Farewell to DirectX?

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Megazell

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AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy say that DirectX is holding back hardware performance.

'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.'
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Check Out The Full Scoop Here - http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/1
 
I gotta say, I find it hard to listen to anything that anyone with the word "relations" in their job title has to say. More often than not they're idiots spewing garbage out their ass.
 
Funny, because Carmack thinks DirectX is the shit.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/john-Carmack-DirectX-OpenGL-API-Doom,12372.html

So who are you going to take the word from, a relations manager from AMD or the father of FPS? In fact, I hadn't realized it at first but that Huddy fellow also makes a comment in the TH article:

AMD's GPU worldwide developer relations manager, Richard Huddy, agrees. He added that the actual innovation in graphics has been driven by Microsoft in the last ten or so years.
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Personally, ever since Direct X 9 - I felt that games have become more and more stable. I mean I really have not had a problem with gaming since the Direct X 7 days.

So I don't see why Direct X has a hold would be holding people back but I guess if this was a real issue we would have seen games or even applications that show what this guy is talking about.

With that said it would nice if they had a tech demo where a short game would play using direct X and play using a non-direct X mode (direct to metal) to highlight his point...I just don't see any retail developer dumping direct X anytime soon.
 
I think that people are forgetting how things were before DirectX with multiple standards like 3dfx and openGL. (EDIT - I remember now GLIDE was the other big standard)

The biggest problem with DirectX is that it is proprietary. It's too bad the hardware developers couldn't get their act together and come up with an open standard that became defacto. If they had, maybe linux users could get some gaming love.
 
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[quote name='m6oo']I think that people are forgetting how things were before DirectX with multiple standards like 3dfx and openGL.

The biggest problem with DirectX is that it is proprietary. It's too bad the hardware developers couldn't get their act together and come up with an open standard that became defacto. If they had, maybe linux users could get some gaming love.[/QUOTE]

That standard is pretty much OpenGL which, up until now, Carmack had been using. The fact is, it's become a design by committee that makes nobody happy because you have to make sacrifices if one platform has trouble with a feature they want to add. At some point, you can't keep holding something back just because 1 platform can't handle it.
 
Makes me wonder how much the hardware manufacturers would like this. Think about it, if a game runs more efficiently when written without an API, that means you could better performance even with a lower end graphics card. This overhead is one reason that high end cards are needed to really run games at their highest settings. Imagine getting high end performance from a mid-tier card.
 
[quote name='Clak']Makes me wonder how much the hardware manufacturers would like this. Think about it, if a game runs more efficiently when written without an API, that means you could better performance even with a lower end graphics card. This overhead is one reason that high end cards are needed to really run games at their highest settings. Imagine getting high end performance from a mid-tier card.[/QUOTE]

You can't build every game from the ground up though, 99% of games are using something someone else wrote. If every developer had to write an in-house graphics engine, the development cycle for games would be considerably longer than they are now with things like the Source engine or the Unreal engine, both of which lean heavily on DirectX.
 
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