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Direct3D 9 Comes To Linux, Implemented Over Mesa/Gallium3D
An anonymous reader writes "Picking up the code from a failed Direct3D 10/11 implementation for Linux, a working Direct3D 9 state tracker has been implemented for Linux. The Direct3D 9 support works with open-source Linux GPU hardware drivers via Mesa's Gallium3D and can run games for the open-source Radeon and Nouveau drivers without simply converting the Direct3D commands into OpenGL. Unlike the experimental D3D10/11 code from the past, this D3D9 state tracker is already running games like Skyrim, Civilization 5, Anno 1404, and StarCraft 2. With Linux games not natively targeting D3D, Wine was modified for using this native Direct3D implementation."
DX9 is rather like OpenGL 2.0 really, with large emphasis on HLSL. The "all about legacy fixed function" DirectX is DX7.
Well, if you're programming for windows, and XP is a target for potential users, then you'd be programming in OpenGL right now (because it's the only way to get tesselation and compute shaders on XP). If you're targetting Windows 7 or above, you'll be using D3D11. If you had even so much considered the remote possibility of ever going cross platform, at any point in the future, then you'd already be using OpenGL (or GLES).
So what we have here is a library that provides access to GPU functionality from 12 years ago. This might be great if you have the source to a 12 year old game laying about, but for everyone else, this is a completely pointless development in the world of linux.....
but there are a whole host catalog of games that use D3D9, in fact I think the vast majority still do, and many popular titles have D3D9 support still.
Good D3D9 support will bring games to linux
combined that with D9 BEING probably the longest lasting of them, many games, including new, still support it natively due to the large number of cards still out there that arent D11 compatible. with cards 5 and 6 years old still running games, even new ones, more than acceptably, the constant pressure to upgrade to the newest shiny constanly is lagely absent. and that would leave a huge market untapped if they didnt support it. its much different than a few years before when cards had a much shorter lifecycle, and you could expect your market to be upgrading every year.
(frankly I cant see a whole helluva lot of difference between 9 and 11 when playing, if the devs did their job right, unless I pause the game and actually look for the differences. When running and gunning, its not really noticable unless the devs were lazy. even crysis3 can be made to work with 9, and it still looks beautiful)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
DX9 needs to stop being used and everyone needs to switch to DX11 or even better, OpenGL4.
If Microsoft had ported DX10 and DX11 to XP, rather than using them as a club to beat XP users into switching to Vista, everyone already would have.