DirectX 10 for Vista was a mistake

[Epsi]

Gabe Newell, president of Valve Software, said in an interview that Microsoft made a terrible mistake releasing DirectX 10 for Vista only and excluding Windows XP. He said this decision affected the whole industry as so far only a very small percentage of players can use DirectX 10.
When developing cross-platform games which are also released fo Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, developers look for the smallest common denominator. And since neither Microsoft's nor Sony's new consoles support Shader Model 4.0 for DirectX 10, only few games use it, he said. In addition, Newell bemoaned the increasing lack of input device diversity in PC gaming culture. He would like to see controllers like the Wiimote or the Guitar Hero guitar, but since DirectX support for devices like these had increasingly been reduced over the last few years, developers didn't dare implement these expensive innovations.

The Half-Life 2 Orange Box, which will be released for PC and Xbox 360 on 12. October, uses DirectX 10 functionality only for accelerating some mimics. Visually, however, it was virtually impossible to differentiate between the versions. The PS3 edition is being developed by an EA studio and is scheduled for release two to three weeks later. The game will already be available from download service Steam on 10. October. Newell said the later release date for the retail editions was requested by the retailers. Retailers also didn't want different versions, resulting in the release of a complete package containing Half-Life 2, Episode 1, Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress. Even before the release date, Valve will announce additional bundles for Steam so that existing Half-Life 2 users don't have to buy a second copy of the game.

If I remember correctly, DirectX 9 did not work on Windows 98SE when it came out. Right? But nobody minded upgradeing from Windows 98SE to XP. Why is it now such a huge problem?

[Aesir]

Well I'm going out on a limb but Vista costs R3000 +-(for those versions worth the buy), Xp didn't.

[Azimuth]

XP works.

[Mic]

xp is far less recourse eating than vista... and also... xp works better and is cheaper... and off topic... can you get an update or installer that upgrades xp to vista and still keeps all your files intact?

[Plan 9]

DirectX 9 was brought out quite a long time after XP was already on the market. Most people had XP.

[Aesir]

can you get an update or installer that upgrades xp to vista and still keeps all your files intact?

Yes.

[Etienne]

Carmack has been saying this for a while now. Glad Gabe is echoing his sentiments. Microsoft would do well to listen to two of the most influential PC game developers of all time. These guys actually know wtf they are talking about.

[Epsi]

Carmack has been saying this for a while now. Glad Gabe is echoing his sentiments. Microsoft would do well to listen to two of the most influential PC game developers of all time. These guys actually know wtf they are talking about.

I agree on Carmack... Not so much about Gabe, I think Will Wright is more influential.
Didnt Gabe used to be a Microsoft employee?

[Ruandre]

Valve will announce additional bundles for Steam so that existing Half-Life 2 users don't have to buy a second copy of the game.I *heart* Valve, and Steam. :)

[Etienne]

You love Steam...?

What kind of a freak are you? :P

[Epsi]

You love Steam...?

What kind of a freak are you? :P

I agree. But steam does have it's finer points. But mostly I agree with you.

[Aesir]

Well according to what I have gathered STEAM is actually brilliant, but because of SA's lacklustre internet it cannot be fully utelised by us 3rd world folk. Amirite?

[PerVert NexT Door]

You love Steam...?

What kind of a freak are you? :P



A freak with a decent internet connection.

I mean after downloading Bioshock on steam I realised how awesome it was.

[Aesir]

A freak with a decent internet connection.

Me ? not really.

[FEN1X]

Vista costs R3000 +-(for those versions worth the buy), Xp didn't.

Well somebodies being ripped off, I can get Vista Ultimate for R 1,949 at www.cafeviva.co.za

[Epsi]

Well somebodies being ripped off, I can get Vista Ultimate for R 1,949 at www.cafeviva.co.za

Damn. Thanks for the website.

[FEN1X]

Pleasure, download the pricelist for all prices of all stock, their the best I can find apart from Prophecy,Rectron and Gennex.

[Epsi]

Pleasure, download the pricelist for all prices of all stock, their the best I can find apart from Prophecy,Rectron and Gennex.

Yes. Just did. Very good prices. Gives me hope that I can onday own a GeForce 8.

[FEN1X]

Ya, me too, im still confused on which card to get ,but I think I might wait for the 8900 ***'s to come out?

[Aesir]

I just gave a price i remembered from when Vista came out, I can barely afford a game each month now that I don't work, so Vista is out of the question either way. :D

[FEN1X]

I just gave a price i remembered from when Vista came out, I can barely afford a game each month now that I don't work, so Vista is out of the question either way. :D

Shame, ive got a friend immigrating to OZ in a few months and he says hes gonna sell his pc and buy a Mac laptop (its a lost cause hes gone off gaming), so im gonna huck him for his Vista for R500 :P

[Aesir]

Shame, ive got a friend immigrating to OZ in a few months and he says hes gonna sell his pc and buy a Mac laptop (its a lost cause hes gone off gaming), so im gonna huck him for his Vista for R500 :P

I had a *cough* cracked version of Vista *cough* used it until my internet gave me problems, there are awesome things to it and horrible things. Much like every other windows. I'm back to xp now.

[FEN1X]

I had a *cough* cracked version of Vista *cough* used it until my internet gave me problems, there are awesome things to it and horrible things. Much like every other windows. I'm back to xp now.

Im not gonna lose my XP, ill just use Vista for DX10 otherwise, its XP for life baby :D

[Epsi]

Ya, me too, im still confused on which card to get ,but I think I might wait for the 8900 ***'s to come out?

I just know anything below the 8500gt (the 512mb version is R1000) is not worth getting... unless your budget as bad as mine.

[caRnAG3]

If I remember correctly, DirectX 9 did not work on Windows 98SE when it came out. Right? But nobody minded upgradeing from Windows 98SE to XP. Why is it now such a huge problem?

You can't compare DX9 running on Win98SE, you would have to make the comparison with Win2000 and if you check you will see that Win2000 supports DX9. When you look back in two years from now no one will remember DX9.

[Epsi]

I compared it to Win98SE, because that's what most people had installed at the time DirectX 9 came out.

[FEN1X]

I just know anything below the 8500gt (the 512mb version is R1000) is not worth getting... unless your budget as bad as mine.

Noi understand that,all the 8900 editions are > 8800's cards.

[Etienne]

Well somebodies being ripped off, I can get Vista Ultimate for R 1,949 at www.cafeviva.co.za

That's for the OEM version. You can only install it on one PC. When you upgrade that PC, you will have to buy it AGAIN. The OEM version also only has one build of the OS on it, which means you either get the 32bit version of Windows or the 64bit version, not both.

[Nandrew]

I compared it to Win98SE, because that's what most people had installed at the time DirectX 9 came out.

Hmm, not quite sure about that postulation. I think a lot of people had migrated to the multitude of newer operating systems by then.

But oh, man, Vista is fail at the moment. Still, I'd like to see how it does after, say, a year or so. There's room for improvement, so one can hope. ^^


Im not gonna lose my XP, ill just use Vista for DX10 otherwise, its XP for life baby :D

XP for life? Dude, I'd be both impressed and scared if you were still relying on that OS after, say, another 30 years. :P

[Etienne]

Anyway, to get back to the topic of this thread: Game developers chose to go with Microsoft. Now Microsoft are bighting them in the ass. They chose Direct X above OpenGL. They chose a closed, propriety API above an open one and now they are bitching.

Serves them right.

Just take this in to consideration: All the OpenGL 2 extensions that gives OpenGL DirectX 10 functionality work on XP and Vista. Why doesn't DX10?

[Chevron]

Just take this in to consideration: All the OpenGL 2 extensions that gives OpenGL DirectX 10 functionality work on XP and Vista. Why doesn't DX10?

Because micro$oft loves the moola.

[Gldm]

Anyway, to get back to the topic of this thread: Game developers chose to go with Microsoft. Now Microsoft are bighting them in the ass. They chose Direct X above OpenGL. They chose a closed, propriety API above an open one and now they are bitching.

Serves them right.

Just take this in to consideration: All the OpenGL 2 extensions that gives OpenGL DirectX 10 functionality work on XP and Vista. Why doesn't DX10?

They chose an API that was actually making progress instead of bogging down in open-source infighting for years. OpenGL2 is a big jump from the previous version but the previous version was like DirectX 6 and it took years to get the next revision.

As far as I know the big "showstopper" feature is graphics memory virtualization. Readers of John Carmack's .plan file will probably recall him talking about the need to go to "more than 32bit" i.e. the HDR floating point rendering we have now, and flat memory addressing as future improvements, back around the Geforce 1-2 days. Well one of the DX10 features that's supposed to be on the sheet (though rumor has it isn't due to some Nvidia implementation bug) is a flat memory model. This means if you want to render say, 4 pixel of sky showing through a bullet hole, you don't need to grab the entire sky texture into memory, you can just grab the relevant bytes. Things like swapping out to system memory are transparent. At least that's what I seem to recall about it. Dislekcia could probably tell you a lot more than me.

Now, the problem with this is as far as I know it completely breaks how XP does memory management and device drivers. So in order to implement it, you either have to do massive emulation, which is going to be too slow, or completely rewrite large chunks of the OS to be like Vista. Given the compatibility nightmare of the latter, it's no surprise MS is not eager to do it.

Now, as I mentioned above there are rumors that this feature was dropped from DX10 due to some issue with Nvidia cards, and the major back port problem is not there. However, it is most likely mandatory in 10.1, which is already gearing up for release. So even if DX10 was released for XP 10.1 would put things right back where they started.

[Nandrew]

Now Microsoft are bighting them in the ass.

This post is notable for the most spectacularly imaginative spelling of the word "biting" that I've ever seen. ^^

I'd hate to actually encourage spelling errors, but that's +10 Internets right there.

... yeah, I dunno. Mebbe it's just that I don't see this word misspelt too often. Wheeeee?

[Frozenfireside]

I like steam as well-it works well but yes, it does require downloading the game in most cases and Dial-up users hate it.
I have a 4meg line-it works well with steam but I get most of my files from a mate who has already downloaded the games.
And yes I do think DX10 for Vista only was a mistake-M$ is trying to push too hard too quickly.
imgine the number of 8800's being sold if people didn't have to buy a R5k OS to be able to use it properly!?

[dolfieman]

Miscro$$$$$$$oft. 'nuff said.

[-StormcroW-]

As said in the beginning 98SE didn't have DX9 support, but as buggy as XP was in its teething stages, everyone made the transition to XP with no problems. Now vista is a new OS people, it handles everything differently than what XP does, and it is now "teething".

As GLDM said the new API and memory management of DX10 is the reason it is not in XP. If I remember correctly the cracker group Razor1911 tried to get DX10 working on XP, and could only do it though emulation, which in turn made it very slow. Even games that have been developed for vista handle memory differently to take advantage of the new API(the main reason why stalker had issues on 32bit vista). I feel Vista is a good step forward.

[Gldm]

Miscro$$$$$$$oft. 'nuff said.

You resurrected a 5 month old thread to post that?

[-StormcroW-]

Lol, only saw that now.
*Guilty of skimming*

[Gldm]

Lol, only saw that now.
*Guilty of skimming*

You are not at fault. He is fail.


http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/8373/fail7yo0.jpg (http://img444.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fail7yo0.jpg)

[Jub Jub]

As i can understand it. There are two views going on, which in turn one group is saying Xp is better because you dont have to go through the whole "teething" stage again and it doesnt require as much resources from the computer as Visita does. Group 2 is telling us about a vital and key point in the API and memory of Direct x 10, And in all essence vista was the right choice to go there.

We have developers moaning because (this is how i see it) They are working with a new system where Direct x 9 still has a large following and can still keep up with the best of them with the exceptions of course. But the developers understand that many people cannot afford brand new PCs

Solution keep vista and Xp and instead of making bigger badder Graphics cards work on making the software cheaper and solve those problems which is causing the suffering. Im just saying that in a third person view, Three markets that normally live around each other in the Gaming world are fighting and ignoring each other. Now just because the companies work together in many agreements doesnt mean they dont see their flaws.

I expect to have many of the forum members firing me down with this statement with either i said something wrong, dont know what im talking about and so on. They are probably right but still i want to leave you completely confused or realising something far above my comprehension