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AMD Says There Will Be No DirectX 12 — Ever
mikejuk writes "This is a strange story. AMD Vice President of Global Channel Sales Roy Taylor has said there will be no DirectX12 at any time in the future. In an interview with German magazine Heise.de, Taylor discussed the new trend for graphics card manufacturers to release top quality game bundles registered to the serial number of the card. One of the reasons for this, he said, is that the DirectX update cycle is no longer driving the market. 'There will be no DirectX 12. That's it.' (Google translation of German original.) Last January there was another hint that things weren't fine with DirectX when Microsoft sent an email to its MVPs saying, 'DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology.' That statement was quickly corrected, but without mentioning any prospect of DirectX 12. So, is this just another error or rumor? Can we dismiss something AMD is basing its future strategy on?"
Only Microsoft uses DirectX, everyone else on the planet uses OpenGL.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
actually it did. more gamers use OpenGL today then Direct X
OpenGL was crap in the 90's but Apple, nvidia and a few others did the work to make it a viable gaming API
why spend money on your own API when someone will do the work for you?
I think you misunderstand what that means. It means directX has moved from a versioned API with new features all the time, to a stable API that they feel safe tying to the OS and pushing updates for through windows update. It's like when an open source project has reached the point where its no longer worth it to pull the latest from git. It's "done".
Only Microsoft uses DirectX, everyone else on the planet uses OpenGL.
Except, you know, most top-selling games and other 3D applications on the market which all use DirectX - even if some also use OpenGL.
Even if the numbers don't keep ticking up, as long as it is the preferred graphics/multimedia API for Windows and XBox, it will stay relevant. Discounting it and saying the other common option 'won' is only demonstrating your lack of understanding and versatility as a developer.
When it comes down to it, OGL and DX are about the same thing, just with different platform-specific options. At some point, both will inevitably cease to progress. Given MS's propensity to push toward tablet-style computing and discontinue functional, widely-loved software, I am not surprised they cut out of the race first.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
more gamers use OpenGL today then Direct X
[citation needed]
Actually, if you're going to give credit to someone for OGL, Apple is about the LAST company you should be thanking. Other than the fact that OGL was the only graphics API that worked on Mac, Apple has done ZERO to help promote, regulate, or stabilize OpenGL in the market. They have not contributed useful code, or participated in the ARB in any meaningful way.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
what's wrong with 7?
I agree, most top games are primarily DirectX. Even if a game supports both, usually it will opt for DirectX if available.
DirectX was kind of an after thought addition to Windows anyhow, when they shut out the low level access that was being used previously for game graphics. I suppose that is where the name "Direct" came from, to emphasize it was the replacement that gave them similar direct access.
Hopefully this will shift things towards OpenGL and we can see more+better frameworks in more languages available for OpenGL.
On the other hand, you hit on potentially another reason for the decline of DirectX, and possibly OpenGL: the "demise of the PC". I do NOT believe the PC will die off anytime soon, but I can't deny that there are alot of casual users that no longer have any desire to put themselves through dealing with a PC, especially if they sit in front of one all day at work. A declining user base will mean commercial efforts shifted elsewhere, which won't be a good thing for the rest of us PC users.
Agreed. They're going to pull a Dx10 - Vista. Windows 8 was a COLOSSAL failure, so just like Vista, now they have to force the market to give them money.
So Windows 9 is going to have Dx12 baked in, and it'll be called "GraphicsNew" instead of "DirectX" so we can't say "Hey, why teh fuck won't you release Dx12 for Windows7?" like we did with XP and Dx9/10. "Oh, sorry, but GraphicsNew is too fancy for poor Windows7, its completely different from DirectX!"
Yeah fucking right.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
more gamers use OpenGL today then Direct X
[citation needed]
Well if you're counting things like playing Angry Birds on iOS/Android, then almost certainly yes. Perhaps not in complexity or number of hardcore gamers, but in screen time I think yes. There's not a whole lot of games that are PC/Xbox exclusives anymore, and if you're doing any other platform you're probably doing OpenGL. It's probably only a matter of time before game makers tell Microsoft they'd rather code to one graphics system rather than two, and that one won't be DirectX. The world has changed drastically over the last 5 years in this respect, people game on smart phones and tablets not just consoles and PCs anymore.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Exactly, we saw the same thing with DirectX 9 which went from A-C and DirectX 10 and 10.1, MSFT just doesn't jump numbers like they did in the past, which you'd THINK everybody would be happy about? Isn't it the FOSS way to only change the version number for a major release, and do minor releases for bug fixes and minor features?
Meh if MSFT doesn't fire Ballmer I figure they'll be dead in 5 anyway, they have been flip flopping all over the place, Win 8/RT is a flop, its been a trainwreck for the past couple of years. Personally I'm glad about DirectX, that means when I switch out my HD4850 for an HD7770 in a month or two it should last as long or longer than the HD4850, can't beat 3 years on a $60 card.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It was never about that. Professional rendering application sometimes render very complex scenes and will get under the refresh rate of the monitor even with top of the line hardware. To answer you question, it's useless to have more frames than your refresh rate. Some may think the internal game action is more fluid (mostly because of CS1.6) but today's game physic simulation is fixed and not tied to the rendering engine anyway.
OK, then tell me why modern OpenGL drivers can provide the equivalent of all DirectX 11 features on Windows XP? The implementation of DirectX 10 and newer may not have been portable to XP, but the interface would have been. There are even libraries that translate DX10/DX11 to OpenGL!
http://www.moonlight3d.eu/
Several objects may be sent to the GPU at the same time. Sending data to the GPU typically causes a context switch, which is expensive. DX11 gets around this by letting each worker thread write to its own command queue, then the primary context thread will notify the GPU when to read from the command queues. This effectively allows communications to the GPU to be batched instead of tossing around the GPU context between threads, which incurs a lot of overhead and is serialized.
Because the GPU is notified by the primary context, there is effectively one context switch to offload a lot of data. The driver knows where these command queues are and will read from them.
DX11 even allows the CPU to help the GPU. GPUs are great for certain types of calculations, but not as great for others. DICE had a nice blog many years ago about how they can send data to the GPU to be processed for one stage, then stream the data from the GPU as it completes, back to the CPU. The CPU then starts working on the data one one 16x16 tile at a time and streams the changes back to the GPU as each tile is completed.
They were able to keep the CPU and GPU well-loaded, while increasing efficiency and reducing memory pressure by data streaming.
They had the classic latency vs throughput issue. Because each stage was only dependent on the prior stage, they were able to keep streaming input into the engine to keep both the GPU and CPU busy. While the CPU was busy crunch special pixel shaders that ran slowly on the GPU, the GPU would be working on physics on the upcoming scene. etc etc
DX11 effectively made the rendering pipeline modular and customization, allowing data to be shifted back-and-forth, but hid the latency by allowing the stages to be done asynchronously.
OpenGL doesn't care about latency vs throughput because professional rendering does not have a latency issue, like video-games do.