OSNews > Thread > "RE[14]: Build a better toolkit" by dagw

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Sep 2008 20:30 UTC, submitted by Jeremy

With a preview version slated for November 2008 and beta versions as early as 2009, Microsoft's newest DirectX will be here sooner than you think. ExtremeTech's Loyd Case digs deep into DirectX 11 and discusses its new features and how it differs from DX10. While improved graphics are expected out of the new release, DX11 hopes to improve upon crunching complex graphics with the GPU through hardware tessellation, which many people hoped to see in DX10.

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RE[14]: Build a better toolkit

by dagw on Mon 8th Sep 2008 12:22 UTC in reply to "RE[13]: Build a better toolkit"

Member since:
2005-07-06

One can build extended capabilities directly into OpenGL. It is easily extensible ... and because it is open source, you are actually allowed to extend it.

But without the hardware support to match, you don't really gain anything in actual performance doing it that way compared to doing it any other way.

The clear suspicion is that Microsoft wants to kill all possibilities of OpenGL applications working well on Windows, and Microsoft wants driectX to be the only way (the only viable API) to get 3D rendering functionality on Windows.

Won't get any argument from me here.

Agnostic architectures also allow for far better cross-platform capability, making it much easier to port games to multiple platforms.

Well obviously. But is it quicker and easier to develop for, and will it allow you to do more impressive stuff? That's the real problem here and where this whole thing got started. As long as writing windows only games is quicker and easier than writing cross platform games, windows only games will be the norm. Nobody ever claimed that cross platform wasn't possible, just that it was more trouble than it's worth in most cases.

Hence architectures such as Gallium 3D are more advanced than DirectX.

Gallium3D has more ambitious goals than DirectX and perhaps hopes to support more advanced features in the future, but it is far from complete. So in any comparison done today between the latest Gallium 3D and the latest DirectX, Gallium won't fare well. Comparing some theoretical future version of Gallium to the current version of DirectX is hardly a fair comparison.

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