Direct X- slow down or necessity?

[asparagin]

Found this article I`d like to share:

 

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/1

 

It is about DX, limiting the game developers through it`s API, and not fully unleashing the power of PC`s.

On the other hand, it keeps a standard that makes it easier for a game (or sim :D) to be compatible with multiple machines.

 

What do you think?

[winz]

Well, that's the tradeoff for having a machine that can do it all.:)

Take away the abstraction layer and say goodbye to backward compatibility.

[topdog]

Let's scrap that abstraction layer known as the C runtime too, surely it's just getting in the way and slowing things down - machine code all the way baby.

 

I guess April 1st came a week early for some.

[asparagin]

Let's scrap that abstraction layer known as the C runtime too, surely it's just getting in the way and slowing things down - machine code all the way baby.

 

I guess April 1st came a week early for some.

 

I'm not a programmer, can you express your opinion so that I can also comprehend...

[winz]

remember the 'good ol' days' when you had to select the exact HW to be able to have sound in game? If you hw was not supported by the game, then no sound for you.

Getting rid of api would put us back in those days.

[topdog]

Basically, abstractions - or more simply, APIs - in software aren't the evil that some AMD community manager would like to have you believe. They're prevalent, and standardised abstractions are better than home-rolled ones much of the time.

 

In the case of DirectX it uses COM, which is an implementation similar to CORBA - the design pattern for this method of writing code is that you can think of the 'interfaces' exposed to programmers as being a 'contract' that is offered to them, promising a certain compatibility between different blocks of code. The back-end of the contract is fulfilled by Microsoft's enumeration systems, and the hardware vendor's driver-to-metal code (the big deal about this, is that so long as the contract looks the same in the middle, you can switch hardware/vendors on one side, you can switch game software on the other, and it's all happy and working under one nice standard and refinable approach, whichever side it is that needs the refining).

 

When you request an interface to a graphics device, Microsoft hands you a reference to the object, and then you call its functions via a table of pointers to them all. It's hardly an overweight interface, and if you were to scrap this, you would either:

 

a) be rolling your own 'graphics driver interfacing middleware component', forcing the developers to spend a large chunk of their time optimizing and implementing for specific pieces of hardware instead of giving you features

 

b) be ignoring vast swathes of hardware, much like when games were written that only used 3Dfx's Glide api to support their voodoo cards, and only software rendering for others.

 

c) be using some other 3rd party library (want to scrap DirectSound? Fine, have the inferior Miles sound driver library instead, but how has this made you better off?)

 

All of these are just examples of abstractions themselves, so what's the reason for blaming DirectX?

 

Direct3D and OpenGL are sort of synonymous; and it's not without good reason smart people like Carmack moved away from home-rolled software rendering and limited vendor APIs, instead embracing abstraction/API layers like OpenGL.

 

This wasn't always the case btw, but from DirectX3 onward, they started getting it right, DirectX5 onward, and it was a solid foundation to work with. Before this time, I would perhaps have agreed, but we're talking well over a decade ago since this become out of date.

Edited March 24, 2011 by topdog

[topdog]

So a longer winded reply than Winz :) but was just trying to cover the futility of removing a layer of code that does what ever any alternative option would end up doing anyway.

[71st_Mastiff]

yes just another scare tactic I'm afraid. From people trying to push out there own agendas.

[asparagin]

So a longer winded reply than Winz :)

 

..which makes your post also more valuable..