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Beyond DirectX 10 - A glance at DirectX 10.1

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sun Aug 13, 2006 06:58 PM
from the one-percent-more dept.
Graphics Software Hardware
Hanners1979 writes "Although we still appear to be some way away from the release of Windows Vista, and with it DirectX 10, specifications for the first point release of the 3D graphics API, DirectX 10.1, have already been finalised and largely made public. Elite Bastards looks at what's new and what will be changing in this release, set to become available not all that long after DirectX 10 — There's more to it than you might imagine."
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Beyond DirectX 10 - A glance at DirectX 10.1 50 Comments More /

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  • the next gen of videocards wait for this technology or include it so we don't have really short lived video cards.

  • DirectX does not seem good for the industry (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2006, @07:19PM (#15900058)
    DirectX does not seem a good standard for the industry to follow. DX9 came out how long ago? It seems as if 3D technology advances have slowed down. Yes there have been updates to DX9, but I don't really remember anything that was exciting. Yes, there has been talk about DX10 and the changes it would bring, but now it's known that it's Vista only. That's why it has taken so long. So the industry is waiting for Vista to finally have implementation of their new graphics features? Sounds like a bad move. What if MS delays Vista? What then? Are the graphic chip makers gonna sit and wait? What we need is an actual open industry standard. Bring back OpenGL so we can make improvements as they come, and not having to wait for Microsoft to lead it where they feel they can control it to make money, and continue locking out other platforms.

    • Re:DirectX does not seem good for the industry (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      DX is the best thing to ever happen to computer gaming.

      DX9 been around for a while? Well please enumerate for us all what features you were 'missing out on'. DX9 was already ahead of it's time if you recall: most of the DX9 features werent even supported (or fully supported) by the king of the hill video cards at the time it was released.

      Look at how great computer graphics were charging forward without Direct X. Um... yeah, right. Programmers are the ones driving acceptance of DirectX, not "teh ev1l M$
      • Running games and graphics apps in OpenGL was better and faster than D3D - why? Simple! D3D had to go thru the OS first. OpenGL was direct to hardware. That was one less step to do (from what I'm understanding reading the OpenGL website,) which usually resulted in better performance, and the general reason was that games running D3D needed more CPU/GPU power and RAM to run as smoothly (Anyone recall Unreal Tournament 2003's requirements? Remember the hidden OpenGL renderer which gave you an extra 10 or so F

    • Re:DirectX does not seem good for the industry (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ceoyoyo (59147) on Sunday August 13 2006, @08:40PM (#15900311)
      Bring back OpenGL?

      OpenGL is alive and well. It would be great if some of the Windows developers started using it though, since they are in the majority. Please, feel free to join the rest of the world.
      • Bring back OpenGL? OpenGL is alive and well. It would be great if some of the Windows developers started using it though, since they are in the majority.

        If it were in a developer's best interest to use OpenGL they would. OpenGL has a history of having mediocre drivers if you are *not* doing things as Quake does them. In other words OpenGL was of such little interest to ATI and NVIDIA that about all the optimization attention it got was whetever Quake used. Now this was a few years ago and things are bet

          • Re:Not much of a business case for OpenGL ... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Andrew Kismet (955764) on Monday August 14 2006, @12:36AM (#15900933)
            Not all PC Gamers (like myself) have ultra-cutting-edge systems. Some of us know how quickly technology progresses, and know that a $3000 rig will be worth $300 in two years. I'm currently typing this on my "gaming laptop", and while I don't play the real CPU/GPU eating monsters like Civilisation 4, this thing handles Half-Life 2 and it's expansions like a charm. As you've noticed, I use said machine to go online. I also use it for work - Maxis, Microsoft Office, and Mozilla Firefox sitting side by side.

            Also, since when is the entirety of Linux considered stable? Half the time the drivers are up in the air, and there's enough competition and conflict between various builds and organisations as to achieve bugger all on a standards level. If game companies started porting to a stable Linux core, they'd be porting to Wii - THAT has a Linux OS with Opera installed.

    • Re:DirectX does not seem good for the industry (Score:5, Funny)

      by peipas (809350) on Sunday August 13 2006, @09:46PM (#15900500)
      What if MS delays Vista?

      Are you crazy? MS would never delay Vista!

      • Re:DirectX does not seem good for the industry (Score:4, Insightful)

        by eebra82 (907996) on Sunday August 13 2006, @11:26PM (#15900795) Homepage
        "I think DirectX sucks for a variety of reasons but the truth of the matter is there are no real video card features DX9 doesn't currently implement. Neither Nvidia or ATI have yet to release a card with the new feature sets in DX10."

        Well, you can run games using older versions of DirectX in Vista, so how exactly is this a problem. DirectX 10 isn't out yet and you're complaining about the lack of DX10 cards? ATI and nVidia are on development cycles and they would obviously not include DX10 support on current graphics cards, simply because DX10 wasn't mature when today's architecture was under development. I am very sure both nVidia and ATI are dying to get DX10 cards out as soon as Vista is out, since selling the first fully Vista compatible cards is a huge thing. You can't expect today's tech to support something that isn't even released yet. That doesn't make sense.

        Even then it makes me wonder what the point is. When games like WoW get all the headlines using technology that barely require DX8. Maybe if you are into FPS games this will matter but for everyone else the featureset you are calling dated far outpaced the software that runs on it years ago.

        Excuse me, but are you even aware of how many of today's games rely heavily on DX9 technology? You are also saying that games like World of WarCraft barely use any DX9 tech. Do you have any documentation on that? Also, what is "games like WoW"? In fact, many "games like WoW" today use pixel shaders and therefore require DX9. Yes, FPS games are clearly taking advantage of the latest technology, but the simple reason is that realism is far more important in such games than, say, strategy games. But on the other hand, there are so many types of FPS titles. We have racing games, action games, MMORPG and even adventure games. World of WarCraft may not be the most graphically advanced game, but this is for three main reasons: it's huge and would simply require too many gigs of space if it was more complex than it already is. Blizzard is also targeting a larger mass who isn't constantly upgrading its hardware as much as some other groups do. Last but not least, have you ever thought of how much more time and money Blizzard would have to invest to include the latest technology with the highest level of detail?

        I'm pretty skeptical of how OpenGL will survive in games now that Carmack has sold out. It's a bleak future for those of us gamers who want to someday drop Windows and use a real OS.

        You know, Carmack has all the money in the world already. I doubt he would kiss Microsoft's ass if OpenGL was more promising than DirectX. After all, as a DirectX developer, you also get to release your games for the Xbox without too much hazzle, which is only one of many reasons why DirectX is more successful. OpenGL is in no way a poor API, but most developers currently support DirectX because it looks more promising than OpenGL. Also, Carmack was one of the main donators to the OpenGL foundation. Why would he fund a project like this and then kill it? I'm sure it was painful but as Carmack is always set on developing the latest in technology, he is also looking at the two API:s individually before deciding what to go for.
        • As the other poster already pointed out, DX8 is the first version that supported shaders. Also, using more advanced shaders do not grow the size of the game by "too many gigs of space", shaders are quite tiny, usually under a few kbytes in size. In fact, if a game uses some of the more advanced procedural shaders that become a realistic possibility with DX10, the size of the game will decrease as some of the art is generated at runtime instead of being handcrafted and stored in the game data. Otherwise agre

  • Article Text (Score:5, Informative)

    by insane_machine (952012) on Sunday August 13 2006, @07:22PM (#15900067)
    Just by reading this article title, it may seem rather like we're getting ahead of ourselves here - After all, we still have another handful of DirectX 9 boards to come from ATI, never mind being a fair few months away from the launch of Windows Vista, and with it the latest iteration of the DirectX API, DirectX 10.

    Nonetheless, despite all this, DirectX 10 is likely to see a number of point revisions during its lifespan and the first of these, imaginatively titled DirectX 10.1, will be the first of these. It may surprise some of you reading this, but the features which will be added by DirectX 10.1 have already been decided upon and information made available about them, so in this article we'll be taking a look through what we can expect to see in DirectX 10.1 compliant hardware.

    I would imagine this goes without saying, but before tackling this article I'd well and truly recommend beginning by reading our look at what DirectX 10 has to offer in our article entitled "ATI on the possibilities of DirectX 10" to get yourself up to speed on everything that this major inflection point in 3D graphics rendering entails, from geometry shaders through to (more importantly for this article) the WDDM driver model. So, if you feel that you know all you need to know about DirectX 10, let's move onwards to the future world of DirectX 10.1.

    Introduction

    Before we begin outright, we should remind ourselves briefly as to exactly why the API will be seeing point releases as of DirectX 10. The main reason for this move is the removal of cap (or capability) bits in the API. In the past, cap bits allowed for graphics vendors to basically pick and choose what features their hardware would support (albeit within some fairly strict guidelines to ensure compliancy to particular DirectX and Shader Model revisions). Although this left the likes of NVIDIA and ATI with plenty of room to develop and tout features that the other didn't have, it also had the side effect of creating development Hell for any game developers working on titles, leaving them to sort through a myriad of cap bits for different GPUs and configurations to ensure that they were supporting the right features for the right boards - More often than not, this simply meant that advanced features that only one graphics vendor supported were left out of the vast majority of titles altogether (Truform anyone?). The removal of this labyrinth was one of the main things developers were screaming out for when it came to discussing what was required of DirectX 10, and so it came to pass.

    Of course, this removal of cap bits had to be offset against the ever changing and progressing world of GPU development, so the graphics vendors still needed a way to push the technology forward and allow new technologies to find their way into games. Thus, DirectX 10 will be seeing point releases, one of the main facets of which will be to facilitate the inclusion of new funtionality for compliant graphics hardware to make use of. This makes life easier both for developers (who can target DirectX 10, 10.1 etc rather than individual features) and consumers - How do you explain to the man on the street that yes, a Radeon X800 and GeForce 6800 are both DirectX 9 parts, but both support different Shader Models in their respective architectures. It isn't much fun, trust me. As DirectX 10 and its point releases will also have very little in the way of features that are only optional in the API, buying a graphics board compliant with a particular DirectX 10 version will ensure that it does everything it needs to do to satisfy game titles that use that level of technology. No more Vertex Texture Fetch-esque confusions this time around then.

    The other question to answer (or not answer, such is the way these things work) before we start is - When will DirectX 10.1 be released? From what we've heard thus far, it appears that it may well become available not all that long after DirectX 10 itself. What isn't so likely however, is that we'll be seeing DirectX 10.1
  • Just like Visual Studio and Office it's yet another thing that props up Windows.

    If I were a DX developer I'd be more interested in playing "ubiquitous developer" than "Windows Sock Puppet".

    I may get modded down for this comment, but honestly, what is so special about windows that makes DX infeasible to implement for other platforms?

    Tom
    • It's just like the rest of Win32. There is nothing magical. But as you implement it new versions will come out and you'll be in constant catch-up. On top of that, DirectX is used for games so you need to have it perform well. This combination makes it hard. CodeWeavers and Cedega are both trying.
      • DirectX for the most part depends on a decent API to the GPU and nothing more. The networking/sound/etc can all be handled by portable APIs [e.g. on top of BSD sockets, ALSA sound, etc].

        The real reason you don't see DX for Linux or BSD [or MacOS] is that they use it to prop up Windows. E.g. "Experience the coolness of DX games, as only brought to you by Windows." The problem is that DX is a viable technology [just like Visual Studio and Office] that in any other market would not be tied to the OS.

        Tom

    • Maybe lack of driver support? Then again, even though its feature set moves like molasses and causes developers extension headaches, I still prefer the OpenGL API over DirectX9 even though I use C++ a lot more than C. DX10 is supposed to have an entirely different API so maybe I'll give it another chance.

      If someone did make an Open Source implementation, I wonder if Microsoft would pounce with patents. I feel like they only tolerate Cedega because it's far from perfect and in a way helps put out a mess

    • The license..it's the intellectual property of Microsoft and they can lock developers into writing games for windows by keeping the API's on windows. Microsoft as never licensed DirectX to ANYBODY and have no plans to ever do so.

      Same thing with the the rest of the Windows API. It could be implemented on Mac/LINUX (Wine tries to do it by reverse engineering), but it does not help them (Microsoft). It keeps people from running windows apps on platforms other than Microsoft Windows.
    • "Just like Visual Studio and Office it's yet another thing that props up Windows."

      Clearly a workable strategy. End users don't care one jot about the OS, but what they can do with it, and Microsoft have been very good at pouncing on those opportunities and communicating what you can do with Windows.

      "what is so special about windows that makes DX infeasible to implement for other platforms?"

      90% of gamers use Windows?

      Microsoft owns both Windows and DirectX and wants gaming on PC to stay a going concern, and i
      • I know the business reason why they do it. I want to see if there is a more technical [and legal] reasoning behind it.

        Proping up one failing business with another is a good sign [but not sufficient] of a monopoly. Microsoft wants to lock you into their platform so they invest in otherwise good tools and then lock them down.

        Visual Studio strives DESPITE windows. Many people use it for things other than writing windows applications. More people would use it if it worked under other OSes [e.g. port it to Q
  • Why not call it DirectX 10, and release it with Vista? Heck, by the time Vista is released, it may be DirectX 11.
  • Considering the fact that DirectX10 is only available on Vista and that 50% of employers say they are not going to purchase (14% if which say they will wait 15 months before evaluating), it's a safe bet to say that we won't be seeing any games that use DirectX10 for at least 2 years.

    Anyone REQUIRING it before then will be severely limiting their consumer base; games failing to be picked up due to a small consumer base will also affect the adoption rate since other game manufacturers will be watching those g
    • I don't think employers care about DirectX 10. Last I checked, most jobs don't encourage playing games on company computers, let alone the latest games.

      Besides, that time frame sounds about right for how long DirectX 9 games came along. Atleast, the ones that really utilized it. I'm pretty sure the pattern is the same for each iteration of DirectX: The API is released on X date but it isn't until X+1 year that we see games that really use it. Heck, DirectX 9 is still being pushed further and further with g

    • Re:2 years for adoption (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MBCook (132727) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Sunday August 13 2006, @07:47PM (#15900148) Homepage

      Considering [...] DirectX10 is only available on Vista and that 50% of employers say they are not going to purchase [soon], it's a safe bet to say that we won't be seeing any games [...] for at least 2 years.

      I think I found the flaw in your logic. Employers != Consumers.

      The fact is, games will probably drive Vista adoption more than any other factor save factory pre-installs. We proabaly won't see much requiring DX10 for a year or more, but that is because most big games take 1-3 years to develop so that's about the earliest that we'll see stuff.

      This may cause game manufacturers to change tactics since OpenGL is supported on ALL OS's.

      That fact has always been true, and it hasn't made much of a difference so far, even back when OpenGL and DirectX were much closer in abilities (without needing extensions and such).

  • No company should want DX 10+ (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CrazyJim1 (809850) on Sunday August 13 2006, @07:38PM (#15900127) Journal
    Why would any company want to lose out on the win98,2000,XP crowd when they market their game? Only Microsoft has any interest in selling stuff that uses DX10+. To me DX10+ is dumb, stupid, and inane.
    • Hate to tell you but a lot of recent games don't support 98. It took several years for XP gain that spot though, so don't expect Vista adoption to be immedient either.

    • Why would any company want to lose out on the win98,2000,XP crowd when they market their game? Only Microsoft has any interest in selling stuff that uses DX10+. To me DX10+ is dumb, stupid, and inane.

      People said the same stuff about DirectX 9, DirectX 8, DirectX 7.... you get the idea.

      Corporations realize $$$ when they can market the newest, fastest, shiniest whatever. For PC games, this is especially true - how realistic a games graphics are drive sales, and often make a game more fun.

      More import

  • DirectX shuts out porting of games to LINUX/Mac (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Danathar (267989) on Sunday August 13 2006, @07:42PM (#15900138) Journal
    It used to be that games used both OpenGL and DirectX (especially before Direct3d had the features to compete with OpenGL), but since game developers have made windoze their PC development platform, direct3d has become the defacto graphics library to use. One of the reasons there was no Half-Life 2 native LINUX/Mac port is because there was no OpenGL development and Valve had no inclination to do MAJOR programming work to make it work with OpenGL.

    Until somebody writes a game that does something on LINUX/MAC that can't be done on windows because of the underlying OS that is successful I doubt if we'll see any change.

    • They simply don't care. The fact is Half-Life was one of the best selling games of all time. They promised a Mac port and showed it off in '98 or '99 but it was never released. I don't think that was because of DirectX.

      Actually one of the things that I've heard about the Mac is Havok is a problem. It runs, and Havok as written a port, but no one is willing to pay for it (they have to pay for the port and the license, despite the fact it is already complete). I think I got this from MacGamer, but I'm not su

  • But not for the obvious reasons. I'm tired of these articles because then the woodwork of MS bashers comes out and says the same tired comments over and over again. "MS is just doing this so everyone has to buy Vista!" "There is no reason why DX10 can't be backported to XP!" It's like these people never saw these articles posted before, and they really feel like they are making some new contribution. They are not.

  • OpenGL vs. DirectX (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 13 2006, @07:59PM (#15900180)
    After years of pushing DirectX, Nvidia is now betting on OpenGL and has promised first class OpenGL support for their upcoming cards. What does this mean? At the very least it means that there must be good reason for choosing OpenGL over DirectX. Also, keep in mind that OpenGL is an actual graphics standard whereas DirectX is not. Both will co-exist for the next couple of years but it is likely that in the long run OpenGL leaves DirectX in the dust.
    • nVidia has always had excellent support for OpenGL. And concidering that alot of the guys at nVidia is former SGI employees, SGI being the ones that made OpenGL, they've always been OpenGL fans. So basicly, is anything you wrote correct?
    • More like wishful innacurate zealot rambling. nVidia isn't betting on OpenGL, nVidia has ALWAYS supported OpenGL to the same level as they have DriectX, which is to say excellently. Ever since their fumbling first attempt with a proprietary API they decalred their cards native APIs were DirectX and OpenGL. They supported both as native, and no others. You'll find that with games that support both, their speed is equal. To this day, I've never seen them slack on their GL support.

      And yes, DirectX IS a standar

  • The best thing about DirectX 10.x... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Teckla (630646) on Sunday August 13 2006, @07:59PM (#15900186)
    ...is that the vendor lock-in is FREE!
  • Impressive ! DirectX 10.0 isn't even released, yet their PR department is already selling us 10.1 ! Wow ! What about the features for the OS they're planning to release in 2020 ?

  • Beta? (Score:3, Funny)

    by bky1701 (979071) on Sunday August 13 2006, @08:58PM (#15900375) Homepage
    Doesn't this officially make 10.0 a beta? It's outdated before realise; sounds beta to me...

  • More importantly.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by StikyPad (445176) on Sunday August 13 2006, @10:11PM (#15900586) Homepage
    Why didn't they follow Apple's lead and call it DirectXX?

    Obviously the 10th point revision would be DirectXXX.

    • GPUs already are "computers on a chip" (Score:5, Informative)

      by cos(x) (677938) on Sunday August 13 2006, @07:21PM (#15900063)
      GPU shader processors certainly are Turing complete and there are plenty of people (ab-)using them for general purpose calculations. See for example http://www.gpgpu.org/ [gpgpu.org]. For some types of calculations, GPUs are much faster than CPUs due to their massively parallel processing. In fact, I have written my thesis on that very topic, comparing CPU and GPU based implementations of some algorithms.
    • I don't understand what everyone wants Microsoft to do with their next version of windows. Before everyone was complaining that they needed to ditch all the legacy code and clean things up, and now everyone is pissed off that new software for vista won't be backwards compatible. You've got to drop backwards compatibility sometime, if you want to get rid of legacy code.
      • Here's the problem: Microsoft reputedly shipped DirectX 10.0 on Windows XP to video card manufacturers so they can develop DirectX 10-optimized drivers.

        Obviously, if that rumour is actually true, Microsoft is pulling a fast one on "consumers" just to force an upgrade. They know that their market share is in danger (ref: OS X on x86 and being only a baby step away from licensing to OEMs when Jobs comes to his senses, Linux rapidly maturing over the last three to four years, etc.) so they need a short-term bo
    • Good luck with that wish.. If the stuck with old standards, then you wouldnt be forced to upgrade..
    • The problem is the driver model for DX10 does not work well for the XP WDDM. I assure you they, and all the game publishers, wanted 10 to be available for as many Windows versions as possible. The break with the driver model was fundamental to several things but especially multi-head/multi-device hardware acceleration, changes to the cooperative nature of the 2D and 3D aspects of the video cards (both for fundamental re-factoring of the nature of DirectX Graphics and for the needs of advanced rendering sy

    • Not so simple (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Rob Simpson (533360) <`moc.oohay' `ta' `nospmistreb'> on Sunday August 13 2006, @09:55PM (#15900534)
      The difference is that it will be very easy to make games that run on both Vista and XP/2000/etc compared to making a Linux or Mac port. While I'm sure there will be a large market for Vista, if a company can use OpenGL (or even DirectX 9) just as easily and sell the game for other versions of Windows as well, they would be stupid not to. There'd have to be a some feature in DirectX 10 or Vista that is essential to the game, which I find unlikely.

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