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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?"

40 of 305 comments (clear)

  1. no DirectX 12 by BigMike · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... it only goes to 11

    1. Re:no DirectX 12 by GregC63 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Obviously didn't get the "Spinal Tap" reference...

    2. Re:no DirectX 12 by alexhs · · Score: 4, Funny

      ... it only goes to 11

      Obviously:

      DirectX10
      DirectX11
      DirectX11R2
      ...
      DirectX11R6
      DirectX11R6.1
      DirectX11R6.2
      ...

      --
      I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
  2. We did it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    We did it everyone! OpenGL won, good job everybody. Highest of fives all 'round.

    1. Re:We did it! by ArcadeMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Only Microsoft uses DirectX, everyone else on the planet uses OpenGL.

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    2. Re:We did it! by MacGyver2210 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    3. Re:We did it! by MacGyver2210 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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
    4. Re:We did it! by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

      OpenGL was crap in the 90's but Apple

      Uh, I remember OpenGL being fairly amazing in the 90s. I saw stuff on the O2s that no one else was doing. The 90s were when John Carmack made his famous rants about how much better OpenGL was than DirectX.

      You're probably thinking of the mid 2000s, when OpenGL lost its way and was kind of directionless.....

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    5. Re:We did it! by AaronLS · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:We did it! by Dunge · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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".

    7. Re:We did it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      OpenGL developers said OpenGL is not meant for games, but professional rendering and there is no plan to add multi-threaded rendering to OpenGL as it is mostly useful just for increasing FPS in games.

      A few CPU bound DirectX games had about 98.6% scaling with multi-threading. The reason for the CPU bound performance is mostly the number of objects being rendered. Any time you have lots of objects, you need lots of system calls and general computation.

      OpenGL is pretty much a dead-end for video-games, unless they add threading.

      Before someone says "but OpenGL supports mutil-threading". No it doesn't. It supports multi-threaded worker threads for the drivers, but it does not support multiple threads communicating to the same context. DX11 does and it makes a huge difference.

      I know AMD announced a while back that they were working on a cross-platform driver interface that used command-buffers like DX11 to drastically reduce context switching, while scaling nearly linearly with cores. They were going to have this for Linux first, but I'm not holding my breath for AMD to finish anything for Linux as they keep cutting employees and scrapping projects.

      I am sick of being thread bound for games. 25% cpu load, sub-60fps, and my GPU at 5% load. Really.. wtf? Use the other 75% of my cpu.

    8. Re:We did it! by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Informative

      No. The great Wiki says:
      "A group of seven companies began the development of USB in 1994: Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. "

      --
      W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
    9. Re:We did it! by TheRealMindChild · · Score: 3, Informative

      No it doesn't. It supports multi-threaded worker threads for the drivers, but it does not support multiple threads communicating to the same context

      Nonsense. Unless you change the context of the process in some other thread via wglMakeCurrent/aglSetCurrentContext/glXMakeCurrent, the context is the same in every thread.

      --

      "When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
    10. Re:We did it! by Paul+Jakma · · Score: 3, Informative

      No, Apple developed IEEE 1394. Apple were quite resistant to USB initially.

      --
      I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
    11. Re:We did it! by ceoyoyo · · Score: 3, Informative

      You're mixing up the API and the SDK. Microsoft makes nice DirectX development tools. There are also nice OpenGL development tools. The difference is that DirectX ONLY works on Microsoft platforms so Microsoft is pretty much the only one that makes development tools for it. OpenGL works on everything else so there are lots of manufacturers who make tools.

    12. Re:We did it! by VirtualVirtuality · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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).

    13. Re:We did it! by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 5, Informative

      > while the Playstation and Wii use OpenGL

      FULL STOP. Why do people keep perpetrating these lies??

      I _wrote_ an OpenGL implementation for the Wii on TOP of the Wii's GX library a few years back. The Wii's GX graphics library was definitely _inspired_ by OpenGL, but it is NOT OpenGL.

      We also had a PS2 version of our in-house mini OpenGL which was a WRAPPER for setting the GS registers. (The "GPU" on the PS2 was called "GS" aka Graphics Synthesizer.)

      While the PS3 provides _2_ graphics libraries, LibGCM and PSGL, I am not aware of any _shipped_ games using PSGL.

      Facts. Try checking them.

      --
      The truth worth of a community is not only what you receive from it, but you can also give to it.

    14. Re:We did it! by Kjella · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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
    15. Re:We did it! by jafac · · Score: 3, Funny

      naw. DirectX is TOTALLY cross-platform man! It works on Windows XP, it works on Windows Vista, It works on Windows 7, it works on Windows 8, it works on X-Box, X-Box 360 - and it's gonna be the premier platform for the greatest games coming out on the hottest new platform, the X-Box 720. You guys just don't know what you're talking about and if your'e not developing in DirectX (TM), you're really missing the boat, and I feel sorry for you, because you're going to be left behind in the great new future that's ahead of us all in the world of Microsoft(TM) 3D(TM) Game(TM) Programming(TM). I am not even joking(TM).

      --

      These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
    16. Re:We did it! by Dahamma · · Score: 4, Informative

      That article is wrong - they misinterpreted Sony's comments that the PS4 GPU would have a "DirectX 11.1+ feature set." NOT that it would actually use the DirectX API. (not to mention calling DirectX the "industry standard"... huh??)

    17. Re:We did it! by Bengie · · Score: 5, Informative

      But only one thread may use the context at a time. Multiple threads may use the same context, but not at the same time. DX11 gets around this by having separate command queues for each additional thread, but only one primary context.

      Each thread can write to its own queue without blocking, which OpenGL can not do.

    18. Re:We did it! by Dunge · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    19. Re:We did it! by Bengie · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  3. Let's predict the headlines of the future: by Minwee · · Score: 5, Funny

    July, 2013: AMD Says 'Okay, There Will Be A DirectX 12, But We're Not Supporting It'

    September, 2013: AMD Says DirectX 12 Support By Next Year

    March, 2014: New AMD Cards' Poor DirectX 12 Performance Disappointing

    May, 2014: AMD Boss Complains About Being 'Left Out' Of DirectX 12 Development

    August, 2014: Struggling AMD Says 'Just Wait For DirectX 13!'

    1. Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: by ron_ivi · · Score: 4, Interesting
      My prediction.

      Microsoft just re-names it; and everyone'll be using DirectY-2014 or Vista Display API or Direct-ME.

    2. Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: by Synerg1y · · Score: 3, Insightful

      what's wrong with 7?

    3. Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: by Zaphod+The+42nd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
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    4. Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: by rsmith-mac · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      Dammit. It's been 6 years now and I'm getting tired of this stupid falsehood. Direct3D 10 wasn't limited to Vista for superficial business reasons. There are some extremely important technical factors that required overhauling parts of Windows alongside D3D10.

      The graphics stack below the API was almost entirely overhauled, as per the Windows Display Driver Model. Context switching, multithreading, virtual memory, splitting up the driver into user-mode and kernel-mode components, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. People forget just how broken Direct3D 9 was (and is); it was created at a time when the term "GPU" didn't exist yet and a video card was little more than a texturing unit and a raster op pipeline, and then brutally extended over the years to incorporate functionality like T&L and shaders. The whole thing predicated on a driver model that basically treated the video card as nothing more than a special class of peripheral, whereas with WDDM the GPU was finally promoted to a special class of processor within Windows.

      Direct3D 10 in turn takes advantage of these low-level changes, particularly the changes to memory management. As a result, you can't have D3D10 without WDDM and the modern graphics stack it brings.

      So the only way to bring D3D10 to XP would have been to create a cutthroat version of it that had little in common with Vista's version, or to backport the entire Vista graphics stack to XP, At which point you would have Vista whether you liked it or not, since you just brought over one of the biggest changes in the OS, and all of the bugs, growing pains, and incompatibility that brings.

    5. Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: by gmueckl · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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/
  4. It has to be said by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Informative

    Use OpenGL. It's the platform of every rising device. Furthermore you can get the benefits of open source.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:It has to be said by cybiko123 · · Score: 5, Informative

      But OpenGL right now does not seem to be geared towards games in any way.

      I think some folks at Valve would have something to say about that.

    2. Re:It has to be said by DanTheStone · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You must have missed this one: http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/10/29/154207/valve-linux-better-than-windows-8-for-gaming

  5. Skipping it? by djdanlib · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Skipping it? by nzac · · Score: 3, Funny

      Maybe it is the name. X got stuck on 11 as well.

  6. Do a little research. by Lashat · · Score: 5, Informative

    If memory serves this was also linked in the related article above. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663275.aspx
    DirectX is just becoming part of the Windows 8 SDK. Then presumably the Windows 9, etc, SDKs as well. On until death.

    --
    For every benefit you receive a tax is levied. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
  7. Re:That is a filthy lie by i+kan+reed · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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".

  8. question by asmkm22 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What exactly does "top quality game bundles registered to the serial number of the card" mean? Have I missed something else in this conversation?

    1. Re:question by phizi0n · · Score: 4, Informative

      It doesn't and that's not even what the AMD exec said but the dumb articles are running with an idiotic interpretation of what he said. He was only saying that there is no new version of DX currently in the works so in order to differentiate their products they have to bundle pretty looking games instead of implementing new features because there aren't any new features left for the to add right now.

  9. Re:Did DirectX ever "drive the market"? by MacGyver2210 · · Score: 3, Informative

    developing your own graphical/physics engine is dead

    Interesting. So I should stop coding this new OGL-based engine from scratch because it's easier to use a pre-made engine? Because you think it's 'dead'? Let alone your coding ability going down the toilet because all you do is drag-and-drop 'component blocks' in your engine of choice, what do you do when you hit the looming brick wall that is the engine's limitations?

    "Hey guys, let's pack it up. This random dude on the 'net says the custom and one-off engines we've been making for years are dead, and we should just use Unity or Unreal."

    --
    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
  10. 'fraid you're the clueless one here. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.