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Beyond DirectX 10 - A glance at DirectX 10.1 236

Posted by CmdrTaco from the one-percent-more dept.
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 More

Beyond DirectX 10 - A glance at DirectX 10.1

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  • Hopefully... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Ichigo Kurosaki ( 886802 )
    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.
      • The problem is that new features are introduced instantaneously by Microsoft into DirectX, but there
        tends to be a delay with the same features becoming univerally available on all graphics hardware (ARB, EXT extensions), although vendors are free to introduce their own custom extensions.

        If you're an application developer wanting to develop a bleeding edge application for the PC, you're more or less forced to use DirectX.
      • 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
        • I think the Rest Of The World is referring to computing that isn't grey boxes on desktops.

        • There is no new money to be made, a port would merely move a sale from Win32 to Linux, more work, no revenue. The Linux market is really only those who refuse to emulate or dual boot.

          Well if they had a clue maybe they'd realize that gamers really couldn't care less what operating system they're using as long as it runs the games. If game companies started basing their products on a stable Linux core instead of that flaky Windoze shit we'd start to see gamers switching overnight. Do you really think they

          • 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.
        • OpenGL gives you easy porting to Mac, Linux and all the Japanese consoles.
          Not a small market, the consoles alone, with two more systems coming Real Soon Now.

    • 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!

  • 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

    • 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 techno

    • the first of these, imaginatively titled DirectX 10.1, will be the first of these ...I know you had a point there somewhere...

  • Why is directX still tied to windows? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gmai l . com> on Sunday August 13, 2006 @07:24PM (#15900074) Homepage
    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 argument for/against Wine/Cedega/Crossover is that while they do encourage users to switch over to Linux by making apps available now, they also discourage developing a native Linux version for something that works flawlessly under Wine -- or it may be easier to make it work under Wine (or with WineLib) than to do a real port.

        As you point out, we have a hard time getting that kind of critical mass that would prompt people to actually do proper native ports, partly because Wine will never be perfect. Es
    • 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.
      • That's not a technical reason. In only furthers to incriminate them on the basis they're a monopoly.

        Tom
        • Sure it's technical.

          Technically it's easier to port the API if you are a license holder and have the right to look at the original source code and port it to a new platform.

          Technically it's harder if you have to reverse engineer it on your own WITHOUT access to the source code (like the wine/transgaming people are trying to do)
      • 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.

        Now, that's not fair. Windows DirectX games aren't locked to windows APIs, they're totally portable to the xbox and xbox360.
        • If you can reverse engineer the API's so that it works all the more power to ya. The wine people are attempting it.

          Legally it could be done with almost 100% compatibility (of course you'd have to recompile your app for the target platform) IF microsoft licensed somebody to look at the real source code and port it to another platform.

          What makes you think the windows API's are not used in the xbox and/or xbox360?
    • "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
        • Many console manufacturers have "exclusive" games. Not for any technical reason, but business, only. They further add to this by selling their consoles at a loss.

          Does this make their practices monopolistic and / or predatory?

          What is inherently magical about Spotlight that it could not technically run on Windows? Why, then, is it something you can only get with Apple and OS X? Is this a monopolistic practice? (Remember of course that you can engage in monopolistic practices without being a monopoly.)

          • My parents use this defense often and it's really annoying. I don't think Apple is of any higher moral standing than Microsoft or Intel [etc].

            Microsoft is just the punching bag here since this is a thread about DX.

            Tom
            • No, I appreciate that - but it was more a question of "just how black and white a scenario is it?" - i.e. is it inherently evil that a company produces a line of "accessories" for its product, like DX for Windows, or Spotlight for Apple? Whilst I agree that MS, and others, have been guilty of unduly / unfairly milking this, I also think it would be somewhat unconducive to the industry if such things were entirely spanked as being monopolistic.
              • There is a difference when you add something but the core value isn't tied to it. OS X is a decent OS with or without any given random widget. How useful is Windows without DX or Office or Visual Studio? Not very. What this lets Microsoft do is grow their market and lock them into situations they shouldn't be locked into.

                Generally, in terms of software, I'd draw the line at software which is platform specific [for no technical reason] which uses proprietary standards [when published ones exist, or more
                • People often make mention of OpenGL and ask why games companies don't use it - they often neglect to note that the reason has nothing (or very little) to do with MS (attempting to) lock them into DX. One of the biggest things stopping people using OGL is that it is 'graphics only'. There's none of the controller handlers. None of the sound handlers. Etc. It's an open standard, so define a sound language that interacts natively with the graphics and see how that goes, because there's a lot lower overhead cur
                  • If your company will publish more than one game, develop a network layer and reuse it. If you're big enough just license one. If you're small base it on more portable primitives.

                    A more sound solution for smaller companies

                    1. Write game with a flexible framework [e.g. C++ class driven, can even emulate them in C]
                    2. Write first game [edition/release] for Win32
                    3. As you get money from game spend time on writing Linux [e.g. X11/ALSA] plugins

                    This is nicely "self-pacing" as you don't use time on porting unles
  • 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
      • Yes but they are still a good measure of how the consumer base will respond. Also, governments and businesses are the biggest early adopters. And from the same poll 14% hadn't even heard of Vista.

        You can probably safely bet that with the exception of hardcore gamers, these statistiocs will probably transfer to the average consumer as well. Those purchasing Vista will also be in for a suprise due to the monitor DRM and will probably re-install XP before purchasing a new monitor... especially if gas prices co
        • Monitor DRM? You mean HDMI? Yeah. That only applies if you use HDMI. I doubt DX10 requires HDMI on the video card. Of course, the average consumer will be buying from Dell or some such vendor and likely will get a monitor with their system. In such case, DRM won't matter to them; only to people that want to rip HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies.

    • 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).

      • Employers do not equalk consumers... this is true. However this is a good measure of the market. Plus considering that Vista will have monitor DRM, early adopters (aside from hardcore gamers) may not find having to buy a whole new monitor acceptable especially if gas prices continue to rise and put a crimp on the expendable income of the average consumer.

        It's not just the perceivable costs but the unperceived costs that will affect adoption.
      • Consumers != tech-savvy people. They'll probably buy a computer with onboard graphics that will not play their muchly-coveted game, simply because they have no honest clue what "Minimum System Requirements" means. They'll bitch, moan, and move on because "It doesn't work." In comes OpenGL (Which any half-competent 3-d accelerator can handle) and suddenly "It works!" D3D will be just like Microsoft within a few years since Gates left the company - nothing but shambles.
    • Yes but how many employers back in '01 said they weren't going to purchase XP? And now, they are all borg.

      • XP had a LARGE DEGREE of backward compatibility... from what I have read about Vista, this won't be the case.
      • Five. Years. Later. And the PC I have at work still runs Win2k. So what's your point? You can't expect from that comment that they would have stayed with Win2k indefinitely; as it was, they often became borg by rolling out new boxes, not by actively upgrading old ones. Look for the same to happen w/Vista--call it "adaptation by attrition." /Fox News, I hold a copyright on that phrase.
    • I see this as forced revenue protection rather than progress. Why are they bothering to release info about 10.1 when 10 isn't even out yet... let alone being used to full potential. This is typical MS. "We're failing now... but look what we'll do next." It's old.
    • Well, the fist dx10 only game was already announced, halo 2. How pathetic is it that an xbox 1 port is dx10 only.

      ahh, I posted on this before and reposted it, but this topic seems to keep coming up and I'll just link it this time if someone wants to read my thoughts on this

      http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=192814&cid=158 28522 [slashdot.org]
    • 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 games that first launch with it.

      Are you sure? I seem to recall that most game-heavy PC users went through a heavy upgrade cycle whenever id Software announced a new "Doom" or "Quake" game. If "Doom IV" were to require DirectX 10.1, you can bet that Microsoft would find a lot of upgrad
    • we won't be seeing any games that use DirectX10 for at least 2 years
      Hmm... like, for example, Crysis? Or UT2K7? Or Halo 2 (PC obviously)? Or Flight Simulator X? Come on out from under your rock, buddy... these are all games that use DX10 and they'll be out well within 2 years.

  • 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.

    • You mean like the vast number of companies whose games no longer support Win98 or Win2K and require WinXP? Once adoption reaches a certain point devs will feel safe requiring the usage of Vista, like it's always been. Whether you'd like to admit it or not, each iteration of DX has given us more and more power that devs are just itching to tap.

    • 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

    • Although I sympathise (particularly as I'm a Mac user), the more important point is that it locks devs out of the Playstation and Nintendo markets.

      In these days of massive development costs, any game dev company not looking with one eye to porting is making poor financial decisions.

      DX10 sounds like it's going to be great. I want OpenGL to match and exceed it though, to spur devs to use it for the portability it provides.
      • At least DirectX gives you a start on Microsoft consoles, OpenGL gives you close to nothing on consoles.
  • 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.

    • Re:OpenGL vs. DirectX (Score:5, Informative)

      by Tolleman ( 606762 ) <jens.tollofsen@se> on Sunday August 13, 2006 @08:20PM (#15900257) Homepage
      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?

    • Insightful? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Sycraft-fu ( 314770 )
      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
      • OpenGL can afford to lag behind D3D - it doesn't have to go thru an extra layer or two of code to get it's damned job done, which is why most major studio-production CG movies (and some games, Doom 3 as an example) use OpenGL as it's renderer. It's more efficient, and when OpenAL really comes forward, DirectX is going to have a very serious fucking run for it's money.

  • 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 ?

  • Not a fanboi (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm not an MS fanboy, but to those people who complain that its not good to make Vista-only games because its such a small market, are the same people who complain that there aren't enough games for Linux/Mac. I don't have statistics yet but its pretty much guaranteed that no matter how small, Vista will still have a bigger market share than Linux and Mac combined. I'm not trolling. This is reality.

    • Not so simple (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Rob Simpson ( 533360 ) 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.
  • Usually a /. ed webserver just means I'll revist the article later. A non event.(Doesnt stop me posting though).

    But this one tickled my fancy.

    "Elite" implies they are impervious to /.

    The "Bastards" part implies they will kick my ass if I ever deemed challenge them(Which would be a waste of time as I am not worthy).

    Its odd. As I trudge nostril deep through the sewerage that is my work place, this "page cannot be displayed" bought me a smile. And my day feels better for it. Thanks Elite good guys.

  • 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.
  • I know Microsoft does not deserve all the roses in the world for its software, but some users in here seem to think beyond all reasoning. How exactly is the announcement of features bundled in DirectX 10.1 a bad thing? It's great that we're seeing some development even beyond DXX simply because the next release is supposedly groundbreaking according to people outside of Microsoft. Complaining about a release that comes shortly after is no good because that only prompts developers to adapt its features soone
  • I'm seeing a lot of comments here lamenting the fact that the majority of PC games are developed using DirectX instead of OpenGL. You have to remember that DirectX Graphics (formerly Direct3D) is just one part of the overall package. DirectX also provides simple, useful interfaces for sound, input and networking. While I'm reasonably sure that the networking support doesn't get a lot of use, the sound and input APIs do. Heck, even the much-touted OpenGL example World of Warcraft actually makes heavy use of

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