A Glimpse Into 3D future: DirectX Next Preview

Dave Baumann writes "Beyond3D has put up an article based on Microsoft's games developers presentations given at Meltdown, looking at the future directions of MS's next generation DirectX - currently titled "DirectX Next" (DX10). With Pixel Shaders 2.0 and 3.0 already a part of DirectX9 this article gives a feel of what to expect from PS/VS4.0 and other DirectX features hardware developers will be expected to deliver with the likes of R500 and NV50."

In other news...

[Jarrik]

Doom 3 was delayed.. again.

Slayers

[zeroclip]

So DX11 will be "DirectX Try"?

Re: So it's not going to be called DirectX X???

[ezh]

We had one NeXT already. It turned back into Apple ;) On the other hand, obsession with X's will finally bring you to triple X. What an operating system that would be! :-)

They're failing to address a major bottleneck IMO

[Samir Gupta]

Since the earliest days of 3D graphics architetures on the PC, a major bottleneck has been the speed of the bus between main system memory and the graphics hardware, be it AGP, PCI, or some proprietary solution. This is usually the limiting factor when it comes to transferring models and textures of a size that we would like to use when rendering super realistic 3-D characters for games.

At Nintendo, we have been surprised that no major graphics vendor has really addressed to an adequate degree this problem, so we're currently spearheading the development of a new architectural paradigm called MARIO, standing for (Making Assets for Rendering I/O Optimized).

In a nutshell, we move bandwidth and space-consuming model and texture data from RAM and disc media, where it is time-consuming to load, to super-fast ROM, contained within the GPU itself. Having this data in silicon will dramatically speed up the rendering process and hence the user experience overall.

You may ask, how do we modify these models and textures? Of course, that is not possible, but we've done great research, and have found that for most of our games, the same models and textures are always being used anyhow, so it makes sense to put those in ROM.

Specifically, we're embedding data for Mario, Luigi, Donkey Kong, the Princess, and Link into ROM. For 99% of our anticipated future games, this will cause a dramatic speedup in performance, and will provide a great incentive for game developers to license the use of our assets in their games, instead of using their own proprietary non-Nintendo characters in order to make their 3-D rendering pipeline as efficent as possible.

We at Nintendo look forward to the quantum leap in graphics performance this new architectural vision will surely bring on and are quite excited as you can see!

Re: So it's not going to be called DirectX X???

[t0ny]

On the other hand, obsession with X's will finally bring you to triple X. What an operating system that would be! :-)

They could get Vin Deisel to write it!

DirectX Next?

[Reteo Varala]

What, you mean it's not going to be called DirectXX?

It would certainly get someone's attention...

Re:It would be nice

[bigman2003]

You've got to be kidding- whether or not you play games on a console determines if you have values? Is software all about personal values, and morals now?

This is starting to sound like vegetarians are taking over or something. Where what you eat/software you run, determines your worth as a human being.

It really doesn't matter that much in the big scheme of things.