Farewell to DirectX?

[MadBoY]

Nedavno sam na Bit-Tech-u naisao na zanimljiv clanak, koji govori zasto na PC-u nemamo igre koje izgledaju dosta bolje nego na konzolama.
Prema AMD-u, upravo je DirectX najveci krivac tome.

The Xbox 360's Xenos GPU has a less then a tenth of the processing power of a top-end PC GPU, so why don't PC games look ten times better?

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.'

So what sort of performance-overhead are we talking about here? Is DirectX really that big a barrier to high-speed PC gaming? This, of course, depends on the nature of the game you're developing.

On consoles, you can draw maybe 10,000 or 20,000 chunks of geometry in a frame, and you can do that at 30-60fps. On a PC, you can't typically draw more than 2-3,000 without getting into trouble with performance, and that's quite surprising - the PC can actually show you only a tenth of the performance if you need a separate batch for each draw call.

Consoles also have a major bonus over PCs here, which is their fixed architecture. If you program direct-to-metal on the PlayStation 3's GPU, then you know your code will work on every PS3. The same can't be said on the PC, where we have numerous different GPU architectures from different manufacturers that work in different ways.

For example, developers may ideally need to vectorise their code for it to run optimally on an AMD GPU's stream processor clusters, or maybe tell the GPU's stream processor clusters to split up their units into combinations of vector and scalar units. Conversely, developers will ideally need to program for a scalar architecture on Nvidia GPUs. Once you remove the API software layer, you suddenly have to really start thinking about the differences between GPU architectures.

Tesko da ce se DirectX i Open GL prestati koristiti prilikom izrade igara, jer ne postoji niti jedan developerski tim koji bi razvijao igru samo za PC a da ista ne koristi DirectX/Open GL. Prodaja igara za PC im donosi premalo novca za tako nesto. Plus stabilnost API-a, odavno se vise OS ne rusi radi instaliranja igre, niti moramo birati koji HW imamo prilikom instalacije igre.
Al ipak je zanimljivo procitati zasto igre na konzolama izgledaju toliko dobro, dok na PC-u obicno dobijemo samo kvalitetnije teksture i vecu rezoluciju, te pokoji DirectX 11 efekt.

[mamutarka]

mislim da se id tech drži open GL-a, i sad ovaj rage koji treba doć je također na njemu, negdje sam čitao da je carmack o tome isto pričao, nemojte me uzet za sto posto, id tech radi jako lijepe igre i svaka im čast na tome ako to rade bez dx-a. (još jednom, nadam se da nisam nešto pobrkao)