AMD Says Long-in-the-Tooth DirectX is Holding Back PC Gaming
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
bloody hell everything to do with the pc seems to be holding back pc gaming -_-
"keyboard and mouse are holding back pc gaming!"
"mod's are holding back pc gaming!"
"motherboards, cpu's, gpu's, ram and other hardware are holding back pc gaming!"
"pc's are holding back pc gaming!"
"keyboard and mouse are holding back pc gaming!"
"mod's are holding back pc gaming!"
"motherboards, cpu's, gpu's, ram and other hardware are holding back pc gaming!"
"pc's are holding back pc gaming!"
The PS3 uses the GeForce 7-series? Shit, I stopped using my Geforce 7300LE ages ago on account it couldn't play games for shit, even when I go it back in 2007. Just.... wow.
I take it you don't like AMD/ATI? In fact, don't tell me about it. I've had about all I can take from AMD haters this week.cplsharp said:
While DirectX can be a factor depending on what the fella said, it's almost entirely Console Gamers holding back the PC front, since companies nowadays focus more on profit than anything else (Obviously I don't mean they never had any profit aim in the past, but devs were more innovative in the past and have made some true classics. Now it's just graphics all the way, but not even then since most games now are illogically made for consoles first, then ported over to PC, usually extremely badly, ala Borderlands) and churn out game after game with no real thought.
Now obviously there are good games in there, but for the most part we're now playing console games on the PC. Sure there's games like the Total War series and whatnot, but thinking about it, most of the games we play on the PC are also on the console. And it's that which is holding us back. If there was more emphasis on PC from companies rather than console emphasis, we'd see much more higher end games and the console would be left behind.
It's a shame that consoles are so popular. Sure they're easier to get to grips with and require barely any effort, but neither do comps if you have any vague idea of what's going on, it's purely that computers are shown in a tech-savvy light and so people flock to what they believe is more simple.
Oh yeah, consoles are also catered for younger people as well, mostly with the simplistic design, but still, these are reasons why the console is so popular and games companies focus on them, PC gaming could be miles ahead if only more devs focused on the PC D:
Edit: Oh yeah, the BIOS thing. That is holding us back a fair bit. It's been modified to about all in can handle now, we need to redevelop something in it's place, it was never built to handle what it does now. But ahh well
Now obviously there are good games in there, but for the most part we're now playing console games on the PC. Sure there's games like the Total War series and whatnot, but thinking about it, most of the games we play on the PC are also on the console. And it's that which is holding us back. If there was more emphasis on PC from companies rather than console emphasis, we'd see much more higher end games and the console would be left behind.
It's a shame that consoles are so popular. Sure they're easier to get to grips with and require barely any effort, but neither do comps if you have any vague idea of what's going on, it's purely that computers are shown in a tech-savvy light and so people flock to what they believe is more simple.
Oh yeah, consoles are also catered for younger people as well, mostly with the simplistic design, but still, these are reasons why the console is so popular and games companies focus on them, PC gaming could be miles ahead if only more devs focused on the PC D:
Edit: Oh yeah, the BIOS thing. That is holding us back a fair bit. It's been modified to about all in can handle now, we need to redevelop something in it's place, it was never built to handle what it does now. But ahh well
Old news to me. And painfully irrelevant in an era where the big publishers want their products to be developed for consoles in the first place.
Microsoft has no real intention of helping the PC gaming market now, but back in the day, DirectX was a Godsend. Today, they have their Xbox/360, and that's far more profitable than any sales stemming from PC gaming. It would be stupid of them to support PC gaming now.
Soon, Microsoft will have to back one or the other and never look back.
Microsoft has no real intention of helping the PC gaming market now, but back in the day, DirectX was a Godsend. Today, they have their Xbox/360, and that's far more profitable than any sales stemming from PC gaming. It would be stupid of them to support PC gaming now.
Soon, Microsoft will have to back one or the other and never look back.
Sheesh. What's next 'in other news, tired AMD marketing pundit decides to mouth off about something else he doesn't know jack about?'.
DirectX holds things back? Yeah right. Any idiot knows that to develop a game that actually runs on more than one type of hardware requires, you guessed it, a hardware abstraction layer. Maybe not quite so heavyweight as DX, but it still needs one. Otherwise, you're back to games developed only to run on AMD cards (can't imagine why AMD marketing might want that) or games that only run on Nvidia cards... Oh wait, that's the console market summed up.
By the by, I've programmed in both DX & OGL. They both have good and bad points, but to argue to do without them is just braindead - however, it's what I've come to expect from the likes of Huddy - controversial statements with no technical knowledge.
Edit: Posters above make good points re. DX11 and its lack of use (i.e. Microsoft is innovating, just nobody is using that innovation), and also, I find it staggering that Huddy makes the comparison that somehow bare-metal programming allows you to use the platform to its fullest.
It sounds true, it sounds logical, yet every single time I've seen it done, it translates to 'yeah we're doing this to work around the fundamental limitations of this hardware platform' not 'this platform is so great I can do all this neat stuff'. Possibly because you want to create a consistent experience across multiple bits of hardware... Oh I wonder what might allow you to do that...
On the subject of that consistent experience, no matter how good your platform is, no matter how good the abstraction layer is, if your artist is making models that fit in the Xbox's memory due to that hardware limitation, are you really going to pay for them to redo the entire set of models & textures so they can splash out in the 1-2GB VRAM the high end PC cards have, when only a small portion of your target market has those cards, and even fewer have the 64-bit Windows 7 OS needed to really take advantage of that RAM space properly (for technical reasons I won't go into as it's off-topic, but look up virtual address space handling if you're interested)?
DirectX holds things back? Yeah right. Any idiot knows that to develop a game that actually runs on more than one type of hardware requires, you guessed it, a hardware abstraction layer. Maybe not quite so heavyweight as DX, but it still needs one. Otherwise, you're back to games developed only to run on AMD cards (can't imagine why AMD marketing might want that) or games that only run on Nvidia cards... Oh wait, that's the console market summed up.
By the by, I've programmed in both DX & OGL. They both have good and bad points, but to argue to do without them is just braindead - however, it's what I've come to expect from the likes of Huddy - controversial statements with no technical knowledge.
Edit: Posters above make good points re. DX11 and its lack of use (i.e. Microsoft is innovating, just nobody is using that innovation), and also, I find it staggering that Huddy makes the comparison that somehow bare-metal programming allows you to use the platform to its fullest.
It sounds true, it sounds logical, yet every single time I've seen it done, it translates to 'yeah we're doing this to work around the fundamental limitations of this hardware platform' not 'this platform is so great I can do all this neat stuff'. Possibly because you want to create a consistent experience across multiple bits of hardware... Oh I wonder what might allow you to do that...
On the subject of that consistent experience, no matter how good your platform is, no matter how good the abstraction layer is, if your artist is making models that fit in the Xbox's memory due to that hardware limitation, are you really going to pay for them to redo the entire set of models & textures so they can splash out in the 1-2GB VRAM the high end PC cards have, when only a small portion of your target market has those cards, and even fewer have the 64-bit Windows 7 OS needed to really take advantage of that RAM space properly (for technical reasons I won't go into as it's off-topic, but look up virtual address space handling if you're interested)?
Anton P. Nym said:
This is something I wonder about in my spare time. Once graphic fidelity hits a certain point, it's going to take a massive amount of time and energy to create art assets. So I wonder were the industry will eventually go. I'm inclined to believe that we'll see a LOT more middle ware developers and tools. Take the idea of SpeedTree, but expand that out. There might be an entire industry of studios that just built assets to be licensed for use other products. Imagine an entire studio cracking out models based on real world vehicles, or furniture, how about urban architecture? Everything becomes decentralized.
The team that develops the actual game would combine different tech to get what they need out of their game. Not every game need advanced physics, realistic light and shadow rendering, procedurally generated foliage, or destructible terrain. But imagine being able to take what you need right off the shelf, putting it all together, and being able to just focus on the game play and mechanics without worrying about the graphics?
He's not flaming. It's a pretty accurate comparison when you're talking strictly about hardware specs. Performance is where the two are closer together, as he is quick to point out.Raiyan 1.0 said:
This idea that devs are going to go 'back to metal' on the PC is insane. It is rare for devs even to use the lastest API on the PC like DX 11, let alone put in the time and effort to go to a low level coding technique.
Going low level would be fantastic and would give more better bang for the buck. But when supposed graphics leaders like Crytek cannot even launch a game with higher than DX 9, the idea that games will be programmed the way they were before DX is crazy.
Don't get me wrong. I would love to be proved wrong on this. But unless there is some major shift on the ROI for PC games, this is just not going to happen. The only reason that devs are doing this on consoles and getting such improved geometries, is that it is worth their while to be able to program directly to the hardware. They get paid back for their extra efforts with a better looking game on system where the ROI is worth it.
Also they only have one set of hardware to code for. The idea that on the PC it is just Nvidia, Intel and ATI, so there is only 3 types of hardware to code for misses the point of low level coding. Each architecture that each of those manufacturers use, will need to be coded for separately. You would not use the same code for Fermi as you would for non Fermi Nvidia cards. You could not use the same code for Radeon 5000 series as you do for 6000 series. There would be some code overlap, but each new GPU architecture would need individual code at low levels. The amounts of hardware permeations gets mental.
Also your old games would not run on newer hardware as it will have only been programmed to support existing hardware architectures. The only way you would be able to run older games would be via emulations or via wrappers, like the 3DFX gilde wrapper from years ago. But the emulation on newer hardware normally would not work as fast as running the software on the native hardware. The result being that your 5 year old game would end up being slower or the same speed on newer hardware that it was when you first got the game.
If devs were so desperate to do this, they do not need to wait for any of the hardware players involved. They can program their games 100% low level and get you to boot the game to play it, therefore circumventing windows and any of it's issues. I won't hold my breath though.
I am sorry to be so negative, but articles like the above really need a reality check. So for the moment, for better or worse we are stuck with DX and the big players, Microsoft, Nvidia and ATI need to get their fingers out to make it the best it can be with support for all the stuff it can do (like multi-treading). Unfortunately this lack for innovation maybe due to the lack of competition from OpenGL in recent years, keeping DX honest, which is a shame.
Going low level would be fantastic and would give more better bang for the buck. But when supposed graphics leaders like Crytek cannot even launch a game with higher than DX 9, the idea that games will be programmed the way they were before DX is crazy.
Don't get me wrong. I would love to be proved wrong on this. But unless there is some major shift on the ROI for PC games, this is just not going to happen. The only reason that devs are doing this on consoles and getting such improved geometries, is that it is worth their while to be able to program directly to the hardware. They get paid back for their extra efforts with a better looking game on system where the ROI is worth it.
Also they only have one set of hardware to code for. The idea that on the PC it is just Nvidia, Intel and ATI, so there is only 3 types of hardware to code for misses the point of low level coding. Each architecture that each of those manufacturers use, will need to be coded for separately. You would not use the same code for Fermi as you would for non Fermi Nvidia cards. You could not use the same code for Radeon 5000 series as you do for 6000 series. There would be some code overlap, but each new GPU architecture would need individual code at low levels. The amounts of hardware permeations gets mental.
Also your old games would not run on newer hardware as it will have only been programmed to support existing hardware architectures. The only way you would be able to run older games would be via emulations or via wrappers, like the 3DFX gilde wrapper from years ago. But the emulation on newer hardware normally would not work as fast as running the software on the native hardware. The result being that your 5 year old game would end up being slower or the same speed on newer hardware that it was when you first got the game.
If devs were so desperate to do this, they do not need to wait for any of the hardware players involved. They can program their games 100% low level and get you to boot the game to play it, therefore circumventing windows and any of it's issues. I won't hold my breath though.
I am sorry to be so negative, but articles like the above really need a reality check. So for the moment, for better or worse we are stuck with DX and the big players, Microsoft, Nvidia and ATI need to get their fingers out to make it the best it can be with support for all the stuff it can do (like multi-treading). Unfortunately this lack for innovation maybe due to the lack of competition from OpenGL in recent years, keeping DX honest, which is a shame.
http://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/229400101/amd-re-affirms-commitment-to-micrsofts-directx-api.htm;jsessionid=606mW9089VCuMg+5L1IFkA**.ecappj01?pgno=1
In the interview above AMD try to take back some of their comments about Directx. This bit caught my eye to most.
"Huddy said that for some high-end developers, developing their own API may allow them to do improve the performance of their gaming while others may see it as a different approach and a means of differentiating themselves from the competition. ?The minority of developers who want a change fall into two categories: those like Dice who have highly-tuned, efficient rendering engines, and those like Crytek who are selling hardware and could differentiate themselves quite spectacularly from mainstream gaming by going around Direct X,? he said. ?Some may be able to do spectacularly good gaming, but for an engine vendor it might simply be a good reason to diverge over the next five years or so.? "
So the company that want to 'direct to metal' the most is the one that cannot launch a game with the lastest version of directx. This to me shows how stupid and wishful thinking the original comments were from AMD.
In the interview above AMD try to take back some of their comments about Directx. This bit caught my eye to most.
"Huddy said that for some high-end developers, developing their own API may allow them to do improve the performance of their gaming while others may see it as a different approach and a means of differentiating themselves from the competition. ?The minority of developers who want a change fall into two categories: those like Dice who have highly-tuned, efficient rendering engines, and those like Crytek who are selling hardware and could differentiate themselves quite spectacularly from mainstream gaming by going around Direct X,? he said. ?Some may be able to do spectacularly good gaming, but for an engine vendor it might simply be a good reason to diverge over the next five years or so.? "
So the company that want to 'direct to metal' the most is the one that cannot launch a game with the lastest version of directx. This to me shows how stupid and wishful thinking the original comments were from AMD.