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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?"
So what, are they going to skip 12 and go to 13? They've done it before, with DirectX 4, so it's not a new idea. Maybe 12 turned out to be a huge mess.
I don't see DirectX being discontinued in favor of OpenGL/OpenAL/etc, since the GUIs in their latest products and frameworks all seem to use DirectX to some extent.
(asbestos underpants on) Or maybe they switched to FOSS-style versioning, and just don't see anything new that would demand a major version number. We're going to see abominations like DirectX 11.1.25.4-r6.3 for the rest of time.
Microsoft just re-names it; and everyone'll be using DirectY-2014 or Vista Display API or Direct-ME.
You must have missed this one: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/10/29/154207/valve-linux-better-than-windows-8-for-gaming
What exactly does "top quality game bundles registered to the serial number of the card" mean? Have I missed something else in this conversation?
Yes, it is multiplatform, but from a developers perspective, DirectX gives a nice SDK with documentation, samples, debugging tools, detailed error messages, and produce a clean code. OpenGL is like a "here is the header files, sort yourself out".
OpenGL was multithreading capable from the get go. DirectX until 11.2 was single threaded only.
DirectX uses a very different object graph proposition that puts the scene as the major component and for most indoor FPS, that is an easier concept, but those choices mean taking it outside where the scene (in a 3D construction context) is not the primary container for the "world" realised, you've got a much worse system to program. OGL was much better at the open world 3D and a little worse at the enclosed box-room preferred for early FPSs.
DirectX development was only slightly easier, and only for a small segment of what is being done.
When it comes to games, certainly, but not so when it comes to 3d applications, atleast not 3d content creation applications where OpenGL is king and directx is seldom used. Maya, XSI, Modo, Houdini, Lightwave, Mudbox, Blender, and more only support OpenGL, the only ones I can think of which supports DirectX are Autocad (directx only), 3ds Max (directx, opengl) and 3d Coat (directx, opengl).
> why spend money on your own API when someone will do the work for you?
Lock-in? It's not like the first few version of direct X were better than the current version of opengl.
OpenGL existed before DirectX. So, it's not like DirectX was ever actually needed anyway, other than for Vendor Lock-in.