah, and if it wasn't java...

I like the ability to use pointers when they are advantageous.

Re:Good news for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

If Linux natively ran something as good as Visual Studio + C# + MSDN, I'd be running Linux far more often. I don't have the time or the patience to exhaustively sift through API references any longer.

I haven't used Visual Studio for a few years it's true, and I'm sure it's improved since I used it, but the code completion and navigation in Eclipse and Netbeans based IDEs is as good as any version of VS I've ever used. Code completion provides a list of all the matching methods and function calls as well as displaying the API reference document for each method as it gets the focus. You can navigate up and down the class hierarchy, follow method calls and list the locations of method usage. It's been like that for years. I do remember when Eclipse and Netbeans lagged VS in turns of code navigation and completion (which I assume is what you where talking about when you mentioned you don't have the time and patience to sift through API references) but those days are long over.
I use Eclipse with MinGW when porting my C++/OpenGL/OpenAL code to Windows. Eclipse with CDT is definitely good enough for me.
Anyway, real men have the API reference memorized.
Not me unfortunately. I'd be fucked without code completion these days.
Originally I was going to go all spider monkey on your ass when I read you complaining about API references.
I spend my day job sifting through the comment free, de-compiled code of the huge lump of proprietary shit that makes up the framework of our system. Thank fuck they didn't obfuscate it so at least the names are meaningful. After years of customer complaints the vendor is slowly releasing the API documentation for the sections they deem us lowly users worthy of witnessing. I think they've covered about 50% so far. I'm guessing the reason it's taking so long is because they were hoping they'd never have to make their shitty API public. I can totally relate to that. :)
Anyway, API references?? API references?? Luxury!!!

Re:Good news for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Or kDevelop, or CodeBlocks, Netbeans, or a few others. Define what it is you actually want, then do some searching. I've found kDevelop, while it has some quirks, is really a lot like Visual Studio. It has all the fun stuff like syntax highlighting, autocompletion, those "helper bubbles" via doxygen (or something like it). Even better, many of the good IDE's in linux have starter templates that act as a simple Hello World for whatever you are looking to do. The default CodeBlocks install has dozens of them (from your distro's repo, Ubuntu has them at least). They all have the project definition where you set your language and compiler/linker/interpreter/whateverelseyouneed. If you have used or tried some of those, say so before saying what you're looking fore doesn't exist.

Re:Good news for Linux

[spike_gran]

I use Linux, but a spend more time in Windows and its not just because of games. If Linux natively ran something as good as Visual Studio + C# + MSDN, I'd be running Linux far more often. I don't have the time or the patience to exhaustively sift through API references any longer.

Absolutely. I spend a lot of time coding using the whole C + EMACS + Autotools + 100 random barely documented libraries that have been cobbled together to form the GNOME GNU Linux API. I care about software freedom. But Visual Studio and C# and MSDN is just so clean and complete and well documented. It really improves productivity. One day coding on Visual Studio == 3 days coding in C on EMACS.

Re:Good news for Linux

[mic0e]

It's funny how C# and Java fanboys constantly fight each other while their languages are really the same crap.

Re:Good news for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

If MS eventually ditches DirectX completely and with Steam coming to Linux, in a few years Linux could improve on desktop market share substantially. I mean: Gaming is THE major reason so many people still use windows. I sure wouldn't use windows if it wasn't the os that runs all of my games.

You might be forgetting the vast multitudes who care not a whit for games but use Windows because their enterprise is built on it.

Re:Good news for Linux

[shutdown -p now]

Try Qt Creator. Granted, C++ is not C#, but you can use a subset of it that's close enough (and Qt largely does just that); and, as far as C++ IDEs go, Creator is pretty good. Qt docs are also very good.

Re:Good news for Linux

[petteyg359]

Well, the fix for that is obvious. Use vim, silly. :)

Re:Good news for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever consider that eclipse (and netbeans) can be used - quite effectively - for C & C++?

The big problem with OpenGL

[tlambert]

The big problem with OpenGL is that the shaders are not guaranteed to run in bounded time. DirectX doesn't have that problem, and the OpenGL emulation layer on top of DirectX unrolls the shaders, and for the ones which won't run in bounded time, just throws them away.

When Chrome implements OpenGL on Windows, it runs it through its own code which does the same thing and preflights it, then renders the OpenGL which will run linearly and in bounded time via DirectX.

The Linux and Mac OS X versions hand the OpenGL to the user space renderer or to the kernel-based renderer, respectively -- there are significant performance advantages to OpenGL on Mac OS X compared to Linux because of this; this ends up being most apparent on portable devices, which have a limited memory copy bandwidth (read: ARM devices), which is why Android doesn't directly use the Linux graphics model, apart from the inability to use binary drivers in kernel space due to EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL().

But both the Linux and Mac OS X OpenGL renderers take the shaders without preflighting them, as is done on Windows when converting to DirectX calls, and so it's possible to crash the user space driver on Linux, or crash the Mac OS X kernel, on Mac OS (the disadvantage you get in exchange for the reduced copy overhead relative to Linux).

I tried unsuccessfully for several months to try and convince the Chrome graphics guys to run the preflight portion of the Direct X converter on Linux and Mac OS to prevent these crashes on these platforms, to no avail. It'd be more processing, but no more than is already done on Windows, in exchange for a significant improvement in stability for OpenGL/OpenGL ES/WebGL/NaCl on both platforms, which is probably worth the additional processing cost, given that the bottleneck is copying, not processing, on the portable platforms. There are cycles to burn on the desktop systems, even if you'd prefer not to burn them, it's probably worth it for the stability.

In any case, a lot of game developers try for a lot of effects with shaders, and most of them are more concerned with the visual appeal, rather than in running in bounded time and not eventually crashing the system. DirectX protects them where OpenGL doesn't -- except on the Windows platforms they use for development, and that doesn't help get these games stable and running on Mac OS X or Linux, which is what you'd hoe the portability of OpenGL code would have bought you.

Re:The big problem with OpenGL

[Hatta]

The big problem with OpenGL is that the shaders are not guaranteed to run in bounded time. DirectX doesn't have that problem

Has Microsoft solved the halting problem?

Re:The big problem with OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

The big problem with OpenGL is that the shaders are not guaranteed to run in bounded time. DirectX doesn't have that problem

Has Microsoft solved the halting problem?

Why does it seems like the majority of people who come out of CS programs misunderstand the halting problem?

The halting problem states that it's impossible to predict the halting behavior of every piece of code. It does *not* state that it's impossible to predict the halting behavior of any *specific* piece of code. In fact, there are a large number of programs where it's trivially easy to predict the halting behavior:

int func(int x, int y) { return x + y; } # Guaranteed to halt for all values of x and y, given sensible (wraparound, truncation) values of overflow behavior

In fact, there's a large and thriving industry ("Real Time Programming") where such halting and runtime guarantees are bread-and-butter. (My favorite quick explanation of real time programming: When this function is called, the valve must close 700+-50 ms later, or the chemical processing plant will explode.)

I wouldn't say it's easy, but guaranteeing halting and run time behavior of code is possible. You just have to be willing to change "if it hangs, it's a bug" to "if we can't prove it halts, it's a bug", be conservative on what your willing to be able to do (e.g. no prime factorization prior to deciding if the valve can close), and have employers who are willing to pay for it.

Re:The big problem with OpenGL

[Hatta]

I didn't come out of a CS program, and I don't think I misunderstand the halting problem. I simply didn't add "or are shaders not turing complete?" What sort of trade offs are there in disallowing shaders that are too complex to prove that they halt?

Re:The big problem with OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

The big problem with OpenGL is that the shaders are not guaranteed to run in bounded time. DirectX doesn't have that problem, and the OpenGL emulation layer on top of DirectX unrolls the shaders, and for the ones which won't run in bounded time, just throws them away.

They've managed to solve the halting problem? Personally, I find having the power of a full Turing-complete language for controlling graphics hardware exciting. It is a dangerous tool, but the potential is too great to ignore.

Re:The big problem with OpenGL

[tlambert]

I didn't come out of a CS program, and I don't think I misunderstand the halting problem. I simply didn't add "or are shaders not turing complete?" What sort of trade offs are there in disallowing shaders that are too complex to prove that they halt?

Trade off A: Allow them to run, and have your graphics stack crash in user space or have it crash the kernel in Mac OS X because the graphics stack appears unresponsive to the keep-alive requests which are periodically sent by the system watchdogs to verify that the graphics stack is prepared to handle more work items to permit the applications to make forward progress.

Trade off B: Don't allow the shader to run; you lose some effect from the shader, but your system remains stable and your application makes forward progress, as intended. Since this is the default for Windows, your game looks more like a Windows game than it would have otherwise.

may directX die screaming

[Kaitiff]

M$ derailed the graphics industry with their strongarm tactics a long time ago. There were already really good graphics api's when directx was shoved bodily down the throats of developers. The only way DX would have been acceptable is if it would have been available to all platforms, not just windows. OpenGL would have/will open gaming up across almost every platform available now. I keep mentioning games because that was where I was always most involved and interested, but having a fully developed and matured opengl would have sped up the adoption use of 3d acceleration on the desktop etc on multiple platforms as well. Put a stake in it's heart, chop off it's head and burn the body!

Re:may directX die screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny thing is that you're not even trolling. Your posts reads like something I would write to make you FOSStards look like idiots. You people really do think MS should port .NET and DirectX to linux, support it, offer it free of charge, and release all the source code. What would you expect after that?

OpenGL was stagnating the graphics industry. Direct3D pushed innovation. OpenGL took so long to catch up, even Carmack himself gave up on it long ago. Microsoft didn't "shove" anything down anyone's throats. Developers chose it because it was superior.

I thought you were trolling until I saw you posted logged in with a low UID. Hilarious. I bet you 3D print Stallman's dick and shove it up your ass, don't you?

Re:may directX die screaming

[Dunge]

It kinda make sense that DirectX is Windows only. And It's much more advanced than OpenGL in my opinion. You are clearly talking out of your ass.

April 1, 2014

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the date included in the announcement. This was possibly posted just as a strange joke.

'Evolving'

[smittyoneeach]

XNA and DirectX are no longer evolving

For these years, I had operated under the assumption that source code was edited & compiled.
Gosh, the stuff you learn on /.

Re:'Evolving'

[VortexCortex]

XNA and DirectX are no longer evolving

For these years, I had operated under the assumption that source code was edited & compiled. Gosh, the stuff you learn on /.

You jest, but as a Cybernetician, I think that evolving could be the right word when it comes to Microsoft. They could be using genetic programming from what we've seen of their leaked sources, it smacks of natural selection. Dead sections of DNA (code). Vestigial features left in because no one knows what might be using it. Off-by-one mutations (errors) everywhere, that'll either spawn more bugs (features) to fix them, or be removed from the gene pool (patched) if they prove fatal.

It's almost as if they just started out with full on randomized opcodes and literals, then apply genetic programming techniques over millions of billions of iterations to get windows to it's current state; That is: Looking like AOL from the 90's...

I thought that trait was gone from the genome, turns out it's a recessive gene...

Re:'Evolving'

[smittyoneeach]

No.

Their migrating to the ms store model

[BlueCoder]

I'll say it again. They are in a completely new ball game.

Don't be surprised if they don't abandon the windows code altogether and adopt Linux or BSD code. I can even see they selling the windows base or spinning it off with it's own company and keeping a big portion of the stock.

All they need is make an API for a GUI for devices and hardware that can run on a kernel/platform. Then they focus on developing a device ecosystem and taking their 1/3 commission from developers selling in their app store. Basically adopt the Apple model and compete with them. You go all Apple, or Google, or Microsoft; kind of like investing in cordless power tools.

Imagine if Microsoft redirected legion of internal programmers to generating apps!

Alternative:

Microsoft is just abandoning Windows and starting over with a new OS or three from scratch. They then no longer need to worry about compatibility which is what bloats Windows. A Windows reboot if you will and maybe with a new name. 30 years of compatabilty is irelevent now with emulation now possible. Just reboot the code base every ten years.

Oh, Microsoft

[conquistadorst]

What jerks. I don't think I've ever seen such a large company do such a phenomenal job at shunning its existing developer base. Looks like pretty much everything they've introduced over the past decade and a half is getting dropped like it's hot. I guess I should be getting ready to get back into Java or just straight up C++ again? hah I guess it shows that Balmer was never a developer. I miss Billy, blood of my blood!

Re:Oh, Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess it shows that Balmer was never a developer. I miss Billy, blood of my blood!

Fair point, but Bill was just as regular at releasing, radically modifying and dumping APIs as Steve.
Who's going to upgrade to the latest version if the old stuff still works?
Though to be fair, the open source world hasn't exactly stayed still either. Most APIs seem to follow the creation, modification, extinction life-cycle.
It seems like every couple of years I even have to modify my old C++ code just to keep it compiling nicely with each new iteration of the ISO standard.

April Fools?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone notice that the alleged end date is April 1, 2014?

So steam is right...

[higuita]

windows/xbox gaming is going to a dead end monopoly, controlled by Microsoft.

they are probably releasing new (expensive) tools, full of MS controls and checks (DRM) with their apps store, so all new games must use their store... and paying MS more and more.

As a side "feature", it will probably also break the wine compatibility for new games during the next several months/few years

Most likely

[TheSkepticalOptimist]

Microsoft is continuing their current trend of re-inventing the wheel and making everything different, yet the same. For instance Windows RT, the UI development framework, is strikingly similar to WPF, albeit with some strange and head scratching changes that make sense to only that one guy at Microsoft. I would imagine that Microsoft is probably going to re-brand DirectX or XNA into some unified framework that has a Metro-y Windows 8 like feel to it, maybe merging development across PC, mobile and consoles into on consistent API, which is different, yet strikingly similar to XNA or DirectX.

Its just part of Microsoft's current strategy to piss off about as many people as possible, consumers, investors, developers, content creators, Google, etc.

That's what happens with propaganda

[Dunge]

With every articles here of Valve turning to Linux some ans fanboy who think OpenGL is better the general opinion switched and Microsoft got brainwashed too. That's sad because DirectX is one of the very best work of technology that exist currently.

DirectX != Direct3D

[flimflammer]

Something people need to understand is the writing has been on the wall for DirectX for some time now. This is not unexpected news to those of us invested in the platform. What I interpreted from this is that DirectX isn't going to evolve (and that XNA is effectively dead, but we've known this for a long time), but that doesn't mean Direct3D, what most people tend to consider when they think of DirectX, is going anywhere. There will always be a need for high performance graphics rendering and it isn't likely going to be OpenGL on the Windows platform.

They've been turning Direct3D into a typical windows component without any extra special treatment since 2011 when they merged it into the Windows SDK. It's just one small piece in the cog of platform technologies.

I can't say I'm pleased with this turn of events, but I can't say I'm particularly surprised, either.

Totally!

[cablepokerface]

And besides; has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?

ANGLE

[paugq]

The performance hit is small enough for Chrome, Qt and other projects to use ANGLE to translate Direct3D to OpenGL:

https://code.google.com/p/angleproject/

Betteridge's Law of Headlines...

[mic0e]

no, it won't phase out. It's not like Microsoft would want to commit suicide in the entertainment sector - DirectX is the only huge barrier that prevents porting games to Linux/OSX/Playstation.

This!

[istartedi]

When Win8 was first described, I posted a comment along the lines of, "If I wanted an Apple product I'd already have one". At the time I got modded into oblivion though. Go figure.

Re:This!

[rochrist]

Windows 8 is far more hideous than ANY Apple product. Apple does not try and turn their desktop computers into tablets.

Re:This!

[CronoCloud]

Apple does not try and turn their desktop computers into tablets.

No, that's the Gnome and Unity teams jobs

Re:This!

[Pino Grigio]

Here's how you work with Windows 8 on the Desktop:

(1) Start your computer
(2) Log in
(3) Click the DESKTOP icon
(4) Use what is essentially a slightly better Windows 7
(5) 8 hours later log off/shut down your computer

For the desktop user, the `tablet experience' is almost entirely absent.

Re:This!

[jimbo]

Perhaps because theyre so different.

The OS X UI tries to be functional and pleasant but without getting in the users way or stepping on their toes. They also use distinct UI elements that are easy to recognize. They're not perfect but at least these are the things they've always tried to do.

The Windows UI have increasingly been trying to tell the user what to do and how to think to an increasing extent, to the point of taking over the screen and stipulating that we shall all do things the same way. They also flatten the UI elements, making them indisguinsable from the web at times and sometimes it's nonintuitive what can be interacted with. In addition some things gets so "user friendly" that they now confuse advanced users.

Having said that I can work fine with both. I never met a UI I couldn't work with. Well, Microsoft Bob was one...
My only fear is that Windows 8 applications will stop offering proper Desktop versions. Time will tell.

Re:This!

[hairyfeet]

Except that because the desktop is merely an "app" running on top of metro you have Metro sucking down resources no matter if you ever touch the thing, you have control panel settings splattered between the metro settings and classic control panel, and that thanks to their anti-piracy crap things that used to be simple like making a restore CD that actually restores the OS (as opposed to just bootstrapping a hidden image) on the drive is damned near impossible.....but yeah, other than that its just Windows 7 /rolls eyes/.

If you haven't seen it I urge you to watch this video that was highlighted the other day right here which explains better than I ever could why Win 8 just don't cut it. I would only add that when discussing Win 8 on several tech sites i found techs, that have NO problem with the funkier UIs in Linux or just running in CLI, all of them had trouble doing basic tasks and after more than 6 months running it most couldn't do even half what they could in 7 on 8, MSFT just doesn't explain shit or give anybody any real context clues in this OS, its just confusing and poorly designed.

Direct2/3D is part of the Windows SDK now

[shofmann]

Direct2D and Direct3D are not being abandoned, they've been moved into the Windows 8 SDK along with other APIs that have replaced components of DirectX such as XAudio2. Microsoft is just retiring obsolete, deprecated, and unsupported APIs like DirectSound (replaced by XAudio2), DirectMusic, and DirectInput. More information is available at Where is the DirectX SDK?.

April 1st joke? Ponies!!!

[taupter]

Well, according to the article, the changes will be made effective on April 1st. So it's an announcement about an April 1st joke way before the date. Good try.

Because new xbox silly.

[Anonymous Coward]

XNA is dead because its for PowerPC, new Xbox is x86, no need for specialized tools when tons already exist. DirectX will continue to be supported, just not XNA for PowerPC.

Loss of MVP support does not mean death

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft killed off the device driver MVPs a year or two ago, because after a re-org the business manager that ended up owning it didn't want to fund it (which was a pittance, really). I suspect the same thing has happened with DirectX/XNA

git

[perles]

They just anounced they are adopting GIT. Next step is to anounce they will be adopting Linux as their OS kernel. Because DirectX is not compatible with Linux they will be ditching it.