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?"
Skipping it? (Score:5, Interesting)
So what, are they going to skip 12 and go to 13? They've done it before, with DirectX 4, so it's not a new idea. Maybe 12 turned out to be a huge mess.
I don't see DirectX being discontinued in favor of OpenGL/OpenAL/etc, since the GUIs in their latest products and frameworks all seem to use DirectX to some extent.
(asbestos underpants on) Or maybe they switched to FOSS-style versioning, and just don't see anything new that would demand a major version number. We're going to see abominations like DirectX 11.1.25.4-r6.3 for the rest of time.
Re:Let's predict the headlines of the future: (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft just re-names it; and everyone'll be using DirectY-2014 or Vista Display API or Direct-ME.
Re:It has to be said (Score:5, Interesting)
question (Score:5, Interesting)
What exactly does "top quality game bundles registered to the serial number of the card" mean? Have I missed something else in this conversation?
Re:We did it! (Score:5, Interesting)
'fraid you're the clueless one here. (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenGL was multithreading capable from the get go. DirectX until 11.2 was single threaded only.
DirectX uses a very different object graph proposition that puts the scene as the major component and for most indoor FPS, that is an easier concept, but those choices mean taking it outside where the scene (in a 3D construction context) is not the primary container for the "world" realised, you've got a much worse system to program. OGL was much better at the open world 3D and a little worse at the enclosed box-room preferred for early FPSs.
DirectX development was only slightly easier, and only for a small segment of what is being done.
Re:We did it! (Score:1, Interesting)
Do you even write code?!
I'm a software developer with a general interest in visualization. That is, I like making visualization software. Software that helps me visualize large/complex datasets. I find it empowering and overall enjoyable.
My first foray into developing visualization tools was roughly ten years ago at NASA Goddard, where as part of an internship I was able to play with a solid-state range imager (a commercially available unit, the SwissRanger2 from CSEM).
Think of this device as a 3D USB camera. You get a low (by today's standards) resolution video feed at 30fps. The primary difference is that the three channels are not RGB.
Now, how do you know if your 3D camera is working right? How do you know if your projection and filtering algorithms are having the desired effect? Well, the easy way is to develop some sort of visualization software. Since the dataset is inherently three-dimensional, a 3D visualization would make sense. And that's what I got to developing.
Of course, I had absolutely no experience in writing 3D graphics code. Being mathematically inclined, I briefly considered writing my own rendering engine. But that would be idiocy; I might as well write my own libc. So my choices were DirectX or OpenGL (yes, there actually was a Windows system available to me). Naturally, I chose DirectX, since that's what everyone used for everything! OpenGL was only used in shitty linux games, as far as I knew.
That lasted for about a day or two.
I quickly grew confused and frustrated by the counter-intuitive API and hoped that OpenGL was less painful. And indeed! Raw OpenGL might hurt a bit, but there's countless higher-level libraries available that make dealing with OpenGL a breeze. Not so with DirectX.
The amount of time I had spent staring at DirectX documentation was the same amount of time I needed to completely implement my visualization solution in OpenGL. It was exactly what I needed.
Now, I'm not naive enough to think that OpenGL is for everyone, and that my needs were just like everyone else's. However, I can say from personal experience: the OpenGL learning curve is much more reasonable than the DirectX one.
I'm sure things have changed over the last decade. It's possible that the advent of programmable shaders, etc., has impacted both libraries differently. That being said, earlier this year I went with OpenGL again for another visualization project. The higher-level libraries that handle the OpenGL ugliness for you have changed, but it's all still very accessible to a novice.
Re:We did it! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We did it! (Score:3, Interesting)
> why spend money on your own API when someone will do the work for you?
Lock-in? It's not like the first few version of direct X were better than the current version of opengl.
OpenGL existed before DirectX. So, it's not like DirectX was ever actually needed anyway, other than for Vendor Lock-in.