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The end of DirectX and Co. may be near
The end of DirectX and Co. may be near
While browsers and their rendering capabilities may be on the rise, APIs like DirectX and OpenGL are certainly not. It's technology of the past, as Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games and the mastermind behind the Unreal engines, might have put it. The falling stars of the graphics heaven, DirectX and OpenGL, have become quite rusty over the time.
In an interview with ars technica, Sweeney elaborates even further on this thought:
I think DirectX 9 was the last graphics API that really mattered. DirectX 9 was a revolution: completely programmable shaders of unlimited length with full floating-point precision support. [...]So, DirectX 10 takes DirectX 9 and adds some weird fixed-function components on top of it, which fit in a very particular place in the pipeline, and are hard to use. I'm not saying that it's entirely unwarranted, but I think that DirectX 9 was the last game-changing step in the graphics APIs, and the next non-incremental step will be the move back to programming languages.
With Intel's completely programmable GPU Larrabee in the incubator, and nVidia's CUDA game programmers are finally free, programming-wise, for they still have to work shifts in the gold mines of game developers, and no longer bound to divide a scene up "into triangles rendered in a certain order to a large framebuffer."
With the challenge ahead to begin a new era of 3D rendering, Tim Sweeney might soon be equipped with a plain "C compiler and a blank text-editing window" to code the Unreal 4 Engine in one single programming language unlike Epic's Unreal 3.
[For Unreal 3] we use one programming language for writing pixel shaders, another for writing gameplay code, and then on PlayStation 3 we use yet another compiler to write code to run on the Cell processor. So the PlayStation 3 ends up being a particular challenge, because there you have three completely different processors from different vendors with different instruction sets and different compilers and different performance techniques. So, a lot of the complexity is unnecessary and makes load-balancing more difficult.
It's no wonder then that, with all the time needed for balancing game performance, the PlayStation 3 doesn't get game titles in time but (often so) with a delay of 5 to 6 months at least. Sometimes, this is even for the better, as in the case of Alone in the Dark.
Nonetheless, the last stroke of the bell is going to come for APIs, sooner or later.
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I don't know much about programming and apis - does that mean that it will be more effort to design a game for different graphic cards with different design?
Graphic cards are going to be API-free, no longer relying on fixed functions through the API, or that a scene should be rendered in triangles. You can do whatever you want. It will be a real effort to start from scratch though, with programmers starting to head into completely different directions at first to approach this new freedom. They can choose to raytrace parts of a game scene, or do whatever is best for the purpose, and needs of the game/software. Games will look much more different then.
If, you know, graphic cards become such a "black box" that you can fill yourself, it can only be of advantage--even if they are design differences.
i'm not happy about this because one thing directx/opengl certainly does is saving the programer lots of work. maybe huge companies like epic or id can do things on their own but smaller developers, that do not have unlimited resources, can't. imo there are already too many games that look too similar because they either use the unreal3 or source engine. without the big graphic apis medium size developers, who in the end want to spent their time creating a game and not a rendering software, wouldn't have the chance to create their own graphic engine.
I guess something like an alliance will turn out - several game design studios sharing a graphic platform, or something like this.
Small studios make good games with good ideas, not with top notch graphics.
Well, I am really happy about this and I share the opinion that DirectX won´t be as important as it is in the future, although not necessarily in the near future. It will take some time to do other things, but it´s true that Intel´s approach brings some fresh air in this highly competitive market. Just think of it, if you use something like the Raytracing technology. You only need one graphics card, you´re not dependent on anything.
The big chaos and in my opinion crucial flaw of DirectX10 would never happen again. Hey, check out this game. It looks entirely like Far Cry in Direct X 9 mode, but hey, it´s Direct X 10... seriously, I know there are some advantages of Direct X 10, but they´re negligible and whatever you can do with it, it is possible to do so with DX9 as well...
Anyway, technologies like Raytracing don´t want you, the customer, to buy new a new graphics card, and this would be just great! Games can still look better and better (and more realistic) and you might not have to pay thousands of dollars for a new graphics card! cool!
You are way off base? Maybe you should learn something about programming (I am a senior developer with a Masters Degree), OpenGL is way better than DirectX - cant even put them in the same league (directX only works on windows as well). OpenGL is easy to use (I have coded it on linux apps , windows cpp apps, and in java code using jogl) , fast and reliable. OpenGL is the optimal way to render the graphics pipeline, you can not simply cut out those steps involved in matrix manipulation , etc..
wow, a lot of different topics in one thread, some are talking about browser vs. APIs, some are talking about OpenGL vs. DirectX (which is a war as old as DirectX itself) and some are mixing up possibilities with performance... I usually like to untangle this chaos, but since the topic is so old, I'll let it rest.
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