AMD is backpedaling on their earlier statements about DirectX and graphics API’s, stating that they were taken out of context. As I originally suspected, the number of developers eager (or willing?) to code to bare metal is a startling minority.
The previous interview claimed that developers want the API to “go away,” that it’s getting in the way of creating some truly amazing graphics. Huddy himself was even quoted saying that developers have admitted this in conversations. But in this latest interview, he said that only a handful of high-end gaming developers were looking to bypass DirectX and code directly to hardware.
“It’s not something most developers want,” he said. “If you held a vote among developers, they would go for DirectX or OpenGL, because it’s a great platform. It’s hard to crash a machine with Direct X, as there’s lots of protection to make sure the game isn’t taking down the machine, which is certainly rare especially compared to ten or fifteen years ago. Stability is the reason why you wouldn’t want to move away from Direct X, and differentiation is why you might want to.”
I’m sure some people want that kind of access to the hardware, but they’re predominantly in the research world. Most developers would happily trade away that tiny bit of performance for the ease of development and portability of a good api. I just don’t think DirectX is a particularly good API.
@Randall That is only partial true OpenGL|ES != OpenGL OpenGL 2.1 != OpenGL 4 and so on. OpenGL suffers from inter hardware incompatibility a lot more than DirectX does. It’s programing model is arcane and stuck back in the late 80s. It is not an alternative at all it is a worse alternative actually.
D2M will not happen since the majority of application writers do not want this. Otherwise if you’re around long enough in the industry you would remember the major complains about DirectX 3 which was pure D2M poking around directly with command buffers and that’s what Huddy wants no one in the dev world wants that.
@ DrBalthar I think that OpenGL is “better” than DirectX, since it can be used on Mac, Linux, and most embedded systems (iPhone, android, etc).
It too needs a lot of work to make up for the last decade or so of “addons” that have really cluttered up things. In reality, I think we need an entirely new API that talks “direct to metal” but offers a nice abstraction on modern primitives like Points, Volumes, or Rays. Some systems try to do this today like OpenRT and OptiX, but are just abstraction layers that still talk to DirectX or OpenGL. A true new API that offered communication directly between primitives and metal is what we really need.
And what API do you think is better at the moment? Don’t say OpenGL that would just make you look like a fool!
I guess this further proves my belief that Mr. Huddy is indeed bipolar.