The End Of DirectX As We Know It 285
socram writes "Speaking with ATI and NVIDIA at ECTS allowed us to confirm that after DX9.0, DirectX Graphics is no more. In name only. Microsoft's next set of core presentation and 3D APIs are now under the umbrella of Windows Graphics Foundation and Avalon. Microsoft will still rely on DirectX in name for the rest of the core components, but the graphics API is now under a new name. Look out for WGF 1.0 compatibility on the back of that next generation graphics card's box. Some WGF 1.0 Info!" Update: 09/06 22:27 GMT by T : David Ross of hexus.net points out that this text comes straight from hexus, and should have been credited as such.
I don't think so (Score:5, Informative)
Re:DirectX (Score:5, Informative)
It's not MicroSoft's fault, by any extension, it is however silly that you are not allowed to check if it is playable according to _your_ standard; and it's the gamedevelopers you should blame.
I guess it's easy to point at something big, like MS if you want someone to blame, people tend to do that.
Re:Makes perfect sense. (Score:2, Informative)
As a poor college student, ram is hard to come by. I don't want my desktop using it all to generate spiffy little icon effects. And seeing as Microsoft isn't going to ship multiple desktops, I hope Longhorn keeps the graphics simple for us poor kids.
Re:Nice... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A little early to celebrating? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wonderful (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Makes perfect sense. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:please them? are you sure? (Score:5, Informative)
1) that page, judging by the date at the bottom, is 7 years old - that's plenty of time for the situation to have completely changes
2) judging from the logo on it and the URL, the guy is particularly anti-MS; you might want to cite a source with a little more objectivity
Re:hmm...might this be the point of time... (Score:3, Informative)
As a historical note, Halflife added D3D support at some stage, even though it was based on Quake1/2, which was also OpenGL (and Glide & Software) based.
That being said, it was probably a lot easier to add at the time than with current engines, which implement a lot more features.
Re:A little early to celebrating? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:hmm...might this be the point of time... (Score:5, Informative)
And he almost decided to kill it off. According to Carmack, the "godawful interface" for OpenGL pBuffers/Render to Texture, made him be "the closest ever to switching over to D3D".
If you are interested in listening to an hour of video-graphics supergeeky stuff, download the one hour video [gamespy.com] of his keynote from Quakecon 2004.
It contains an hour of tech-talk from John C. about the doom3 engine, and what he's working on now.
Re:So many changes... (Score:3, Informative)
Mod parent down (Score:1, Informative)
"Microsoft - like any other big company tending a big market - tries to please them, not piss them off!"
Paul Hsieh's OpenGL versus Direct3D [azillionmonkeys.com]
Learn to link. While copypasteing is annoying enough, these anti-page-widening spaces /. inserts make it unbearable.
Re:I don't think so (Score:4, Informative)
Re:curious (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Vaguely on-topic (Score:4, Informative)
Re:[OT] Re:Nice... (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know if that's the main motivator to them moving things to user-mode or not, but it seems so. I can imagine the drivers being built in a two-stage structure where the bulk of the driver is in user mode and a small back-end runs in kernel mode.
I am not sure what world Tranzig here lives in
Re:hmm...might this be the point of time... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:hmm...might this be the point of time... (Score:3, Informative)
Though it has been reengineered over the years, its BSP files are still almost Quake 1 compatible, its SPR files can be recompiled in Quake 1 compilers, and many other things.
or more to the point OpenGL in it.
wtf are you on? More than 50% of people use Half-Life's OpenGL renderer over its D3D or Software renderers. Namely due to its better performance on most cards, and that the D3D Renderer is unstable and causes crashes in some instances.
Mandatory notice (Score:2, Informative)
OpenGL is the multiplatform equivalent of Direct3D, and APIs like SDL are the multiplatform equivalent of SDL.
Just nitpicking here