Hardware Farewell to DirectX?

AMD's Richard Huddy claims game developers want direct-to-metal access to PC graphics hardware.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/1

 

Very interesting article. Makes sense to drop it if its going to help the platform, but with developers not wanting to release many games on it just now will they want to put even more time/money into developing a game without the API?

 

I think DX9 was the ast really user friendly API, DX10 was a mess, 10.1 ws only adopted by AMD - so for the last 3 years or more the API has been a diffcult beast to tame, DX11 fixes some fo that but also brings in more complications.

I liked the info provided about processing efficiencies of the console and what they are capable of without using an API - one could also argue that most PC titles are restriced because they have to be ported across to PS3 and XBOX and also cater for DX8 or DX9 gpus that are still in PC's today.

The points made are valid, the API has to cater for a very broad range of GPU's I think this would be made less restrictive if the industry would agree that any gpu older than 4yrs becomes an unsupported legacy product (with a legacy instruction set), thus allowing designers to develop and opimise for a much more streamlined set of products using modern techniques.

The alternative would be back the good old days of selecting your GPU from a menue when installing the game and have direct to metal instruction sets for each - watch AMD and NV splash out the millions then to make one more optimised than the other .

I'd like to hear more developers feedback on the DX Versus OPEN Versus Console.

 

So what about OpenGL?:

 

Funny how Elma Fuddy here didn't mention that isn't it. Which API does AMD favour again?

 

The same also applies to OpenGL - it's just that most cutting-edge PC game developers use DirectX now, and they're the ones who are most likely to be interested in programming direct-to-metal. We've also got a big feature all about OpenGL coming up in Custom PC soon.

 

I'm old enough to remember having to select what hardware (egh sound card) you had to play Doom. If it wasn't on the list, no sound.
I really hope we don't go back to that. It was especially annoying if you had hardware newer than the game. Remember when sound cards were advertised as "Sound Blaster compatable" so you knew you'd be able to get them to work in games?
If you take away the ease of use then you really will kill the PC as a gaming platform.

 

If getting the best is a question of coding directly for the hardware, imaging how good games will look on the next generation of games consoles when they come out in five years or so.
I'm hoping for masses of tesselation.

 

Very interesting. I can see this happening in the future but not for a long while yet.

 

Interesting theory but I can see too many perfectly good, older gaming architectures out there that devs will still want to be able to sell to creating too many options.

 

So last week Huddy praises Microsoft for D3D and this week he wants rid of it? If they start dropping stuff like DX, they really will kill off the PC as a gaming platform.

 

I thought the xbox was called the xbox because it used directx?

 

Page 117 of the current (May) issue.

 

So are there any examples of real world "direct to metal" games available?

 

Nah, that's about OpenCL

 

Oh I remember that, used to drive me MENTAL. However, I could see it being alot easier these days... auto-detect and the such.

I mean, say you buy something on STEAM and you've got your rig details uploaded somewhere. The copy you download could be optimised (wording, I know) specifically for your system!

Sure turnaround times on games will go up... but to be fair, this kind of thing is a good way to go =]

 

Interesting, indeed! Please follow up on this.

I know it's probably not a great comparison, but perhaps we can move towards something like the luxury sports car world. Just like with high-end PCs, most people won't / can't afford to buy an Aston Martin DBS, but those that do will probably say it was worth every penny (or cent, or what have you). If you pay "top dollar" for something you sure as hell expect to get more out of your investment than the guy that bought a Skoda.

 

A very good article, thankyou.

 

I'd second this - having games too tightly coded to specific graphics cards makes them less likely to work with future ones. The PCs biggest benefit has always been having access to the largest collection of software, going back to the 1980's (though much of the early stuff now requires emulators like DosBox or ScummVM to run properly).

As for games "looking alike", isn't that more a reflection of them using engines developed by the likes of Unreal and ID? I would have thought a more valid complaint would be about games *playing* alike - particularly with companies previously known for breaking the mould descending into generic 3D FPS-hood (*cough* Bioware *cough*).

 

Well its a poor state of affairs but I did say it reference to the console article (next gen due out on 2014) that this will be the next big performance leap for pc games and then we will have to wait for the generationa fter that for the next big leap - whereas before 3d tech leaps came with every new DX revision (18-24mths).