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?"
Re:We did it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Only Microsoft uses DirectX, everyone else on the planet uses OpenGL.
Re:We did it! (Score:1, Insightful)
actually it did. more gamers use OpenGL today then Direct X
OpenGL was crap in the 90's but Apple, nvidia and a few others did the work to make it a viable gaming API
why spend money on your own API when someone will do the work for you?
Re:That is a filthy lie (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you misunderstand what that means. It means directX has moved from a versioned API with new features all the time, to a stable API that they feel safe tying to the OS and pushing updates for through windows update. It's like when an open source project has reached the point where its no longer worth it to pull the latest from git. It's "done".
Re:We did it! (Score:5, Insightful)
Only Microsoft uses DirectX, everyone else on the planet uses OpenGL.
Except, you know, most top-selling games and other 3D applications on the market which all use DirectX - even if some also use OpenGL.
Even if the numbers don't keep ticking up, as long as it is the preferred graphics/multimedia API for Windows and XBox, it will stay relevant. Discounting it and saying the other common option 'won' is only demonstrating your lack of understanding and versatility as a developer.
When it comes down to it, OGL and DX are about the same thing, just with different platform-specific options. At some point, both will inevitably cease to progress. Given MS's propensity to push toward tablet-style computing and discontinue functional, widely-loved software, I am not surprised they cut out of the race first.
Re:We did it! (Score:5, Insightful)
more gamers use OpenGL today then Direct X
[citation needed]
Actually, if you're going to give credit to someone for OGL, Apple is about the LAST company you should be thanking. Other than the fact that OGL was the only graphics API that worked on Mac, Apple has done ZERO to help promote, regulate, or stabilize OpenGL in the market. They have not contributed useful code, or participated in the ARB in any meaningful way.
Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: (Score:4, Insightful)
what's wrong with 7?
Re:We did it! (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree, most top games are primarily DirectX. Even if a game supports both, usually it will opt for DirectX if available.
DirectX was kind of an after thought addition to Windows anyhow, when they shut out the low level access that was being used previously for game graphics. I suppose that is where the name "Direct" came from, to emphasize it was the replacement that gave them similar direct access.
Hopefully this will shift things towards OpenGL and we can see more+better frameworks in more languages available for OpenGL.
On the other hand, you hit on potentially another reason for the decline of DirectX, and possibly OpenGL: the "demise of the PC". I do NOT believe the PC will die off anytime soon, but I can't deny that there are alot of casual users that no longer have any desire to put themselves through dealing with a PC, especially if they sit in front of one all day at work. A declining user base will mean commercial efforts shifted elsewhere, which won't be a good thing for the rest of us PC users.
Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: (Score:5, Insightful)
So Windows 9 is going to have Dx12 baked in, and it'll be called "GraphicsNew" instead of "DirectX" so we can't say "Hey, why teh fuck won't you release Dx12 for Windows7?" like we did with XP and Dx9/10. "Oh, sorry, but GraphicsNew is too fancy for poor Windows7, its completely different from DirectX!"
Yeah fucking right.
Re:We did it! (Score:4, Insightful)
more gamers use OpenGL today then Direct X
[citation needed]
Well if you're counting things like playing Angry Birds on iOS/Android, then almost certainly yes. Perhaps not in complexity or number of hardcore gamers, but in screen time I think yes. There's not a whole lot of games that are PC/Xbox exclusives anymore, and if you're doing any other platform you're probably doing OpenGL. It's probably only a matter of time before game makers tell Microsoft they'd rather code to one graphics system rather than two, and that one won't be DirectX. The world has changed drastically over the last 5 years in this respect, people game on smart phones and tablets not just consoles and PCs anymore.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We did it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: (Score:4, Insightful)
OK, then tell me why modern OpenGL drivers can provide the equivalent of all DirectX 11 features on Windows XP? The implementation of DirectX 10 and newer may not have been portable to XP, but the interface would have been. There are even libraries that translate DX10/DX11 to OpenGL!
Re:We did it! (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the GPU is notified by the primary context, there is effectively one context switch to offload a lot of data. The driver knows where these command queues are and will read from them.
DX11 even allows the CPU to help the GPU. GPUs are great for certain types of calculations, but not as great for others. DICE had a nice blog many years ago about how they can send data to the GPU to be processed for one stage, then stream the data from the GPU as it completes, back to the CPU. The CPU then starts working on the data one one 16x16 tile at a time and streams the changes back to the GPU as each tile is completed.
They were able to keep the CPU and GPU well-loaded, while increasing efficiency and reducing memory pressure by data streaming.
They had the classic latency vs throughput issue. Because each stage was only dependent on the prior stage, they were able to keep streaming input into the engine to keep both the GPU and CPU busy. While the CPU was busy crunch special pixel shaders that ran slowly on the GPU, the GPU would be working on physics on the upcoming scene. etc etc
DX11 effectively made the rendering pipeline modular and customization, allowing data to be shifted back-and-forth, but hid the latency by allowing the stages to be done asynchronously.
OpenGL doesn't care about latency vs throughput because professional rendering does not have a latency issue, like video-games do.