czerro

June 23, 2009 at 11:36pm

Carmack is pointless?  iD, doesn't revolutionize the gaming industry every engine release? When has iD released a game or engine that is anything less than spectacular?  What makes Carmack pointless, when he heads a company that has been on the groundfloor of every gaming/hardware/graphical implementation since Doom?  If anything DX11 is pointless, as is DX10.  Vista sold jack, and developers don't need DX10 to implement the effects they want, so why will DX11 change anything?  Secondly, cross platforming is more important than ever, why would you develop a game with DX11 support when the latest gen consoles only support something comparable to DX9.  NVIDIA made a killing on DX10 support until everyone realised it was pointless, AMD no longer has this illusion as luxury so this is a very pointless marketing ploy for them.  This is a non story and no one cares who is the first to implement DX11 hardware support...what are the benefits again?

LatiosXT

June 23, 2009 at 12:05pm

One to get the fanboys screaming "OH LOOK NVIDIA<insert insulting suffix here>, WE BEAT YOU TO DX11!!!11". DX10 hasn't even been used to the fullest, and at this point, it's really just about optimizing how video cards compute graphics than adding features. Actually, that's what it looks like from here on out until we get full fluid physics.

 Also whoever was in charge of OpenGL failed. 3.0 was playing catchup with Microsoft.

thefirstm

June 23, 2009 at 2:29am

Who cares about DirectX?  OpenGL FTW!!

Jeffredo

June 22, 2009 at 11:51pm

By the time there are actually applications to take advantage of DX11 both companies will be set with hardware.  Its a marketing trump, thats all.

Vegan

June 22, 2009 at 4:43pm

DX10 support was meaningless when it's Vista-exclusive. I *have* a DX10 video card, I just can't use it as such.

kiaghi7

June 22, 2009 at 4:05pm

An application "supporting" DX10 and actually using what DX10 has to offer aren't the same thing...

I'm all for games evolving onto newer iterations of DX, but considering the currently luke-warm adoption rate of DX10 compared to DX9, I fully expect DX11 to yield an even slower adoption rate by developers, and why one might ask?

 

Because when only a select niche of hardware supports it, only those with that hardware are even capable of using it. Then among them, only the population that is interested in that game will even bother with it, and let's be honest, among power-users the piracy rate is also significant (nowhere near to the amount the industry claims, but it is there), thus an even smaller potential market to draw upon. At the end of the day, it's dollar signs for "main stream" support and development and often tumble weeds for games that are on the very bleeding edge of technology until the rest of the playerbase can catch up to the requirements. 

The afore mentioned Crysis is a perfect example of this, setting aside the absolutely abysmal optimization only made more apparent by Crysis Warhead running infinitely better on the identical hardware. As a result, the misnomer is that if you can run Crysis well, then you must have a powerful machine, which while partially true it's also compensating greatly for the failings of the developer as well. That aside though, the DX10 set and the forefront of the game title was touted as the end-all and be-all of gaming technology, pitched as the measuring stick by which all other games would be measured for quite some time (and it is erroneously used as just that), unfortunately for the gamebase the game can be modified to do in DX9 mode what it does in DX10 mode, but better and on the same hardware... Partially because the developer cut some corners and didn't actually do what they had claimed to, and partially because microsoft lobotomized DX10 at the last minute before release to satiate the cries of large development and publishing houses.

horzo

June 22, 2009 at 2:05pm

How many games relased in the last two years even support DX10?