Farewell to DirectX?
Is it time to say goodbye to the DirectX API?آ AMD's Richard Huddy believes that the time might be ripe to do just that, and explains his reasoning.
'It's funny,' says AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy. 'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.' Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is: 'Make the API go away.'
'I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers,' he says, 'and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all.'
Of course, there are many definite pros to using a standard 3D API. It's likely that your game will run on a wide range of hardware, and you'll get easy access to the latest shader technologies without having to muck around with scary low-level code. However, the performance overhead of DirectX, particularly on the PC architecture, is apparently becoming a frustrating concern for games developers speaking to AMD.
Read his thoughts in full at bit-tech.'I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers,' he says, 'and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all.'
Of course, there are many definite pros to using a standard 3D API. It's likely that your game will run on a wide range of hardware, and you'll get easy access to the latest shader technologies without having to muck around with scary low-level code. However, the performance overhead of DirectX, particularly on the PC architecture, is apparently becoming a frustrating concern for games developers speaking to AMD.
View or post comments.
Read More ...
No comments:
Post a Comment