DirectX 10 Hardware Is Now Obsolete

ela_gervaise writes "SIGGRAPH 2007 was the stage where Microsoft dropped the bomb, informing gamers that the currently available DirectX 10 hardware will not support the upcoming DirectX 10.1 in Vista SP1. In essence, all current DX10 hardware is now obsolete. But don't get too upset just yet: 'Gamers shouldn't fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and, more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about. The spec revision basically makes a number of things that are optional in DX10 compulsory under the new standard - such as 32-bit floating point filtering, as opposed to the 16-bit current. 4xAA is a compulsory standard to support in 10.1, whereas graphics vendors can pick and choose their anti-aliasing support currently. We suspect that the spec is likely to be ill-received. Not only does it require brand new hardware, immediately creating a minuscule sub-set of DX10 owners, but it also requires Vista SP1, and also requires developer implementation.'"

More juice!

4xAA is a compulsory That would seem to me to be the biggest change, that it requires batteries now.

Re:More juice!

Support of the feature by the video card is mandatory. Use of the feature by the game is not.

At least, that's how I understand it.

That aside, am I the only person who remembers reading this "bomb" months back? The plan was that instead of checking for individual features (and coding around their lack case-by-case, like we will still get to do with OpenGL) the developer would check for a DirectX version, leaving fewer opportunities for wonky bugs from weird support combinations.

-:sigma.SB

(Disclaimer: I am a game developer who exclusively uses OpenGL for hardware 3D and I fully intend never to write a single line of DirectX code. Ever.)

Re:More juice!

On many games, I can run at a much higher resolution without AA than with. In my opinion, high resolution > antialiasing.

This is especially true on displays like LCDs, which have a fixed pixel size. Running at a lower resolution than native will add scaling artefacts, and AA can make these even worse. Of course, the spec only make support for AA mandatory; it doesn't force you to use it.

Wait...

You mean developers are actually using DirectX 10?

Re:Wait...

I am hoping they finally started to figure risks of using a MS only technology rather than platform independent, documented frameworks such as OpenGL, OpenAL.

I've always wondered about this. It seems that the single biggest problem with porting Windows games to Mac or Linux is lack of DirectX support, so why do developers even use this broken technology to begin with instead of OpenGL? Is it easier to program for? Presumably Windows also supports OpenGL so why not make games that are easily ported like id does?

Or did they simply state "We can't sell Vista otherwise, those FPS racing teens will buy it for DX10".

Well, obviously that is the reason. There's no reason Windows 2000 Pro wasn't sufficient to run today's modern games if they had just released the latest DirectX libraries for it, but then they wouldn't have sold Windows XP and dragged gamers into the wonderful world of DRM and activation. I was more than happy to keep using Windows 2000 Pro on my gaming machine and didn't need any of the features of Windows XP.

Re:Wait...

I've posted it before, but never really got a response. So here goes. My take is we have to look back at history. Some will argue that the reason they choose directx today is, supposedly, some things are easier vs opengl.

But way back when, I always wondered why a company like valve took an opengl engine and ported it to directx (for hl1) when no one would argue that directx was better then. Hell, carmack had his famous open letter to microsoft to ensure support for opengl. Microsoft saw how big gaming was becoming, and the best way to tie your users to one platform was to tie the developers to one platform. If hl1 was opengl only when it exploded, maybe companies like ati would have got in gear and developed better (i.e. not shit) opengl drivers. Either that or miss on out the huge hit that was/is counterstrike. I'm not saying valve was the lynchpin in how things ended up. But if big players like them stuck to opengl, more companies might be willing to port as their games would be opengl based anyway.

So why valve did that at that time I'll never understand, but microsoft understood the market in this case, all too well.

Why aren't there more game developers like id software who actually care? Carmack has said in the past he tries to keep everything crossplatform not because it's necessarily the profitable move, but because 'it's a good thing'.

Re:For the extra features, I'm guessing

You missed the root cause of DirectX's success, which is that Microsoft has been a lot more quickly responsive and to the concerns of developers and hardware designers. They listen to the API fixes and new features that game developers ask them for, and they work with graphics card manufacturers to expose new capabilities as soon as they are available, and release new DirectX SDKs every few months. Meanwhile OpenGL's committee decisions are always a step behind.

So if you want to make your game portable by not using any DirectX stuff, well, you'll have to write your own equivalent for that other stuff. That translates directly into higher development costs, plus God knows if your own stuff will work as well, and what bugs will it have.

Nah there are excellent portable third-party libraries for this stuff now, such as Miles (sound), Bink (video), DemonWare (networking). The components of DirectX that are not Direct3D are pretty much irrelevant today.

Re:Wait...

Did MS care to explain what kind of undocumented,hidden quantum computing (!) routines in Vista needed for DX 10 running?

I can explain that one. I read a post a while back where someone who was in the know explained it (it was on one of the Microsoft blogs, I think). DX 10 contained virtualized graphics memory (that may not be the right term). Like system memory, each program would get it's own addresses and you could page in and out graphics data. This is a big feature. It also required kernel and GDI changes. This is why DX 10 could only run on Vista.

Someone (I think it was NVidia), couldn't get it done in time.

So it ended up optional in the spec (or moved out completely, I don't remember). The people who did do it (ATI, I think) got an unfair shake. Now without that feature, there is no technical reason DX 10 can't be run on XP without a few small innocuous changes. But they don't have time at this point (or a business reason).

DX 10 being only on Vista was based on a very valid techical reason... that they gave up on and removed.

Where is OpenGL when we need it?

This seems like a window of opportunity for a new OpenGL standard. Anybody knows when it's due?

Re:Where is OpenGL when we need it?

OpenGL 3 is announced recently: http://www.opengl.org/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?u bb=get_topic;f=3;t=015351;p=0/ [opengl.org].

Re:Where is OpenGL when we need it?

SDL is not comparable to DirectX in any way

From the SDL website:

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer.

From http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/AboutGFW/Page s/DirectX10.aspx [gamesforwindows.com] :

DirectX® APIs gives multimedia applications access to the advanced features of high-performance hardware such as three-dimensional (3-D) graphics acceleration chips and sound cards. They control low- level functions, including two- dimensional (2-D) graphics acceleration; support for input devices such as joysticks, keyboards, and mice; and control of sound mixing and sound output.

No, it is not a joke. Yes, they are comparable.

Such a disappointment

I'm sure the two developers using DX10 are gonna be pissed.

Re:Such a disappointment

> I'm sure the two developers using DX10 are gonna be pissed.

I have dissociative identity disorder, you insensitive clod!

M$ fractures the DX10 community!

Yeah, this move surely fractured the DX10 developer community.

Once again, early adopters take it in the shorts..

The article makes it seem as if Microsoft rushed DX10 out before it was truly ready; when you consider that this is what they often seem to do with their OS's, this should probably come as no surprise. Of course, we're seeing this news on the Inquirer, often considered to be a slightly less-than-reliable source of tech news. Maybe I'll reserve judgement until I hear another explanation from some other source.

Since when is DirectX a standard?

Once again, those seven little letters get left out of a "standards" article: d-e f-a-c-t-o.

Re:Since when is DirectX a standard?

DirectX is a standard and de facto standards are a subset of standards: the minority that are actually used.

A standard is just a set of rules. If I wrote a blog article "Rules for wiping ones arse" that would be a standard. In the unlikely event it became widely accepted it would be a de facto standard. If the international community became concerned about global arse-wiping inconsistency it could ultimately become an ISO standard.

Catchy title but...

"Now" is probably an exaggeration, considering that we're talking about Vista SP1.

"Obsolete" ...I guess my DX9 card has been obsolete for a few years now, it still ticks on nicely though. Heck, all my hardware is probably obsolete.

You could sum up TFA in a single line: "Microsoft discusses future extensions to the DirectX API. The current generation of hardware won't support those."

Are anyone really surprised? Newsworthy?

Re:Catchy title but...

You hear about it for a few reasons:

1) Some people (like many on Slashdot) hate MS and want them to fail, thus look for anything that makes them look bad and make sure it gets page time.

2) For some reason, some people had the perception that because DX10 was launched with Vista, that made it special and thus it wouldn't be changed for a long time. Never mind that MS has released a version of DirectX that has added a significant feature (as in something that needs more hardware) every 1-2 years in the past.

3) Perhaps because of this many people bought in to the DX10 cards expecting them to be "futureproof". Again no idea why anyone would think that given graphics cards are the things that evolve the fastest and thus obsolete the fastest.

Also I'm not so sure they said it wouldn't support it. Maybe I misread their slides, but all I saw was they said that "upcoming hardware" will support it. That statement doesn't mean that current hardware won't.

Either way, much ado about nothing. Games will continue to be made to support whatever hardware is common on the market. Game companies love all the flashy new toys, but they are in bussiness to make money and you do that by selling games that run on the actual systems that are out there. That means so long as most peopel don't have cards capable of using a new standard, they won't require it (though they may support it to give mroe eye candy to the eairly adopters).

Heck, right now you'll discover that a great number of games require nothing more than a DirectX 8 accelerator. That's a card like a GeForce 4 Ti fore example. Basically that means shader model 1.1 hardware. While many games support 2.0 and 3.0 (DX 9.0 and 9.0c respectively) you'll find that a good number don't require 2.0, and very few require 3.0. The reason is that there are still a lot of people using older cards. Not every one upgrades every year. Thus game makers have to take that in to account.

It's not like the second 10.1 comes out developers are going to say "Ok, everyone better upgrade because this is all we support!" They could try, and they'd just go out of business and other, smarter, developers would support the hardware that more people have.

Heck it is a pretty recent phenomena that developers have stopped supporting Windows ME for games, and some still do. Why? Enough people still used it.

A Bit Late To Notice?

That DirectX 10.1 is incompatible with 10.0 (along with new WDDM interface) has been known for at least a year now. It's a bit late [elitebastards.com] for people to be in shock about it.

Slashdot even covered it before [slashdot.org].

Just because Microsoft officially announced it at a conference doesn't *exactly* make it new news, since they made it very clear on roadmaps and everything else exactly what was going to happen, and why it wasn't the best idea ever to adopt DirectX 10.0 hardware, rather than hardware capable of 10.1 (or 10.2) and whatever the new superset of OpenGL happened to be (3.0 as it turns out).

Also, the reason to bother [elitebastards.com] with DirectX 10.1 isn't so much that it offers "brand new super features" to games, but the WDDM 2.1 bits, which would allow for far finer-grained context switching and task management. Being able to immediately switch from rendering one small bit, to starting to render something else, which would theorhetically make all of the compiz/Aero type stuff be able to run much more smoothly in conjunction with real 3D rendering (ie, games, CAD).

It all seems an exercise in futility to me, as far as the "DirectX 10" hardware goes. I like faster, I like more features, but there just seems no real reason to upgrade beyond my Geforce 6800 for the price point (which I got 18 months ago). Not to a 7800-series or comparable, and certainly not to an 8x00 or upcoming 9x00 Geforce, unless driver stability improves dramatically, and they can add more real-world-useful features, particularly without the need for Windows Vista. I'm back using WinXP "for a while" again, but I generally won't buy hardware anymore unless it's a notable and drastic improvement in Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD.

I digress, but the point is, the news has already been covered before. If it apparently wasn't that attention-worthy a year ago, is it now? New DirectX versions *always* require brand new hardware, whereas most minor OpenGL revisions have almost always included new features that also work on old hardware (OpenGL 1.5's Vertex Buffer Objects humming along happily on a Geforce 256, for instance), and while full compliance is the best, all you really need to care about is if something implements certain clearly defined extensions, rather than wondering if Nvidia or ATI have 'misinterpreted' specifications over DirectX. Both have been panned in the past for 'creative' adoption of pixel shader standards and bizarre interpretations of DirectX 9.

I'd just hope that eventually, there's more actual competition again, and both companies (and new companies) actually respect and care about standards compliance and that both they and the standards bodies start to care about what customers actually doing with their hardware.

This is one deluded discussion...

First off.. technology is made obsolete??? no shit! Its hard to imagine the slashdot crowd finding this to be news. This doesn't mean your dx10 card doesn't work anymore, you don't install SP1 and your PC wont boot with DX10 hardware. If you get upset every time people make revisions and improvements to software and hardware, I suggest you packup your computer and return it to avoid further heart ache. If you are an early adopter of the latest hardware and don't read any reviews (which all from memory said it will be some time before dx10 is going to matter) then thats your fault. Microsoft have explained in numerous interveiws (and documentation of course) how DX 10 will work, they even suggested 10.1 would be out BEFORE vista shipped. Graphics card features change ALL THE TIME, you have to write miles of CAPS checking code and render paths to support the zoo of cards and features. Now with DX10 they roll all the features up and any DX 10.x card will support the featuers, even if you write a DX 10.0 and DX 10.1 path, its only two options you have to support. You didn't see "ATI MAKES LAST CARD OBSOLETE BY INTRODUCING NEW PRODUCT", even though those changes could be far, far more difficult to develop for by having a bunch of changed caps and maybe even a few new proprietary ones. A fixed feature set is what allows developers to squeze out every drop of performance from PS2 hardware to make amazing looking graphics, even though your mobile phone might have more processing power available to it. And lastly.. people who mock the, apparent, modest real world improvments dx10 is offering.. what is your point? Intel brings out a new processor every x months with ~1-3% improvements, by your logic they should just stop bothering making new processors. Of course thats stupid, you wait till the improvment is enough for you to find it compelling.

Re:I'm not really sure this matters all that much

Wow, what a load of FUD. OpenGL is completely supported under Vista and is in no way routed through DX:

http://www.opengl.org/pipeline/article/vol003_9/ [opengl.org]

Re:Are they TRYING to shoot themselves in the foot

The summary and the Inquirer article are, well, wrong.

Microsoft announced 10.1 as a side-by-side update - DirectX 10 is not obsolete, they are both fully supported. Developers and manufacturers have the option of coding for 10.1 or sticking with 10. The real quote:

Direct3D 10.1 is an incremental, side-by-side update to Direct3D 10.0 that provides a series of new rendering features that will be available in an upcoming generation of graphics hardware.

Re:Oh no!

I didn't think I'd live to see the day where new technology would be unwelcome to the slashdot crowd.

That's the general trend of Slashdot nowadays. The realization hit me when everyone started bashing the PS3, which contains a very impressive processor, allows installation of linux, has built-in media streaming, uses standard USB and Bluetooth hardware, runs folding@home, upscales DVDs and old games, etc. etc. All anyone here says, though, is "OMG SONY I BET THERE'S A ROOTKIT ON IT LOL".

This isn't a tech site anymore, it's a political site. Witness all the anti-RIAA/MPAA stories, global warming stories, election stories...

Re:Mandatory 4xAA is this a joke?

You're reading it wrong. The -games- aren't required to support 4xAA, the -hardware- is. It's great that you hate AA and all, but there are plenty of others that insist on it. By requiring the hardware to support to be '10.1 compatible' they are merely pandering to the majority of gamers out there.

They haven't forced you to do anything, and they haven't forced developers either.