All DirectX 10 hardware is obsolete

From Slashdot:

Wow: a non-standard standard.

Nah its not, dx10.1 adds nothing much so games will be aimed at 10.

I just bought an 8800GTX. I'm still waiting for DX10 games.

Never raced nor rallied

Aw heck, I don't even have a DX10 card and it's already obsolete.

Better waiting for DX11...

I think OpenGL 3 will be like DirectX 21.

Well, can't say that an $800 graphics card will even be worth the effort.

One of those newly compulsory features is 4x anti-aliasing...

I can see it now:


OGL may be "less friendly", but it's a heck of a lot safer.

M$ suck as alwayz

Actually OpenGL3 will probably be like trying to be DirectX10. And don't you guys know never to trust *.0 release?! :O)

OpenGL3 is going to rock. I can't wait. OpenGL has had the same architecture for ten years. Obviously more care goes into its planning than DX.

But Microsoft would not be able to sell you an Operating System if DirectX wasn't continually updated. :-/

I'm surprised to hear you saying that considering how many problems OpenGL has given you with pretty much all ATI cards. You're a lot more generous than I would be in your place.

Ahh, and I had this build in mind, yes, I know that Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Duo were better, but I thought that the AMD x2 6000+ would have been worth looking into, this was what I was about to build:

ASUS M2N-E Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 Ultra MCP ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ Windsor 3.0GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Processor
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive
Patriot eXtreme Performance 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory
Foxconn 8600GT-256OC GeForce 8600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer 7.1 Channels 24-bit 96KHz PCI Interface Sound Card
LITE-ON Black 20X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 20X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA DVD Burner with LightScribe
COOLER MASTER eXtreme Power RP-650-PCAR ATX from factor 12V V2.01 650W Power Supply 115/230 V Safety Nemko, TUV, cUL, CE, BSMI, FCC, CCC

I was kinda hoping that this would've been a good build for DX10.1, but then again, AMD may have to almost come out with a 128-bit processor to even get back on top of Intel at this point...

Which might have been a good thing if the hardware also would have stayed the same for ten years and if the vendors were interested in supplying reasonable drivers. Well, reality is a bit different, isn't it?!

You might even be lucky to get five years on most high-end hardware configs anymore... When did Microsoft say that you didn't need more than 640K? My, how times have changed since Mr. "Deep Pocket Geek" Gates said that.

Yeah, that's what's weird. It's pretty early, but the article sounds like 10.1 will be ignored in favor of the "outdated" 10.0 spec. Which sort of defeats any point to 10.1.

Are there not many out yet? It's been ages since I bought a PC game; board games have my interest lately.

Heh - yeah, that about sums it up. <g>

From the little that I've seen, it does look good.

In any case, I guess I'll hold off on Vista/DX 10[.1]. If I were paranoid/conspiritorial, I'd almost think that MS did this to suck in all the PC gamers then pull this the rug out deliberately to kill off PC gaming and promote their Xbox as a "more reliable" gaming platform. But surely even they wouldn't do that.

The ARB is not at fault. They stuck to their own specifications. ATI is at fault for making bad drivers.

yea right.

Indeed. The quality of ATI's software is quite well showcased by the cobweb that is the Catalyst Control Center.

Having both ATI and nVidia - I have to say I much prefer nVidia.

Many ATI owners had problems with ATI's Catalyst Control Centre with regard to the 3d preview not working - coincidental that ATI decided to make a drastic change and remove the 3d preview?

Just turn the CCC off completely, that's what I've done.

I've used NVidia and ATI cards and always had less hassles and less instances of corruption and stuff not working with the ATI cards. The NVidia ones have always had problems, and lately my last NVidia card (a 6600GT) blew itself up.

No more NVidia cards for me unless I have no alternative.

Puki, did you win the lottery? you seem to own everything

ATI is quite OK and I always had less problems with their cards. And all CCC problems are easy to solve. Switch the thing off completely and just leave the driver in.

But I'd like to point out one more thing. So far it looks that the original source of this DX news is The Inquirer. Frankly I would not believe everything they say... or, at least I would not believe it to the letter.

Barney

There is a second problem to the CCC since day one: it somewhere has a massive memory leak problem. each game you start will add further memory to the CCC up to that point where your system just crashes with a BSOD.

my first step always is to kill CCC and replace it with Ray Adams ATI Tray Tool.
The result is like day and night actually.


Vorderman: if you want real shader support you sadly are forced to use NV. ATI still believes in "we are god" which resulted in the totally useless Xyyy serie which has no SM3, not Vertex Texture Fetch and many more things missing for current gen shaders ...
Don't know if the new one supports everything they should support nowaday but I actually doubt it ...
ATI just never tried to be the one creating technology, they just implement stuff into their hardware if they are forced because the game makers contact them with problems or because MS puts up new specs for upcomming DX subversions.

Thats because theres no MS to botch it and OWN it. Im pretty sure with cross platform considerations becomming more popular more developers will be looking to OGL.

Same thing's true with an AMD vs. an Intel, I'm guessing. Would the brand of processor affect DX 10.1 performance, too? Even tho Intel's better, AMD has recently broken the 3.0 barrier with the 6000+, but if that's enough, I dunno.

OGL will always only be second importance on Windows, the mainstream is DX.
Serious developers have been looking into OpenGL for a long time. Companies like Blizzard have hybrid installer since back Diablo 1! (ie 1 disc to install on Windows and Apple)

The fact that EA is looking into apple market actually does not make me believe that it will have a good end. EA isn't known to do any good to the game market and they proof this fact year after year with reviving the same old stuff another time and selling it for fullprice.
Right now, OSX is a raising gaming market but only until EA is start to dead flood it.

Well, don't forget that John Carmack was showing off some sort of Star Wars-type racing game on OSX as well, so Apple may gain id Software as another game developer as well... So far, most of id Software's old games were ported by a third party, like the Doom series, RtCW (even tho that was done by Grey Matter/Nerve/Venom), Quake series, and Wolf 3D. This may be the first that id Software themselves designs a game for Mac AND Windows simultaneously.

Nvidias are then perfect, ATIs are scrap.

So why bother making games that support crappy cards?

Thank you.

Then again, my only nVidia card is the 8800 (self-touch) GTX.

I'd like to say that my experience with ATi has been much better than nVidia. If I want to play all my games, I no longer need to keep 7 different versions of the nVidia drivers around, depending on which was the last version the game worked properly with.

The only reason I see for getting an nVidia card is because they have better Linux drivers, and Cedega needs it.

Im with Nvidia

nVIDIA are the better option for openGL. For DirectX i like ATI because of their image quality, especially their AA is niceee.

X1800 series and above are as performant as Nvidia in the same graphics card class. But someone will point me to crappy ATI drivers. I don't blame them, but both have their fair share of crappy drivers, no?

Most of the comments in regards to bashing one company sound like excuses for lazyness (complying), or excuses because Nvidia is green or excuses because I have an ATI or whatnot... It's not that valid. If one of the two were that crap, then XBOX360 wouldn't have ID's support, Playstation 3 wouldn't have ID's support, ATI cards would be 1/20th of the market, Nvidia cards would still be in the FX series... I prefer to say that I would really enjoy a nice 8800 GTX or Ultra if I had tons of cash to spend on a top of the line system, or a nice second hand ATI X1950XT. I mean both companies have very good graphics cards.

Why did I mention ID, well, usually they try to be as compatible as possible and try to keep their product as top of the line as possible, even on the low cost market. Yet, you still have fantastic games like Oblivion on the XBOX 360, Half Life 2 (old tech you might say) is still a incredible title in terms of realism, graphics, peformance, and it plays real good on mid cards of both ATI and Nvidia (usually faster on ATI).

I wouldn't stop on ONE opinion and base my purchase on that.

FFS, in a market with only two real contenders, it's inevitable that quality (especially of drivers) will suffer. Everything is rushed to market because there is such an unbearable pressure to be the best and to be the first.

nVidia by no means have decent drivers. By the time they released their TNT their drivers were horrendously bloated (RAM usage of 30+MB back in the day when 256MB was considered mainstream). Nothing has changed.

I can't directly comment on ATI because I've never owned their hardware (apart from a Rage AGP which I never used and can't quite remember how I obtained).

To summarise the whole graphics card situation, it's all marketing bullshit. Top-end kit is grossly overpriced in order to limit the market. Essentially using the big-spenders as public beta-testers. High-end kit gradually filters down to the mid-range (after tweaking) whilst drivers are honed to kill the most horrible bugs. By the time the general public can afford the kit, it's been through a revision or two, several thousand users have ensured bugs are not too noticable and the cycle continues.

The 1GB 'G92' cards will be £550+, run hot (I bet anyone £5 on this) and we will not see mid-range versions for a good 3 months after release. I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of failures, especially if they use next-gen GDDR.

I want an 8800GTS but I'm going to wait until the 9800GTX comes out and everything else devalues.

I'm still waiting for the new gfx cards. DX10 is useless at the moment. DX10.1 is already on the way.

Nvidia with their texture bug in the 8800 series is a joke imho. I hate being an unpaid beta tester.

ATI Radeon HD2900XT is quite competant with NVidia GeForce 8800 GTS, while the NVidia is still faster in normal and AA scenes, the ATI beats it in HDR shader language scenes. The interesting thing is that it happens in both OpenGL and DirectX9 games, like Doom3 (OpenGL), FarCry (DirectX). So I wouldn't say ATI is bad at OpenGL, ATI seems to be now better than NVidia at modern shader language graphics.

my ATI experiences have been terrible, Whilst Nvidia cards have never had any probs. My Geforce 2,3,6,7 all work fine with no problems outside of being old and slow.

I'm not too keen on GL either, in part because there are very few artist friendly shader tools that support GLSL or CG. At least Nvidia have taken the plunge with Mental Mill and FX composer. But the majority of tools simply don't support GL.

Even apps like 3DS max run better in DX9 than GL now.

Hmm, wonder what the 8800 GTS would ever do? I've been overlooking that, as well as the AMD 6000+, but wondering if that's the best combination to go with for DX 10.1.

Well, now that the Core 2 Quad seems to be the processor of choice, here's a new build that I think will comply with the DX 10.1 standard:

APEVIA X-CRUISER-BK Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail 
GIGABYTE GA-P35-S3L LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard - Retail 
EVGA 320-P2-N811-AR GeForce 8800GTS 320MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card - Retail 
COOLER MASTER eXtreme Power RP-650-PCAR ATX from factor 12V V2.01 650W Power Supply - Retail 
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80562Q6600 - Retail 
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X2048-6400 - Retail 
SIIG JU-52NF12-S1 52-in-1 USB 2.0 Hi-Speed USB 52-in-1 Reader/Writer - Retail 
Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM 
LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model LH-20A1L-05 - OEM 
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer 7.1 Channels PCI Interface 
TRENDnet TEW-443PI 32-bit PCI 2.2 Bus Master Wireless Adapter - Retail    
COOLER MASTER GeminII RR-CCH-ANU2-GP CPU+ Board Cooler - Retail 
Microsoft Windows Vista 32-Bit Home Premium for System Builders Single Pack DVD - OEM 

Total before S&H:  $1,360.88 USD

This. Screw Direct3D, OpenGL 3 will be the better choice. Since more developers seem to be aiming at Mac compatibility now (and in rare cases Linux, but that's not important unless you're me), using Direct3D is a waste of time and effort when you have a more streamlined and powerful API with OpenGL. Or so my opinion is.

AAhh, so it all boils down to all things come to those who wait, get stuff thats a damn sight more reliable, a damn sight cheaper, and results in a damn sight more cash to spend on the finer things in life.

I think it a tad unfair - considering I splashed out a fortune on a DX10 ready system and have yet to play a DX10 game and may not do so for another couple of months - coz there aren't any.

Yet "Gates" had the nerve to email me about all my WOW moments I had experienced prior to the launch of Vista.

I rather think it stinks a bit.

Puki: Never go with any 'new idea' of Microsoft:

- First generation XBox 360 overheating and breaking like crazy.
- Their great 'plays4sure' DRM protected media files for which microsoft dropped support like a brick as soon as they released the Zune

Lesson learned: let someone else be a beta tester, and wait for the bugs to be ironed out. sounds cold perhaps, but Microsoft makes enough money without me being their guinneapig. A couple of months patience can save a *lot* of aggrevation and money.

Oh no, puki, what you doing man? you believed one hand washes the other Willy ? OS's that gobbles up hardware, ever the cynic... or the realist ? thats me that is.

I don't think many people will have bought DX 10 cards anyway; my rule is always: Wait for a game that needs the card then buy it, don't buy the card and wait for the game.

Darkheart

Right, and usually the standard setters for games would be John Carmack, CliffyB, Gabe Newell, and Peter Molyneux, and maybe George Broussard. Outside of them, usually Microsoft will put at least the minimum standards for any DirectX setup, but it's the game developers and publishers that will start to have the final say... So up until then, stick with dual-core, until quad-core becomes the new standard for gaming, and stick with your ATI X1xxx and nVidia 7xxx or 8xxx, then you'll be all right, then when DirectX 10.1 comes out, then we'll worry about what types of hardware we'll need then.

Christ, I'm glad I don't still play PC games...

Playing computer games is vital for my game development - where do you think I get all my crushingly dominant media?

You don't have to play them to nick the media.

:)

Ehh, well, I was planning a decent build, too... Right now with nVidia and Intel dominating over AMD and ATI, I'd have to say that building a rig may be more expensive than ever before. :( Now with this news, I may probably go strictly to console gaming, since hardware doesn't change every three months rendering a build obsolete in less than that.

hmm
why give m$ the direction for the hardware developer and not Carmack and Co?

developing hardware for a software producer ala m$ is imho not the right way .

Yeah, and if you thought that wasn't enough, I found this a little absurd for a card that may be obsolete in another year, but a DX9 card in the ATI X1950 XTX can outperform an nVidia 8800GTS, which is a DX10 card. Here's where I got that information: http://reviews.cnet.com/graphics-cards/xfx-geforce-8800-gts/4505-8902_7-32328758.html?tag=also



Well, I know that the specs for the 8800GTS show that it's only a 320MB card, but then again, unlike the X1950, the 8800 GTS will meet the DX10.1 standard, so I don't get why this can't outperform a DX9 card.