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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?"

14 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. 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 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
    2. 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."
    3. 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".

    4. 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).

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

  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 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.

  4. 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
  5. 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.

  6. 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?