Avalon and Windows Graphics Foundation 2.0

[Brent_Justice]

A good summary here about the new WGF and Avalon

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2403&p=4

I like this part:

We can also expect Microsoft to come through with a much more detailed and stringent specification for WGF 2.0. It seems that the extent to which DX9 hardware can vary has gotten their attention. In one of the sessions we attended, it was stressed that Microsoft doesn't want software developers to have to cater to multiple hardware paths in order to get good performance. In fact, they went so far as to say that they wanted a tight enough spec so that WGF 2.0 hardware would all support the same features implemented in the same way. Foreshadowing this, all capability bits have been eliminated from WGF 2.0 (meaning that either hardware will or will not support exactly the same set of functions as all other WGF 2.0 hardware).

 

[FanATIc]

read this at work, so i'll bump it. Figured it would get more attention then this, but i guess people dont like technical jibberish? heh.

Basically its saying ATI and Nvidia, under microsofts direct X releases, wont be supporting different feature sets. For example SM2.0 vs SM3.0. Its going to be about who has the best OpenGL customization and features, if that even survives as a gaming engine, and a work per clock battle, they used AMD vs Intel as a comparison. Thought it was very interesting.

They dont appear to care about who has what hardware wise, but more about making life for coders easier. I think its a great angle. Wonder if theres a catch. More people should read this. Future of gaming.

 

[PRIME1]

I don't imagine this being too hardware intensive. With the 6xxx series already supporting 9.0C and the R520 due to support it, I would think that this is more of a driver issue than a hardware limitation.

Although I have yet to see any solid spec on DirectX 10.


*I bet the "starfield" screensaver is going to look soooo cool on Longhorn

 

[Hvatum]

read this at work, so i'll bump it. Figured it would get more attention then this, but i guess people dont like technical jibberish? heh.

Basically its saying ATI and Nvidia, under microsofts direct X releases, wont be supporting different feature sets. For example SM2.0 vs SM3.0. Its going to be about who has the best OpenGL customization and features, if that even survives as a gaming engine, and a work per clock battle, they used AMD vs Intel as a comparison. Thought it was very interesting.

They dont appear to care about who has what hardware wise, but more about making life for coders easier. I think its a great angle. Wonder if theres a catch. More people should read this. Future of gaming.

As long as at least Apple, Sony, Nintendo, Redhat, IBM or SGI exists OpenGL will continue to keep pace with Direct X and remain a vaiable graphics platform - So yeah I guess that means forever.

I'm not very impressed with Avalon either. It looks like a poorly implemented version of Quartz Extreme.

If they actually manage to develop a consistent implimentation for the Direct X features that would be good thing though. This would also spill over into the other market segments

 

[FanATIc]

Farcry, Half life 2, F.E.A.R., Stalker, Unreal Engine III, Everquest 2, Battlefield 2
Few up and coming popular titles as well as released games using DX

Doom3 *quake4*, Chronicles of Riddick, WoW which i believe can use both engines
recent popular titles on OpenGL,

Every year it gets less and less. Game developers will go for the least amount of work for the most output, and i just dont see OpenGL keeping a viable pace in terms of PC games. Obviously it has use in console games, and most certainly in 3D rendering programs, but in terms of Computer gaming its dying. Not long ago it was the most popular, but its losing popularity fast amongst game coders. Im not too sure the upcoming PPU cards will work in OpenGL either since i'v only heard about DirectX game implimentation.

Ask any gamer who plays the hottest titles what they'd rather have if they had to choose between the two for support on their hardware, i can bet bottom dollar the answer would almost always be Direct X. Supports more effects, easier to code shaders. Its getting alot more attention these days from game developers.

 

[Hvatum]

Farcry, Half life 2, F.E.A.R., Stalker, Unreal Engine III, Everquest 2, Battlefield 2
Few up and coming popular titles as well as released games using DX

Doom3 *quake4*, Chronicles of Riddick, WoW which i believe can use both engines
recent popular titles on OpenGL,

Every year it gets less and less. Game developers will go for the least amount of work for the most output, and i just dont see OpenGL keeping a viable pace in terms of PC games. Obviously it has use in console games, and most certainly in 3D rendering programs, but in terms of Computer gaming its dying. Not long ago it was the most popular, but its losing popularity fast amongst game coders. Im not too sure the upcoming PPU cards will work in OpenGL either since i'v only heard about DirectX game implimentation.

Ask any gamer who plays the hottest titles what they'd rather have if they had to choose between the two for support on their hardware, i can bet bottom dollar the answer would almost always be Direct X. Supports more effects, easier to code shaders. Its getting alot more attention these days from game developers.

Bill Gates' wet dream is complete Direct X dominance - Microsoft gets a monopoly on PC games and starts charging for a Direct X SDK. Too bad for him that's not going to happen.

In my opinion the situation has been static since the millenium. There's always a proportion of titles which are cross platform and therefore must be prorammed in OpenGL. If anything there's an ever growing number of OpenGL titles out there with the increasing popularity of Macintosh computers.

Direct X and OpenGL aren't even mutually exclusive in hardware support (programmable pipelines etc.) so there's absolutely no reason for a company to discontinue support for one or the other. Unless of course they want to shut themselves out of half the market.

But you're right, the most popular titles have and will be Direct X in all likelyhood. OpenGL is here to stay though - on the PC and on the console IMHO.

 

[USMC2Hard4U]

Is it me, or does it seem like Open GL (in games) seem to provide a smoother expirance? As oppose to its direct X counterpart.

 

[Met-AL]

I used to think the same thing, but I really don't think there is much difference in all reality.

It would have been nice if 3dfx would have made GLiDe public domain a few years sooner than they did. GLiDe was awesome, but that may have been just because it was running on Voodoo cards which in there day were the best.

OpenGL isn't going anywhere soon, unless Microsoft releases DXfor other platforms and doesn't milk it for all the money they can get out of it. I think they would be crazy not to. They already have the dominate OS by a large margin, no need to keep DX Windows only to help lock that position since they aren't gonna lose it anytime soon.

 

[Scali]

Is it me, or does it seem like Open GL (in games) seem to provide a smoother expirance? As oppose to its direct X counterpart.

Must be you... Or perhaps your system.
There is no technical reason why OpenGL would be smoother than Direct3D. In fact, in my experience it's less smooth, but that's probably because I cannot seem to enable triple buffering in the NV drivers, while triple buffering in D3D works.
You may have settings that give the opposite results

 

[Scali]

It would have been nice if 3dfx would have made GLiDe public domain a few years sooner than they did. GLiDe was awesome, but that may have been just because it was running on Voodoo cards which in there day were the best.

Glide was custom-made for VooDoo cards at the time. It would be horribly unsuitable for today's cards with hardware T&L, programmable shaders and everything.
DirectX is nice because it's reasonably custom-made for today's hardware, and everytime the hardware makes a significant change, DirectX changes along with it.
OpenGL is far slower in changing and adapting, and you often find yourself lacking features, or requiring to use vendor-specific extensions for things that have been standard in Direct3D for years (like render-to-texture, or SM1.x support).
Even Carmack himself has admitted he has sometimes wondered why he is still using OpenGL instead of Direct3D... Doom3 could have been his last OpenGL engine.

OpenGL isn't going anywhere soon, unless Microsoft releases DXfor other platforms and doesn't milk it for all the money they can get out of it. I think they would be crazy not to. They already have the dominate OS by a large margin, no need to keep DX Windows only to help lock that position since they aren't gonna lose it anytime soon.

Windows-only? See www.macdx.com

 

[Dan_D]

Is it me, or does it seem like Open GL (in games) seem to provide a smoother expirance? As oppose to its direct X counterpart.

OpenGL is a cross platform standard. While I don't think its superior in any form other than that, it makes porting to other platforms easier. I would think.

 

[Brent_Justice]

OpenGL is a cross platform standard. While I don't think its superior in any form other than that, it makes porting to other platforms easier. I would think.

IMO it's superior to D3D in the fact that it allows extensions. So graphics cards features and game features can grow without having to wait for a core API upgrade.

With D3D you have to wait till MS releases a new version that supports new features.

I think D3D should be made more like OGL. Make it so the card has to support the core features that make it DX10 compatible, do the thing MS is doing to enforce the cards either support the features or not to call it a DX10 capable card. But also have extension support so IHV's could add new strings into the drivers allowing new graphics features, like OGL does.

The best of both worlds IMO.

I dunno, maybe that has drawbacks, but it sounds like it could work.

 

[Brent_Justice]

More Here

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1791702,00.asp

 

[Scali]

OpenGL is a cross platform standard. While I don't think its superior in any form other than that, it makes porting to other platforms easier. I would think.

In theory yes... In practice it's not been that easy for Doom3.

 

[Scali]

IMO it's superior to D3D in the fact that it allows extensions. So graphics cards features and game features can grow without having to wait for a core API upgrade.

In theory that's nice... In practice it makes a complete mess of supporting features, since each manufacturer will have its own version of an extension for a certain feature long before a common ARB/EXT extension comes out.

With D3D you have to wait till MS releases a new version that supports new features.

Funny enough D3D is often faster with adopting new features these days... it is actually pulling the hardware... look at SM3.0 for example. The API supported it long before the hardware did.

I think D3D should be made more like OGL. Make it so the card has to support the core features that make it DX10 compatible, do the thing MS is doing to enforce the cards either support the features or not to call it a DX10 capable card. But also have extension support so IHV's could add new strings into the drivers allowing new graphics features, like OGL does.

One of the main advantages of D3D (for developers anyway) is that there's no extension hell. It's very easy to support a feature... You don't have to consider vendors or specific hardware models or anything... You just check if the D3D driver supports a certain feature and that's it. The same feature will work the same for any vendor and any model.
That is probably the main reason why D3D is more popular than OpenGL among developers. It's the reason why I use D3D instead of OpenGL anyway. I am sick of all the compatibility problems, workarounds and other kludges, to support even the most basic features like render-to-texture in OpenGL.

 

[Brent_Justice]

Cool, I'm not a developer, I look at things from a gamers perspective

 

[Scali]

Cool, I'm not a developer, I look at things from a gamers perspective

Well, I don't see why gamers should care about the API at all...
They should only care about getting the most out of their PCs... and currently D3D is doing that a lot better than OpenGL (reasons for that related to what I said above about developers).
Namely a result of OpenGL's vendor-specific extensions is that your hardware may not be supported, not because it lacks the feature, but simply because it's from the 'wrong' vendor... as in, a vendor that didn't have the feature at the time of development, or a vendor that the developer didn't find important enough to support... or a vendor that didn't even exist.

Doom3 has... 5 rendering paths or so? And still support is very bad if you don't happen to have a recent card from one of the two main vendors.

 

[Hvatum]

Cool, I'm not a developer, I look at things from a gamers perspective

Those two perspectives often lend completely different optimal situations. Case in point, for a Gamer it would be awesome and blazing fast if the engine were progammed completely in Assembler. That would be HELL for the programer though.

As to the Mac direct X: Stuff like that is a legal minefield. If Apple Direct X becomes a real threat to Microsoft's Dominance they could pull out their patent arsenal and destroy it. Having your balls in Microsoft's vice is not a good place to be.

 

[Scali]

Those two perspectives often lend completely different optimal situations. Case in point, for a Gamer it would be awesome and blazing fast if the engine were progammed completely in Assembler. That would be HELL for the programer though.

Would also drive software development time, hence prices through the roof...
Which is bad for the gamer too

As to the Mac direct X: Stuff like that is a legal minefield. If Apple Direct X becomes a real threat to Microsoft's Dominance they could pull out their patent arsenal and destroy it. Having your balls in Microsoft's vice is not a good place to be.

So far MS seems to be fine with it. Just another reason to use D3D (this stuff actually makes porting to Mac about as easy as recompiling... OpenGL would only make the graphics sorta portable, still leaving you with sound, input, network etc, that has to be handled separately). Even Microsoft's games are ported with such technology (although I believe Macsoft has its own DirectX implementation, which is not available to the public)... see www.macsoftgames.com.
DirectX games are ported to Mac at amazing speed anyway.