Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Confirms DirectX 12 Is Alive and Well, Demo Coming At GDC
MojoKid writes "Buzz has been building for the last week that Microsoft would soon unveil the next version of DirectX at the upcoming Games Developer Conference (GDC). Microsoft has now confirmed that its discussion forums at the show won't just be to discuss updates to DX11, but that the company is putting a full court press behind DirectX 12. The company responded sharply over a year ago, when an AMD executive claimed that future versions of the API were essentially dead, but it has been over four years since DX11 debuted. To date, Microsoft has only revealed a few details of the next-generation API. Like AMD's Mantle, it will focus on giving developers "close-to-metal" GPU resource access and reducing CPU overhead. Like Mantle, the goal of DirectX 12 is to give programmers more control over performance tuning, with an eye towards better multi-threading and multi-GPU scaling. Unlike Mantle, DirectX 12 will undoubtedly support a full range of GPUs from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm. Qualcomm's presence is interesting. With Windows RT all but moribund, Qualcomm's interest in that market may have seemed incidental. However, the fact that the company is involved with the DX12 standard could mean that the handset and tablet developer is serious about the Windows market in the long term."
Open development, more involvement from the community, more trust. Would be good for both Microsoft and its users.
or devs Will not use it
If only for the fact that it will push OpenGL forward. Mantle looks promising (and should support non-AMD GPUs as well) but is still some time away from public release.
...requires Windows 8.1 or better and Bing on the desktop.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
>>> However, the fact that the company is involved with the DX12 standard could mean that the handset and tablet developer is serious about the Windows market in the long term." ...Or it could mean that even though they already know Windows phone is almost certainly dead, being seen to be playing nice with Microsoft is worth the relatively small cost of 1 developer who is only actually working on this in any otherwise slack time.
>> it will focus on giving developers "close-to-metal" GPU resource access and reducing CPU overhead.
Translation: ...its finally been gutted of a lot of heavy Microsoft crapware and is now just a thin wrapper over the GPU vendor's own driver.
I wish the rest of Windows would go that way too.
These sorts of announcements have the effect of freezing developers and keeping them from moving to superior technology.
They would have done nothing if not for AMD and now they're going to steal AMD's thunder.
This sort of thing makes my blood boil.
If you're a developer out there, please, don't let Microsoft get away with this.
...and that is trumps open source for most of us.
From the invaluble wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khronos_Group "The Khronos Group is an American not-for-profit member-funded industry consortium based in Beaverton, Oregon, focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free application programming interfaces (APIs) for authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices." Note this is not just opengl.
I am not sure why the original poster has been modded down. OpenGL suffered from the very same bitcruft that DirectX suffers from today until The Kronasgroup "companies including ATI Technologies, Discreet, Evans & Sutherland, Intel Corporation, NVIDIA, Silicon Graphics (SGI), and Sun Microsystems. It now has roughly 100 member companies" got their shit together.
This is the way they force us to upgrade, which in turn forces peripheral manufacturers to write Windows 8.1 drivers, for which they get paid nothing. It really is a sick little cycle. I'm tired of watching it.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
Slashdot is filled with haters, but just to do the inverse I'm really happy about this. DirectX always been top-notch, high-tech and the easiest API to work with for developers along with the best performance from shaders (yeah I know OpenGL have more brute draw calls per sec). This will push graphic technology forward. I'm very eager to see it, and I'm happy that Microsoft is still going because ATI Mantle was limited to a single vendor and couldn't succeed for this only reason.
Of course its being worked on. And of course it'll be Windows 9 exclusive.
Unbelievable. Another brand new graphics API to front the graphics hardware so that developers have to completely rewrite their software yet again.
People need to get over their damn obsession with "new versions" and remember what the point of a programming API really is. It is to provide a stable and comprehensive interface for doing a task so that developers do not need to hit a moving target or relearn their entire skillset every six months. The reason OpenGL was so successful was that it did not try to capture the current state of graphics hardware. Instead, it captured the essential aspects of a 3D graphics pipeline and created an API for that, and let the drivers handle mapping features to hardware. With this model, OpenGL 1.x was stable for decades. You could run the exact same software on a pure-software implementation on your dinky home PC that you could on the pure-hardware big-iron SGIs. The only difference was in how fast it ran, there was no changing how you interfaced with the hardware, there was no learning an entirely new way of doing things.
Fundamentally a 3D pipeline involves vertex transformation, rasterization, and pixel coloring. That's it. OpenGL 1.x captured this beautifully with its interface for specifying vertices for primitives (triangles), setting up the matrix transformations, and specifying the coloring and interpolation modes. It was simple and effective. Hardware manufacturers came out with dozens of generations of new hardware, and the developers only had to care that "things got faster" and how many more polygons they could afford to push per frame. Then came the programmable hardware, and shaders. OpenGL responded by replacing the matrix transformations with a vertex program, and the pixel coloring with a pixel program. Simple, done. One major version update captured the whole thing with a nice high-level shader language that was intended for many generations of shader improvements.
Unfortunately, the Direct3D dipshits got their hands into the OpenGL ARB and suddenly the shader language is gimped to only represent the current generation of hardware without the simple additions required to make it future-proof. Then, surprise surprise, we need to have many more versions of OpenGL simply to fix the deficiencies that were deliberately added in the first place to sabotage the API. Now we have the same bullshit version bloat in OpenGL that we had avoided for decades until Direct3D came into the picture.
Direct3D embodies everything that is wrong with modern software development. Programming APIs need to express the theoretical capabilities of the task, not the limited expressions people currently use. And trying to make the API "closer to the bare metal"? Ahh, I get it! Driver developers think it's too much work to provide a consistent graphics API, so instead they're just going to make the game developers do all the hard work of driver development and debugging for them! Brilliant!
Fucking lazy assholes. This is why I got out of computer graphics after studying it for years in graduate school. It used to be you could approach it as a clean science, now it's devolved into bug-chasing of half-assed microcode.
Get more modern features even on XP, and easier ports to iOS/Android/PS4/PS3/OSX/SteamOS/a toaster.
Just a few years ago it looked like there wasn't much of a point to OpenGL any more. Now it looks more like that for Direct3D.
I get a little bored with the defence that people hate something implying that they are somehow emotionally against something. Directx was another single platform Microsoft APIs. Through dominance and laziness like internet explorer it has thrown away it's lead. Hate it... hardly notice it... Love the massive growth if cross platform gaming since Microsoft dropped the ball... high fives all around. Welcome to competition.
I have seen lots of these posts, and there is lots of presidents to back it up. Directx was just another thing that was propping up Microsoft resilient monopoly on the desktop... A shrinking market... with ever growing refresh cycles, and Is increasingly dwarfed by the overall computer market that is mainly android... Using directx especially as a platform exclusive could simply cause this market share to shrink faster... For the sake of a few early conversions to a later version of its OS; there are other ways to milk it's hostages. This is not the same market that had Steve jobs begging like a bitch with patents for Microsoft's pocket change while apple is on its knees. This is Microsoft the hardware and services company. The one that is prepared to bet it's future on sneaking in an app store and a hardware lock, behind the metro(where are the windows never mind the start button) interface. No wonder stream is pushing Linux.
Will be just a wrapper around openGL.
MS will never come out with another service pack for Win7. Windows 8 (just the stuff under the hood, not the UI) was SP2, and 8.1 is SP3. But could they recognize Win7's wide acceptance in business by releasing an update rollup? They did that win Win2K long after the last service pack, mainly so businesses using it would have a baseline package of updates to the final service pack for systems that would keep using it for a while. By not calling it a service pack it doesn't reset any of their schedules for cutting back on support.
DX12. Microsoft is the sole definer. Implemented for only ONE Operating Environment, according to the defining body. May be implemented for two OSs at Microsofts leisure.
May or may not be upward or downward compatible with itself or anything else.
So PLEASE. STOP calling DX ANYTHING a standard. You may call it a library or an API.
PHIGS is the standard. OpenGL has pretty much supplanted PHIGS but is still not a standard. OpenGL is also an API but with broader support.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
DirectX introduced shaders after 9, OpenGL did it a bit later with 2.1. DX11 and OpenGL 4.4 are largely similar in features. Also OpenGL isn't a 'format', its an API.
"Apparently very antiquated and doesn't do modern things as well."
This is complete FUD. Why not read up on stuff before spouting nonsense? Wikipedia is a click away you know
I doubt it'll be a complete rewrite... and they'd be really stupid to change the fundamental shader pipeline. It'll probably be more like replacement API calls to do certain things faster. Think VAOs in OpenGL 3 compared to manually managing buffer state in OpenGL 2. That being said I really do wish DirectX would die. Enough of this fragmentation bullshit -- if OpenGL were the only standard out there, developers could write once and deploy on anything that displayed 3d graphics.