AMD Says There Will Be No DirectX 12 — Ever 305
mikejuk writes "This is a strange story. AMD Vice President of Global Channel Sales Roy Taylor has said there will be no DirectX12 at any time in the future. In an interview with German magazine Heise.de, Taylor discussed the new trend for graphics card manufacturers to release top quality game bundles registered to the serial number of the card. One of the reasons for this, he said, is that the DirectX update cycle is no longer driving the market. 'There will be no DirectX 12. That's it.' (Google translation of German original.) Last January there was another hint that things weren't fine with DirectX when Microsoft sent an email to its MVPs saying, 'DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology.' That statement was quickly corrected, but without mentioning any prospect of DirectX 12. So, is this just another error or rumor? Can we dismiss something AMD is basing its future strategy on?"
It has to be said (Score:5, Informative)
Re:no DirectX 12 (Score:5, Informative)
Obviously didn't get the "Spinal Tap" reference...
Do a little research. (Score:5, Informative)
If memory serves this was also linked in the related article above. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee663275.aspx [microsoft.com]
DirectX is just becoming part of the Windows 8 SDK. Then presumably the Windows 9, etc, SDKs as well. On until death.
Re:It has to be said (Score:5, Informative)
But OpenGL right now does not seem to be geared towards games in any way.
I think some folks at Valve would have something to say about that.
Re:We did it! (Score:5, Informative)
OpenGL was crap in the 90's but Apple
Uh, I remember OpenGL being fairly amazing in the 90s. I saw stuff on the O2s that no one else was doing. The 90s were when John Carmack made his famous rants about how much better OpenGL was than DirectX.
You're probably thinking of the mid 2000s, when OpenGL lost its way and was kind of directionless.....
Re:Did DirectX ever "drive the market"? (Score:4, Informative)
developing your own graphical/physics engine is dead
Interesting. So I should stop coding this new OGL-based engine from scratch because it's easier to use a pre-made engine? Because you think it's 'dead'? Let alone your coding ability going down the toilet because all you do is drag-and-drop 'component blocks' in your engine of choice, what do you do when you hit the looming brick wall that is the engine's limitations?
"Hey guys, let's pack it up. This random dude on the 'net says the custom and one-off engines we've been making for years are dead, and we should just use Unity or Unreal."
Re:We did it! (Score:4, Informative)
A few CPU bound DirectX games had about 98.6% scaling with multi-threading. The reason for the CPU bound performance is mostly the number of objects being rendered. Any time you have lots of objects, you need lots of system calls and general computation.
OpenGL is pretty much a dead-end for video-games, unless they add threading.
Before someone says "but OpenGL supports mutil-threading". No it doesn't. It supports multi-threaded worker threads for the drivers, but it does not support multiple threads communicating to the same context. DX11 does and it makes a huge difference.
I know AMD announced a while back that they were working on a cross-platform driver interface that used command-buffers like DX11 to drastically reduce context switching, while scaling nearly linearly with cores. They were going to have this for Linux first, but I'm not holding my breath for AMD to finish anything for Linux as they keep cutting employees and scrapping projects.
I am sick of being thread bound for games. 25% cpu load, sub-60fps, and my GPU at 5% load. Really.. wtf? Use the other 75% of my cpu.
Re:We did it! (Score:5, Informative)
No. The great Wiki says:
"A group of seven companies began the development of USB in 1994: Compaq, DEC, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NEC and Nortel. "
Re:We did it! (Score:2, Informative)
You should qualify that. PC games. If you bin a little bit and say the XBox uses Direct3D while the Playstation and Wii use OpenGL, most of the modern best selling games use OpenGL. Note that all the smartphone and tablet games are also OpenGL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games [wikipedia.org].
Since Microsoft is trying to focus on the table/smartphone market, which is pretty much exclusively OpenGL, you're right, it's not that surprising they're bailing on DirectX.
Re:We did it! (Score:4, Informative)
Nonsense. Unless you change the context of the process in some other thread via wglMakeCurrent/aglSetCurrentContext/glXMakeCurrent, the context is the same in every thread.
Re:We did it! (Score:4, Informative)
No, Apple developed IEEE 1394. Apple were quite resistant to USB initially.
Re:We did it! (Score:4, Informative)
You're mixing up the API and the SDK. Microsoft makes nice DirectX development tools. There are also nice OpenGL development tools. The difference is that DirectX ONLY works on Microsoft platforms so Microsoft is pretty much the only one that makes development tools for it. OpenGL works on everything else so there are lots of manufacturers who make tools.
Re:We did it! (Score:5, Informative)
> while the Playstation and Wii use OpenGL
FULL STOP. Why do people keep perpetrating these lies??
I _wrote_ an OpenGL implementation for the Wii on TOP of the Wii's GX library a few years back. The Wii's GX graphics library was definitely _inspired_ by OpenGL, but it is NOT OpenGL.
We also had a PS2 version of our in-house mini OpenGL which was a WRAPPER for setting the GS registers. (The "GPU" on the PS2 was called "GS" aka Graphics Synthesizer.)
While the PS3 provides _2_ graphics libraries, LibGCM and PSGL, I am not aware of any _shipped_ games using PSGL.
Facts. Try checking them.
--
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Re:We did it! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:question (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't and that's not even what the AMD exec said but the dumb articles are running with an idiotic interpretation of what he said. He was only saying that there is no new version of DX currently in the works so in order to differentiate their products they have to bundle pretty looking games instead of implementing new features because there aren't any new features left for the to add right now.
Re:We did it! (Score:5, Informative)
That article is wrong - they misinterpreted Sony's comments that the PS4 GPU would have a "DirectX 11.1+ feature set." NOT that it would actually use the DirectX API. (not to mention calling DirectX the "industry standard"... huh??)
Re:We did it! (Score:5, Informative)
Each thread can write to its own queue without blocking, which OpenGL can not do.
Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: (Score:5, Informative)
Dammit. It's been 6 years now and I'm getting tired of this stupid falsehood. Direct3D 10 wasn't limited to Vista for superficial business reasons. There are some extremely important technical factors that required overhauling parts of Windows alongside D3D10.
The graphics stack below the API was almost entirely overhauled, as per the Windows Display Driver Model [wikipedia.org]. Context switching, multithreading, virtual memory, splitting up the driver into user-mode and kernel-mode components, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. People forget just how broken Direct3D 9 was (and is); it was created at a time when the term "GPU" didn't exist yet and a video card was little more than a texturing unit and a raster op pipeline, and then brutally extended over the years to incorporate functionality like T&L and shaders. The whole thing predicated on a driver model that basically treated the video card as nothing more than a special class of peripheral, whereas with WDDM the GPU was finally promoted to a special class of processor within Windows.
Direct3D 10 in turn takes advantage of these low-level changes, particularly the changes to memory management. As a result, you can't have D3D10 without WDDM and the modern graphics stack it brings.
So the only way to bring D3D10 to XP would have been to create a cutthroat version of it that had little in common with Vista's version, or to backport the entire Vista graphics stack to XP, At which point you would have Vista whether you liked it or not, since you just brought over one of the biggest changes in the OS, and all of the bugs, growing pains, and incompatibility that brings.
Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: (Score:2, Informative)
The original DirectX 9 seems to have been released in 2002. That's 3 years AFTER nVidia started using the term "GPU" to describe their early register combiners on the GeForce.