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AMD Says There Will Be No DirectX 12 — Ever

Posted by Soulskill on from the pulling-a-reverse-firefox dept.

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?"

2 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. Re:We did it! by multi+io · · Score: 0, Troll

    [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.

    They provided it with several hundred million new potential users, by building and selling the most successful (by number of users) platform in history[1] that uses OpenGL as a primary API, thus creating a huge incentive for developers to write OpenGL-based software. I think this does deserve credit.

    [1] at least it was at the time; has since been overtaken by Android (which probably wouldn't have enjoyed the same success against WinMobile it it hadn't had iOS to copy from)

  2. Re:We did it! by tlhIngan · · Score: 1, Troll

    Not even close. Apple ditched ADB to standardize on USB for keyboards and mice, and that's about it. ADB was a crappy apple-only thing that nobody missed.

    It did maybe potentially slightly encourage PC makers to eventually drop PS/2 ports for keyboards and mice but that's about it.

    USB was widely available on PCs before apple standardized on it with the first imacs. USB PC peripherals were widely available for it -- cameras, pre-ipod mp3 players, scanners, printers, etc.

    PCs were just late to the USB party with keyboards and mice because Windows 95 didn't support USB out of the box until "Win95 service release 2" and you often had to install chipset drivers. So while you could use a USB keyboard and mouse with Windows 95 "eventually", you couldn't reliably setup windows 95 with a usb keyboard and mouse. Not to mention that if you went into BIOS the usb keyboard likely didn't work.

    So it took a lot longer to dump the PS/2 slots and switch over to USB entirely.

    But -other- then keyboards and mice, USB was widely available on PCs well before Apple committed to it.

    Actually, ADB, despite being the APPLE desktop bus, was used in quite a number of places. Like in many UNIX workstations (Suns, HPs, and such). There were also some strange things that hooked to it as well.

    As for USB - yes it was widely available on PCs. But almost no one used them - USB peripherals were horrendously expensive. I remember seeing a generic PS/2 keyboard for $20. Its USB equivalent, still equally crappy, was $50. Likewise, most other USB peripherals were similarly overpriced compared to the legacy version.

    Heck, if you wanted to hate on Apple, you'd hate on them for going completely USB - because USB cost more, plain and simple, and there was very little USB stuff out there - keyboards, mice (try finding a replacement then for the freaking puck...) and USB floppy drives.

    Heck, a lot of pre-iPod players used parallel ports and serial ports to transfer data alongside USB. Of course, at USB 1.1 speeds, it took a little while.

    Oh, and Win95 OSR2 came out in 1996 with USB support in 1997. Win98 had USB HID support built in (but mass storage required drivers). The original iMac came out in 1998. Probably around the same time as Win98. It's considered that the iMac sparked the whole USB revolution where everyone post-iMac started making all sorts of USB things, rather than let it languish as an underused port suitable only for joysticks and keyboards/mice.

    Windows did not get full USB as we know it today until Windows 2000/Windows ME, It was actually Microsoft holding back USB support (I think even Microsoft was putting effort into support IEEE1394/FireWire).