DirectX 10

[maddog]

I have heard a lot recently about Microsoft releasing DirectX 10 and seen several pics of it, but I was wondering. Many people say that it will revolutionize PC gaming I didn't know if this was true. So I'm asking anyone that knows anything about PC gaming: will directx 10 revolutionize PC gaming and is vista worth getting just for directx 10?

[CaveMan]

I have heard a lot recently about Microsoft releasing DirectX 10 and seen several pics of it, but I was wondering. Many people say that it will revolutionize PC gaming I didn't know if this was true. So I'm asking anyone that knows anything about PC gaming: will directx 10 revolutionize PC gaming and is vista worth getting just for directx 10?

in 2-4 years time, vista will be the only OS worth running

XP will be a thing of the past

[Sparda]

in 2-4 years time, vista will be the only OS worth running

XP will be a thing of the past

Let me correct that sentence for you:

n 2-4 years time, vista will be a completely dead operating system

XP will be just as dead

[stingwray]

XP won't be dead for a long time, big corps are only just upgrading to XP from 2000 (eg. Pfizer).

DX10 will make a big difference, but not until DX10 hardware is perfected (nVidias 8800GTX only just counts as DX10 hardware and certainly won't be the best for long) and then you have got to wait for games to come out which support DX10.

Give it a couple of years and it will be fine.

[W4RP3D]

if your in to gaming yes it will!

It will have a huge performance increase of games thanks to the vertical and pixel shaders being now "combined" into a "Common Core" so that instead of the shaders being fixed they can change into either one maximising the use of the hardware, also with the introduction of geometry shader which will benefits include better textures.

Theres also the fact that because of the directx 10 architecture, the load of the CPU will be decreased and the same for the GPU, how will this work? well as i understand imagine there is huge army in front of you each solder wont be processed but one will be (or a few) then the data will run though once more to find the position of each one dramatically decreasing the work.

Thats just what i have read on the net and mags.

[boristsr]

well as i understand imagine there is huge army in front of you each solder wont be processed but one will be (or a few) then the data will run though once more to find the position of each one dramatically decreasing the work.

woah, geometry instancing! we've only had that for many years! (this is how many trees as well as large armies are done). There is also a step further to this idea called "imposters" which will render the object to a texture then draw a single polygon every time the object is used.

Sorry to be an arse, but thats a common rendering technique, not a technology provided by an API.

i intensely dislike what microsoft have done with direct x 10, there is no good reason why they couldn't have it available for xp as well, it's just to force users to upgrade. I can also see it backfiring, for developers who don't want to double their workload or loose customers, direct x 10 will not be used, they'll either stay with direct x 9 or move to OpenGL. It means they have to write 2 renderer's. one for direct x 9 and one for direct x 10.

at the end of the day, these API's are not revolutionary, the hardware improves all the time, and the API's are just ways of interfacing with the hardware.

Also, i can't see improved graphics "revolutionizing PC gaming". Aren't games meant to be about gameplay? if anything has revolutionised gaming, it's the Wii.

Personally, i will be getting Vista, as a developer i need to be able to test my software on many different OS's, but i won't be getting it until i get a new computer mid next year. Vista offers a fair few features over XP, but none of which make me go "I NEED to have vista" they'd be ok, but i can definitely live without them. If i wasn't a developer, i'd stick with XP.

My advice for upgrading to vista:

Cases to get it:

*You need to test software on many OS versions

*You need to learn it for your career (network admins and the like)

*You are getting a new computer and it's bundled

*You are building a large expensive gaming computer (or an upgrade to a directx 10 graphics card and have money to blow)

If you don't fall into any of those categories, you won't see that many benefits, especially not for the cost of the change. Not to mention that in the early days there will be LOTS of bugs with a lot of the software you commonly used.

[VaKo]

Vista isn't worth upgrading to right now, but new OS's never are. In 2-3 years Vista will be where its at for the home user. Linux still isn't ready for the consumer desktop, and won't be until the command line has full gui replacement tools, th help is a good as windows and your mum can install her iPod on it without help. People seem to think that ubuntu will magically take over from XP, but they don't realize that its not ready for the average user yet.

[maddog]

I think that linux has come a long way in the past few years. Installing SUSE on my machine a little over six months ago was much easier thatn I expected and I had very few compatibility problems switching over. i think that in ten years linux might start to take a noticeable, but small, percent of the market.

[VaKo]

Oh hell yeah, its not a bad OS at all. Its just still kind hard to use for a generation of users who grew up with windows level of automation (if you have to use the terminal for *anything*, its not newb user friendly). Give it 10 years and linux will be a major player on the consumer market, but probably not in the form of todays OS.

[stingwray]

I wouldn't say 10 years, the big players are all working towards making Linux easy for Joe Blogs, the main problem is compatibility and maintenance, unfortunately compatibility is a problem that can't really be fixed by the Linux community as it needs to come more from the manufacturers of the hardware.

[cooper]

I disagree. The main problem is apps and games.

The apps are slowly becoming a moot point because of OOo, *BUT* OOo is really slow compared to Office.

Games will continue to plague Linux adoption amongst the younger people.

[Guest ABC]

I have heard a lot recently about Microsoft releasing DirectX 10 and seen several pics of it, but I was wondering. Many people say that it will revolutionize PC gaming I didn't know if this was true. So I'm asking anyone that knows anything about PC gaming: will directx 10 revolutionize PC gaming and is vista worth getting just for directx 10?

only the 8800's support DX10

ATI are releasing one soon, but you don't want ATI you want a nvida ...

if you play games, it will revolutionise or if you use vista/vinnea .. it has all the up dates of the current tecs, e.g. pixel shader 4

[maddog]

If linux ever got a gaming framework, like directx or something similiar, do you think that it would start taking more of the market? The fact that you wouldn't need antivirus/antispyware is a big selling point, but do think that people would make the switch?

[VaKo]

See, that was what help MS do so well for so long as the home PC OS of choice. DirectX. Anyone else here old enough to remember gaming on your PC before directX? It was a nightmare, as games had to support hardware, not just run on a PC. Direct X just allowed the game makes to make games for windows, instead of games for computers with certain hardware and running windows.

[cooper]

If linux ever got a gaming framework, like directx or something similiar, do you think that it would start taking more of the market?

Clearly not, as such a thing exists already. It's called OpenGL and it's the main competition to DirectX. The biggest difference is that with Direct X there was Microsoft showing The Way whereas with OpenGL there was a huge committee with tons of representatives from various interested parties that worked really hard at killing trees and dumping ink on them, but didn't get a whole lot of stuff actually done. Eventually graphics chip makers would simply code up OpenGL extensions however they saw fit, and added them to their implementation of the standard. Some stuck, some didn't. Most worked. All muddied the water for the dev's that had to actually make the device do something interesting.

Since that time there's been a resurgence in the OpenGL way of doing things, with 3DLabs leading the way and really pulling things forward. The result was OpenGL 2.0 and just last august OpenGL 2.1.

Interestingly, there's also the Simple Direct-media Layer (SDL) library. It's a somewhat high-level API that succeeded in the fascinating task of making a high-performance cross-platform graphics API. When a program is coded against it and used on Windows, the calls will be passed on to DirectX and over in X11 it will pass them on to OpenGL.

Google it sometime. If you're into coding games and such there's a good chance you'll find some fascinating reads out there.

[Sparda]

While DirectX started out as an innovative technology, like most things MS, MS are now using it to lock people in to there product. OpenGL performance in vista is shocking at best. Thus, almost, forcing game developers to use DirectX and buy MS's DirectX SDK and make it a huge hassle to port there game to Linux or Mac (I still don't understand why WoW hasn't been ported to Linux, I guess it must be a policy reason rather then a technical reason).

[cooper]

Probably something along the lines of "Hey it works in Wine. Why invest money, time and effort in making a native version?"

This is why people have mixed feelings about the Wine project. Sure, it brings Windows apps to Linux, but it doesn't actually *BRING* those apps to Linux. It simply makes it more sensible to make _only_ a Windows version of the program as you'll be able to run that same program under Linux aswell.

[Guest ABC]

The fact that you wouldn't need antivirus/antispyware is a big selling point,

if more people used it, there probably would be more viruses written to attack it

also most linux distros are free so there is no need to sell it ;)

[boristsr]

The fact that you wouldn't need antivirus/antispyware is a big selling point,

if more people used it, there probably would be more viruses written to attack it

also most linux distros are free so there is no need to sell it ;)

while you raise a good point, several things stop it reaching a level that windows viruses reach.

lets see:

*not many people run linux as admin. there is little need to once it is set up, so a lot of things can't be acheived by the virus.

*things can't be hidden with root kits as the virus would need to be compiled on the machine and then it'd bitch and moan about not having the required dependencies :P

[maddog]

I do agree that as soon as more people begin to use linux, more security holes will be found and more viruses will be written for linux.

As boristsr said, you can't install or run anything that requires admin priveleges unless you are root, which most people don't (and shouldn't). In XP, you can't get anything done unless you have admin priveleges, which is why XP can be easily compromised.

I don't know much about Vista but I have heard that you will be prompted several times before anything can be run as admin. How much more secure will this make Vista; will it be on the same level as linux as far as preventing malware from owning your machine?

[Sparda]

Linux has a better security model then Window,s which is why I think it will be allot harder for people to exploit it. Mainly because of the file system.

If some one downloads a virus, they have to explicitly say that it's an executable, then open a terminal to execute it (unless it exploits a hole in nautilus or KDE or some thing like that).

[maddog]

Now that all of this has been said, what do you think will be the future of linux and gaming on linux? Will it ever become one of the most common OS's, or will it always stay greatly inferior to Windows?

[Sparda]

It isn't inferior to windows, it just dosn't have the market share, and so developers will use windows becasue more people use it, and becasue OpenGL performance is well down in Vista (50%ish compared to Linux) developers are practicly forcedto use irectX, which makes porting a game to another OS very difficult.,

The only reason Windows has the market share it has is because of sleazy marketing tactics taken on by Microsoft in the 90s. Conversely, if MS never did dominate the market there may never have been free operating systems as brilliant as Linux or BSD. Admittedly if Microsoft hadn't come up with a 'standard' platform (I use that term very loosely) computers would probably not have really taken off until some thing like the year 2000.

[Guest ABC]

Linux has a better security model then Window,s which is why I think it will be allot harder for people to exploit it. Mainly because of the file system.

If some one downloads a virus, they have to explicitly say that it's an executable, then open a terminal to execute it (unless it exploits a hole in nautilus or KDE or some thing like that).

people will find holes as more users come to it.

A big wall against security problems is there s so many distro's you couldn't make a universal linux virus/spyware

[maddog]

I agree, but wouldn't there be more holes found in the software rather than the distro itself?

For example, many people have the KDE and Gnome desktops installed on their system (including me). If a vulnerability was found in one of these, it wouldn't matter what distro you're running, would it?

Another thing that I was thinking about is that the possibility that one distro comes out that is completely user-friendly, no terminal use is required. The general public would use that as opposed to anything because of its ease of use. Viruses and malware would be written for that one distro because of its popularity.

Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about. Please tell me your thoughts.