DirectX 10 & the Future of Gaming

[Fredl]

That's news? The article reads more like an advertising brochure, rather than an objective look at how DirectX 10 will influence the industry.

Why don't they release DirectX 10 as a separate install? Does anyone know?

Not all games developers are happy with it. id Software blasted it: (Link)
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=22161

[Kabab]

John Carmacks opinion is rather interesting...

http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200701/N07.0109.1737.15034.htm

[RobertoOrtiz]

My take on it?

That the tools released to support Direct x will be revolutionary.
Just wait until the homebrew developers start releasing titles a year from now.
And just wait until the Next gen machimina shorts start making the rounds.
-R

[noisewar]

I think one of the worst business decisions that you can make is to fight an inevitable technology.

Very well said.

[Coliba]

Fredl, that article critiques the fact that DX10 will only be available on Vista, not DX10 itself.

It's clear DX10 opens up some very interesting possibilites, not only for games but GPU supported rendering.

[Fredl]

Sorry, I missed that bit in the article about Vista (page 1), because the link took me to page 3 of the article.
Hollenshead[/b]] I think one of the worst business decisions that you can make is to fight an inevitable technology.
Is DirectX 10 inevitable?

Maybe I am wrong, but I would have thought that because it is welded to the OS it will slow its spread.

If it was downloadable and you could use it with current OSes, it would be more popular. No?

[UrbanFuturistic]

I think one of the worst business decisions that you can make is to fight an inevitable technology.Very well said.Someone really needs to tell that to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. So far they've fought OpenGL, Linux, Apple Macs and many others. What next? SDL? OO.org? Haiku? OpenAL?

PS. SDL 1.3 is so gonna kick arse.

[mustique]

There's no denying of the power of DX10 for games.
But it's scary to think that in the future all game devs are bound to Microsoft.
The industry needs competing open standarts. Hopefully openGL will have it's comeback.

[ffear]

But it's scary to think that in the future all game devs are bound to Microsoft.
The industry needs competing open standarts. Hopefully openGL will have it's comeback.

That's the crux of it. Plus there is no Vista non-NSA edition.

[switchblade327]

Why don't they release DirectX 10 as a separate install? Does anyone know?


Simple; to sell Vista.

[DrBalthar]

There's no denying of the power of DX10 for games.
But it's scary to think that in the future all game devs are bound to Microsoft.
The industry needs competing open standarts. Hopefully openGL will have it's comeback.
Hahahaha thanks for that joke that really made my day. There are many reasons why this will not happen but the biggest one is probably there is no interest there is no driving point behind that no big company. DAMIT/Nvidia are quiet happy how things are going right now they did not even seem to have big interest in OGL2.0 (which was 3DLabs at the time pushing for it). And when OpenGL2.0 came finally out it could barely compete with DX9 besides that it was a cheap ripoff of DX9 in many parts. DX10 is lightyears away from anything on the OGL horizon front currently. Considering how long OGL took to evolve to 2.0 state nope. OGL|ES & Khornos Group might push harder but I am not sure if the market is big enough until now they basically followed the desktop line by cuting out all that mostly unnecessary heavy load of functions no one uses anyway.

[mustique]

Hahahaha thanks for that joke that really made my day. There are many reasons why this will not happen but the biggest one is probably there is no interest there is no driving point behind that no big company. DAMIT/Nvidia are quiet happy how things are going right now they did not even seem to have big interest in OGL2.0 (which was 3DLabs at the time pushing for it). And when OpenGL2.0 came finally out it could barely compete with DX9 besides that it was a cheap ripoff of DX9 in many parts. DX10 is lightyears away from anything on the OGL horizon front currently. Considering how long OGL took to evolve to 2.0 state nope. OGL|ES & Khornos Group might push harder but I am not sure if the market is big enough until now they basically followed the desktop line by cuting out all that mostly unnecessary heavy load of functions no one uses anyway.

Maybe it's too early to laugh. OpenGL isn't a dead horse yet. AMD and Nvidia won't give up on openGL. They are forced to do so with the current driver policy of MS. But they won't. Not as long as there's a market for CAD/3D apps, Macs and linux. The day, one of these players give up on openGL, the mentioned markets will belong to its competitor.

[jewalker]

I could be mistaken, but I remember reading an article that said many of the API changes in DirectX 10 couldn't be done on Windows XP because of XP's driver architecture. There were just certain thing that couldn't be done in XP, so they made the changes in Vista which facilitated the needed changes in DirectX 10. I'm looking forward to a unified architecture. I really do think that it is silly to have single purpose hardware sitting around doing nothing when you could have general purpose hardware actually accomplishing something.

[jewalker]

Duplicate post

[mummey]

My take on it?

That the tools released to support Direct x will be revolutionary.
Just wait until the homebrew developers start releasing titles a year from now.
And just wait until the Next gen machimina shorts start making the rounds.
-R

Counterpoint: ;)
I consider it more e-volutionary. It just another tool to add to the stack available.

Those who want to make games will do so with or without this being available. You might see a bunch more mediocre items around now, but having the tool around won't make the work any better.

Add this to the high-end Vista computer needed to properly use this, and that leads to a small group. Granted, those with the high-end machines will also be more likely to be those that would make use of this, but they might be desuaded by the small potential audience.

Maybe in a few years this will really catch on, but not initially.

[aaraaf]

As far as openGL 2.0... I've yet to get it running right with my Adobe apps on any 3 of my systems I use them on. It crashes pretty often on closing, and sometimes during previews.

I've got no real problems with DirectX. Max runs better in DirectX mode than OpenGL on all 3 systems as well. :shrug: I dunno what that means, but I generally try and not use it... it's on my "this doesn't work quite right" list, and I'm not the only one.

[richcz3]

I am not convinced DX10 wil make a revolution in gaming. ATI and nVidia well simply graduate their hardware to meet the new specs in performance. I see this as an evolutionary phase as opposed to anything remotely revolutionary. OpenGL may be aging but it's not tied to one OS like DX is.

I also don't believe multiple competing open formats are any good for the indutry at all. How many PC game developers want to produce libraries or code for each format. There are reasons for standards or even "Industry Standards". So that developers can focus on creating content and less on supporting different competing factions.

A similar albeit not exact example would be video codecs. Who makes their demo reels or trailors in WMV, QT, DivX, Real Media, Xvid and every other video codec out there in order to support all existing formats. It would be wasted time that could be better spent elsewhere in development.

[inguatu]

Someone really needs to tell that to Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. So far they've fought OpenGL, Linux, Apple Macs and many others. What next? SDL? OO.org? Haiku? OpenAL?

PS. SDL 1.3 is so gonna kick arse.

None of that is relevant. Just because it's Microsoft, they aren't allowed to present something new, possibly changing the way gaming works on the PC (possibly future consoles)? People get stupid when Microsoft doesn't do anything.. then they get stupid when they do. Companies like that just can't win for the simple fact of who they are. In this case it's Microsoft. Had OpenGL come out with 3.x or something, we wouldn't be having this thread, but because Microsoft has come out with something new, people prepare their wasted ammo to shoot bullet holes through it.

I'm an avid PC gamer so I do have a vested interest in this kind of stuff and I do hope this pushes forward so I can see the great games coming out in the not so distant future. Anyone else here a PC gamer or is this really just a thread to take down Microsoft yet a gain on this forum?

If they are fighting competing technology it's because they should. There's nothing wrong with competition. That's how Linux and OSX have become so popular. That's why AMD is where it is today. While competing techologies may be good and bad to the consumer (blueray vs hd dvd for example), it's something that is needed in order to foster innovation or "evolution". I think DX10 will help the PC gaming platform over the next 2+ years. As for Linux and OSX... well.. typically people don't buy/install those to run PC games, so those people shouldn't really be worried about DX10 anyways as it pertains to this thread. And with that, it's not to say you can't run Windows to play games on your PC or ApPlE and in fact, the game developers and Microsoft encourage you to do so (and yeah it's for the money.. that's why they're in the game).



Crysis anyone?

[Brettzies]

I am not convinced DX10 wil make a revolution in gaming. ATI and nVidia well simply graduate their hardware to meet the new specs in performance. I see this as an evolutionary phase as opposed to anything remotely revolutionary. OpenGL may be aging but it's not tied to one OS like DX is.
I agree. Game developers make games revolutionary. PC's have been pushing graphics and upgrades for years because of games. The graphics are always better, but that doesn't mean the games are any better.

Obviously you have to move forward if you want to continue to play the latest and greatest, but for every graphicly amazing DX10 Crysis, there's going to be 100's of boring clones. We don't even know if Crysis will be any fun, it just looks great.

I'm not sold it's going to revolutionize anything, just make you spend more money if you want to play current games, new gfx card, new os, possibly new sound card. Graphics, of course, will be more capable, but how is that different from any other year? PC gaming with the latest hardware has always looked better then the current consoles, yet consoles continue to grow and develop exclusives. Gears of War looks and plays amazing on a huge-uh tv. I'm sure a PC could make it even better. Vista/DX10 is inevitable, but I don't see it having an immediate impact.

[Apoclypse]

If I'm not mistaken I think that opengl 3.0 is going to be unveiled at siggraph 2007. There is supposed to be some cool things in there that might help it garner more attention. I also think that opengl is such a huge beast and they don't seem to want to deprecate anything that people assume that it isn't as good as what MS offers. That doesn't mean that it couldn't use some major revision. Unlike DX10 though opengl doesn't focus on just games it focuses on a lot of other things. Opengl has also had a bad rap due to bad implementations that have very little to do with the spec itself (guess who? MS). The Khronos group had been working hard to get all the vendros on board in-order to update the spec and 3.0 is supposed to be the end result. The real test is to see if the whole spec gets implemented not just parts like with opengl 2.0/1.4 etc.

[Refuznik]

For casual devs vista is the problem.

http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=14952

[UrbanFuturistic]

None of that is relevant. Just because it's Microsoft, they aren't allowed to present something new, possibly changing the way gaming works on the PC (possibly future consoles)?SDL is very relevant because it's directly in competition with DirectX. As it stands, Creative have been reported to be moving over to OpenAL (DirectSound equivalent) because Vista breaks the EAX 3D sound on their cards, SDL 1.3 will 'fix' the issue with OpenGL in Windows that you have to reload all the data to the gfx card every time you resize a window (not a problem in Linux) and there is nothing in Direct3D 10 that won't be supported by OpenGL extensions which can all be handled automatically by GLEW.

In the meantime, I'll be programming in Dev-C++ just because I don't have to include a ton of contrived 'extension' support code for stuff like multisampling that's been included in OpenGL since version 1.3 because of Microsoft's little conflict of interest.

While I'm at it, you can explain to me why Doom3 and Quake 4, two of the most graphically advanced games of recent times, were programmed in OpenGL and not Direct3D.

[daHund]

None of that is relevant. Just because it's Microsoft, they aren't allowed to present something new, possibly changing the way gaming works on the PC (possibly future consoles)? People get stupid when Microsoft doesn't do anything.. then they get stupid when they do. Companies like that just can't win for the simple fact of who they are. In this case it's Microsoft.
[...]

thats simply not true. the problem is HOW they do things.

if you look at the history of directx you have realize ist a complete nightmare for every gamer.

first there was opengl, pretty much alone. it was very powerfull at that time, so powerfull that all of what was opengl is still in it today.

microsoft was part of the opengl design process. so they had the chance to implement many of their nice ideas. but they realized: we have a monopole - every pc-gamer is using windows these days. why do we need opengl? so everyone can easily write 3d apps for windows and different systems?!

so what did they do? they left opengl alone and bought their own 3d library.

so we, as gamers, got a good 3d api that soon almost no game-developer used anymore and a new 3d api that had to catch up in pretty much every regard.


at the end, microsoft didn't do any good for us gamers. the time it took to get direct3d to something thats in some aspects superior to the opengl spec(note not opengl in practice, because of extensions) would have been much better spend in improving opengl.

also there is currently no competition at all. games don't use opengl anymore. the last big company(id, they made quake and doom) ditched it last year. and whats realy the point in competing with an open standard!?


in the end thats why you actually HAVE to use windows to play games today. developing crossplatform games today means you have to implement the core of it at leased twice - simple as that.

so in the end directx is just another tool to sell windows, or to keep their competition small.

[richcz3]

John Carmack always derided DX in its early days for good reasons. That's why ID produced all its titles in OpenGL. But lately he has supported MS efforts with DX. I haven't read anywhere where he says he's dropped OpenGL, but he does speak favorably of where DX is and where it's going. He doesn't feel that bolting DX10 to Vista is the right move and intends to develop for XP DX9 for some time to come.

I personaly feel tripple A game development for the PC is stagnent when compared to consoles. DX10 has very little chance of changing that course. Key developers simply port their console efforts to PCs and most run poorly (LucasArts). There is ID and Epic Games that build PC game engines that produce quality engines for PC and Console developers. Then theres games like World of Warcraft by Blizzard. From a sales perspective PC games are anemic and problematic. PC architecture is all over the place. Talk about open standards.

[KayosIII]

My understanding is that DirectX 10 has not been backported to XP because It requires the updated driver model.... It moves key parts of driver into user space where all of the driver used to reside in kernel space.... This apparently requires a new driver model. I am also lead to believe that most OpenGL implementations have been doing this all along.

As for OpenGL I think the current plans are to have the core largely on feature parity with DX 10... By October this year as the second of two major releases planned for this year... Most of the features are already available in the form of extensions but that tends to be more work on the part of the developer

[DrBalthar]

While I'm at it, you can explain to me why Doom3 and Quake 4, two of the most graphically advanced games of recent times, were programmed in OpenGL and not Direct3D.
First they are not so advanced actually it is mostly using techniques from the 1970s. Second mostly because Carmack was an ignorant idiot! But for you now check how many people actually licensed the Doom3 engine this time? Compared to how many people licensed the U3 engine? Doom3 was far less successful on that front compared to Q3.

[UrbanFuturistic]

First they are not so advanced actually it is mostly using techniques from the 1970s.GI and sub-surface scattering are techniques from the 1970s and, last I checked, there weren't a lot of 3D normal-mapped opponents in the FPSs of the 1970s or renderers with fast BSSRDF shaders. Talk about ignorant idiots.

EDIT: Oh, and another thing. Isn't the U3 engine available for PS3, and doesn't the PS3 have Embedded OpenGL (OpenEL) as its graphics API? Nice work proving my point there.

[SinisterUrge]

I've noticed a model I'm working on in max is rotated around the screen far more smoothly since I installed DirectX10

[richcz3]

....edit.. But for you now check how many people actually licensed the Doom3 engine this time? Compared to how many people licensed the U3 engine? Doom3 was far less successful on that front compared to Q3.

I'm going somewhat OT because I think the DOOM3 engines short comings aren't in the graphics department.

It's not enough to make games that push hardware limits anymore. OpenGL or Direct X, it has less to do with graphics. Titles need publisher support and Epic for now has a real good business model.

The game (Doom3) itself was visual makeover built over aged game play mechanics. I think IDs insistance on old style game play didn't highlight the strength of the engine on the PC and the game proved difficult to port to the XBox. Game engines need to be adaptable to the Console market needs as well. Don't get me started on Quake 4. ID may have really overlooked the market there and Epic moved in.

Epics UT series has offered more innovative game play and complete level editors for Mods from UT2K3 and on out. Everything I've read about Epic's licensing and technical support puts ID's licensing model to shame. Now with the new UT engine highlighted by Gears of War and the upcoming PC UT3, Epic looks to burry ID.

[Cyborgguineapig]

Now with the new UT engine highlighted by Gears of War and the upcoming PC UT3, Epic looks to burry ID.

I would possibly cry a little if this happens. They need to be around at least for Wolfenstien the movie.

[CHRiTTeR]

I would possibly cry a little if this happens. They need to be around at least for Wolfenstien the movie.

Nah, they didnt think the doom movie was all that bad and that gives me the idea that the wolfenstein movie wont be that good either. But thats just a thought, we will see how good it is when the movie's out.

Back to DX10 again. I think it's a bit overhyped to sell more cpies of vista to gamers ;)
If it would be really that great as if it is hyped then I think Carmack's answer in that intervieuw would've been a lot different :D
While its a step forward, I still think DX9 is good enough for a while.
I think all those DX10 movies look like they do because of the evolution in GPU and such and not in DX technologie that much. I'm pretty sure they can be done with verry little differences on a DX9 platform.

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