Tim sweeney comments on DIrectx10.

[Nv40]

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...view/page8.asp

Very interesting interview.. with Epics main engine developer. and his brutally honest answers..

Realistically, DirectX 10 doesn't introduce fundamentally new capabilities, but brings many new features that will enable developers to optimize games more thoroughly and thus deliver incrementally better visuals and better frame rates.

THis is ofcourse is not what you will hear from any developer in a microsoft sponsored event. because they realize gamers are very important in the sales of their OS. People dont buy expensive DELL machines to play with wordperfect. and not many (non gamers) will upgrade to Vista just because it looks pretty. (althought security is a diferent story)

His views of the new DIrectx10 technology are basically that the new technology doesnt add anything new in terms of eye candy but very usefull techniques to optimize for their games. In theory the same Direcx9 effects could be done more efficiently and also more faster in dx10.

look what T.S says is the major step from here that we use DIrectx9.

From here on, there is really only one major step remaining in the evolution of graphics hardware, and that's the eventual unification of CPU and GPU architectures into uniform hardware capable of supporting both efficiently.

The major step that T.S. is looking is for the complete unification between CPU-GPU . Things will work together and both will be used for graphics and physics and everything else .

so two possible scenarios will happen...

1)Unification of the CPU and GPU means either the dead of the PCI express x16 bus (and graphics acelerators the way we know today them.) and eveything will be inside of INTEL/NVidia , AMD/ATI hybrids prosessors



2)or the dead of processors sockets and everything will be done from the unified PCIxpress graphics adapter.

From a practical point of view , Heat ,physical size and power , and market dominance it looks like AMD or INTEL have better chances to dominate in the long run with HYbrids CPUS/GPUS ,designed for nothing else than gaming.

KNowing the size of INTEL AND the buyout of ATI by AMD , shows that in the end will be NVidia vs the World. And Intel will rule them all. . unless NVidia begin to design unified CPU/GPU's ,dedicated "gaming PRocessors" too and competes ,or unify with INTEL. MAny here will question the ability of Intel to make powerfull small and integrated graphics Dx10 accelerators .but no one will question the ability of AMD now that they have ATI Engineers. aparently last i heard INTEL is buying large ammounts of NVidia stock shares.. so do the math.

OF course things like UNification will not happen in the near future ,but something that i think will happen sooner or later in the next 5-10 years if technology progress in the same way.

know another interesting question by F.S.

FiringSquad: Based on what you’ve seen with DirectX 10, do you think it will be easier for game developers to program for than DirectX 9 was? If yes, which features really stand out?

Tim Sweeney: You can't really use the word "easier" in conjunction with supporting DirectX 10. Because it's only available on Windows Vista and not XP, all developers who support it will have to continue supporting DirectX9, and henceforth maintain two versions of the rendering code in their engine. It's worth doing this, and we're doing it for Unreal Engine 3. But, far from making our lives easier, it brings a considerable amount of additional development cost and overhead to PC game development,

So there goes all the theories of Directx10 only games.. people should not be alarmed of those games advertised as Directx10/Vista only ,there will be versions of DIrectx9 of the same games and should look identical .unless THe developers have been paid alot $$$ for the exclusivity , enough to sacrifice 60-80% of the gaming community that will not upgrade anytime soon to a top of the line PC ,less for Vista.

now my favorite part..

FiringSquad: We know that Unreal Engine 3 was largely developed with shader model 3.0 in mind, but do you plan on adding any DirectX 10 aspects into Unreal Engine 3 and ultimately Unreal Tournament 2007 or is that coming in UE4?

Tim Sweeney: Unreal Engine 3 will make full use of DirectX 10, and many of our and our partners' games will ship in 2007 with full support for DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. But, despite the marketing hype, DirectX 10 isn't all that different from DirectX 9, so you'll mainly see performance benefits on DirectX 10 rather than striking visual differences.

DirectX 10 is a good and solid step forward for graphics, but it's very much an evolutionary thing, and for a game shipping holiday 2007, DirectX10 will represent maybe 10% of a typical game's customer base, say 35% Xbox 360, 35% PC, 30% PS3 (which will still be ramping up then), with one-third of the PC owners having new computers running Windows Vista with DirectX10 GPUs, and the other two-thirds either running XP or running Vista on DirectX9 hardware. I want to point this out in advance, since the marketing around DirectX 10 exceeds the .....reality.

IN summary TS believes..

1)Dx10 while Good ,its only an incremental step , its ~Dx9 with more efficiency and will not be used as much as the MS adverting claims until many years.
.
2)A big change will happen in the gaming industry ,that will make dedicated graphics or dedicated Physics obsolete in the long term. Everything will move to the CPU again , but now they will be a lot more powerfull ,they will be able to manage latest graphics and physics in Hybrids CPUs. That will have GPUs abilities. I think AMD have the oportunity now to be the first with hybrids CPU/Gpus. time will tell.


Now to clarify , i love Vista ,i will be the first to buy the 64bit version as soon as its released ,and will also buy the 8800 gtx as soon as a shop sells it .but for its performance and new AA and HDR modes ,i dont really care if it is truly Dx10 card or not ,and will love to see ENthusiast ONLY games with incredible graphics ,but unfortunately i cant ignore history that have show us again and again that it takes years before developers completely move all their games code to new technolgy ,less take real advantage of the technolgy. Ask the people who bough the geforce3 (directx8) or the radeon9700 (directx9) because of its Directx capabilities.. at best what we will in the first year of VIsta is a few games with a quick Dx10 patch to help Vista sales.

[a12ctic]

So basicly, dx10 is dx9 accualy optimised for the PC and not just random sloppy code like dx9 was? figures...

[Quickstar]

Its nothing new really. I thought most people already knew that DX10 made performance improvements rather than adding special effects....
I remember reading an article a while back from HardOCP and the only 'new' thing that stood out was the geometry shader.

[RAY16]

So, Sweeney basically confirmed what me and every semi-intelligent person on the planet figured out a billion years ago. Yay.

[myshkinbob]

DX10 has it's other benefits though, in terms of developement, at least in the long term.

They got rid of cap bits right? so there's less code paths to cover (for each brand), just the standard DX10 implementation of things.

I guess the changeover period is always more work, but the payoff this time is less work later.

[queth]

Originally Posted by myshkinbob

DX10 has it's other benefits though, in terms of developement, at least in the long term.

They got rid of cap bits right? so there's less code paths to cover (for each brand), just the standard DX10 implementation of things.

I guess the changeover period is always more work, but the payoff this time is less work later.

exactly.

also if it brings better performance by offloading more work, than i say that is a huge feature and something more important than most anything else as it allows for more items on the screen than we could hope for now.

[Subtestube]

Additionally, removing performance bottlenecks makes previously prohibitively slow techniques feasible - hence, even though there may be 'no new effects' that are possible with DX10, DX10 should theoretically make old effects that were in the past just too slow a lot more possible. From a user perspective the two are the same - if we never previously saw a visual effect in a game, but suddenly do now, it doesn't matter if it was never in because it was too slow, or just because it couldn't be done - it's still an effect enabled by the new tech.

[RAY16]

Regardless of the fact that they can pile more effects on with DX10 (or put in effects that were previously too slow), the point is that DX10 isn't going to be as revolutionary as some people make it out to be.

[Subtestube]

Originally Posted by RAY16

Regardless of the fact that they can pile more effects on with DX10 (or put in effects that were previously too slow), the point is that DX10 isn't going to be as revolutionary as some people make it out to be.

Surely that depends on how significant the performance improvements _actually_ end up being - if MS isn't lying when they say they've reduced certain call overheads by almost half, I'd say it certainly _is_ revolutionary in at least one way. Without having production hardware or any real-world comparisons I'd say it's next to impossible to make any kind of statement about how important/revolutionary it'll be. I'll tell you this though, from a code perspective it tidies up _a lot_.

[Zelda_fan]

Folks, take a look at the origional poster. NV40. Why anyone would take this remotely seriously is beyond me.

[|MaguS|]

Originally Posted by Zelda_fan

Folks, take a look at the origional poster. NV40. Why anyone would take this remotely seriously is beyond me.

Why not ignore the post and read the article... gasp! It's still from Tim Sweeny...

[Intel17]

Originally Posted by a12ctic

So basicly, dx10 is dx9 accualy optimised for the PC and not just random sloppy code like dx9 was? figures...

Have you ever actually used DirectX9?