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"DX10" Works in XP Through OpenGL

ozone3d.net — Microsoft claims DX10 (D3D 10, the "important" part for games) can't be ported XP. The truth is you don't even need DX10 to use all major new features of DX10 hardware on ANY platform. That includes XP. How is this possible? OpenGL ofcourse. The only thing stopping MS from porting DX10 is greed, not technology. RTFA before you reply.

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  • shazbot, on 10/12/2007, -30/+7"The only thing stopping MS from porting DX10 is greed, not technology."
    Well of course that's the fact you idiot. It's a selling point. If Apple had a 3D technology that almost all game developers used, they wouldn't go port that to Windows. It would be stupid.
    It's not Microsoft's fault everyone develops games on their platform. If people would stop developing games using Direct X then we wouldn't have this problem. It's not Microsoft's fault for not porting their proprietary API technology on competitor's systems, it's the game developer's fault for using Direct X.
    They are going full force with Vista, and there are legitimate reasons for not porting it to XP or any other platform. Leaving a legacy operating system behind to work on their current release makes sense when you have a limited number of developers and a new operating system out.
    • rm999, on 10/12/2007, -18/+12"RTFA before you reply."

      no.
    • theblooms, on 10/12/2007, -1/+20@shazbot

      Back in the infancy of 3D on the PC, DirectX was ***** compared to OpenGL and by extension, 3DFX's GLide. The only reason that DirectX is now the defacto standard now is 3dfx (notice the difference in the logo?) made some TERRIBLE business decisions that effectively killed OpenGL and GLide for PC gaming. It was NOT the technology that was bad, it was pretty much the decision to purchase STB and start manufacturing their own cards instead of just making the processors like nVidia continues to do.

      Had 3DFX remained solely a chipset manufacturer, hardly anyone would give a ***** about DirectX at all, and nVidia would be a distant second place, and ATi probably be gobbled up by now.

    • kuribo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+10"It's not Microsoft's fault for not porting their proprietary API technology on competitor's systems, it's the game developer's fault for using Direct X.
      They are going full force with Vista, and there are legitimate reasons for not porting it to XP or any other platform."

      The point is that Microsoft isn't putting DX 10 support into XP. Are you aware that Microsoft makes Windows Vista AND Windows XP? It's true! So it should theoretically be really easy for Microsoft to license DX 10 to Microsoft, so that they could use it in their very popular Windows XP operating system.
    • Bootes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11The point is that supporting XP doesn't make them money anymore, everyone already has it, and the point of DirectX is to drive Windows sales.
    • OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1[quote]The point is that supporting XP doesn't make them money anymore, everyone already has it, and the point of DirectX is to drive Windows sales.[/quote]

      Yes, that is true. But Shazbot, even though he flew off the handle because he assumed I was referring to porting to Apple, is right that game developers are at fault for becoming locked in to DX like this. About the only PC dev who stuck to his guns is John Carmack. Otherwise, you can look at Wii and PS3 games and see that OpenGL is every bit as good as D3D10, and also has the benefit of being cross platform. Why would you want to use DX?

      Nvidia is doing a lot to promote OpenGL, but it's up to game devs to take advantage of it. Why throw away crossplatform and XP sales for nothing?
  • ander1dw, on 10/12/2007, -2/+59Title is misleading, it should read "DX10-based Hardware Works in XP Through OpenGL," not DX10 itself.
    • brasso, on 10/12/2007, -20/+3Its not DX10, its "DX10"; very different things you know.
    • chris9902, on 10/12/2007, -5/+21yeah but how many people are really going to read the article? this is digg remember.

      no. instead lets just sit back and wait for the "***** Vista" posts and comments from people who use XP but claim to hate Microsoft.
    • threepio, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11LoL Sony...

      Wait... *****. Sorry. ***** the RIAA!

      Er.. ***** Vista!

      There we go.
    • Ademan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Well of course dx10 hardware works through opengl, the "big deal" is that all of the features work in openGL. OpenGL has had geometry shaders for a long time through nvidia extensions (iirc at the time only nvidia cards had that capability), but now there's a vendor inspecific version of the spec though i don't know EXACTLY when it was created: http://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/EXT/geometry_shader4.txt


      course, geometry shaders aren't the only new features in dx10, but in my opinion it's certainly the most important.

      List of OpenGL Extensions here: http://www.opengl.org/registry/
      You'll see most if not all of the dx10 features (though most of the current work is going into the two new versions of OpenGL and less into these extensions at the moment)

      cheers
      -Dan
    • OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1[quote]people who use XP but claim to hate Microsoft.[/quote]

      Is that mutually exclusive?

      I hate MS. I don't want to buy Vista. That's one reason why I wanted to help expose the DX10 scam.
  • RedLion, on 10/12/2007, -4/+8on that list of useful *proprietary nvidia extensions* (amazing! game developers will now have to learn the different proprietary extensions of ATI, nVidia, intel...) I still don't see workarounds for the main reasons that required the new driver layer for Vista like GPU task switching and GPU memory management as you can read @ http://pollux.arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/2/14/7060/p1

    even if nvidia allows the developers to use some of the DX10 graphic features through proprietary extensions this does not mean that all of the DX10 features could have easily been ported to XP

    I don't get why you pretend Microsoft to port DX10 to XP, it's their OS after all and I believe they have all the right to chose which features to port back to older platforms and which not. when you bought XP Microsoft never promised you that they would have gave you newer features for free; it's a company after all and like all the other companies their scope is to make money, like that or not
  • cquinnd, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12The last I checked, OpenGL support on XP was limited to OpenGL 1.1, unless the graphics maker provides a seperate ICD in their display drivers to support higher versions of OpenGL.

    I think a better article to explain why DX10 is not back portable to XP as a whole, and what specific features can or cannot be carried over is at http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2006/11/30/directx10_future_of_pc_gaming/2.html

    It has always been possible for OpenGL and XP to take advantage of *some* of the features included on DirectX capable hardware, and I have said as much in comments on this topic in the past. What seems unclear to people is that to get full DX10 support requires changes in the drivers as well as support in the APIs to take advantage of the new ways the hardware can work, and the only OS right now that has both the driver and API support in the works is Windows Vista; no such driver support is possible on XP. And without that, even if you can load OpenGL 2.0 on the os, XP will still be subject to most of the limitations that the move to DX10 on Vista was designed to fix.
    • dukeeeey, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9k
      it's just the windows header files which are still opengl 1.1
      Yes the header files are over 10 years old now, but it didn't exactly stop them writing doom 3 did it ? :)
      You just bind the functions you want through extensions, that's how opengl works. So as soon as nvidia had finished the drivers for the 8000 cards opengl could use all the new 'dx' features. Not just some, all :p Ie the geometry shaders etc. There is no real reason why they couldn't run dx10 with xp. It is just ms trying to push people to upgrade. Just like how they tried to kill opengl on vista completely, and how they can't be bothered to upgrade the windows headers.
    • Lick, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4Completely true. Some Direct3D10 (why do people refer to it as DirectX10?) features are only doable on Vista because the OS handles the graphics hardware completely differently. Just go to http://www.gamedev.net/ and search the DirectX forum.
    • Lick, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3I found the exact article that describes why Direct3D10 is Vista only.

      Visit: http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programming/features/d3d10overview/
    • dukeeeey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8lol
      why digg me down ?
      im a graphics programmer, that's what i do for a living. What i said is accurate.
      And even john carmack thinks that dx10 probably could run on xp ..

      "While Carmack remains keen on Xbox 360, he thinks the Vista initiative is bogus, accusing Microsoft of using the new OS's "artificial" tie with DirectX 10 to lure consumers (and developers). "They're really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it," concluded Carmack. Good news for those content with XP."

      http://www.joystiq.com/2007/01/11/carmack-blasts-vista-gaming-initiative/

      If you actually read the article, it gives no reasons why Vista is required. It's basically just talking about limitations of the dx9 application programming interface (api) such as the need for hardware caps etc .. This has nothing to do with the OS really.
  • jockser, on 10/12/2007, -13/+2title is not accurate but either way this is god news for people like me who wont buy vista just to make Microsoft some extra money
    right now i see no advantage to migrate to vista.
    • killerofkiller, on 10/12/2007, -6/+17why buy vista when you can torrent it!
  • DigitalJester, on 10/12/2007, -7/+4Does this mean that with a little bit of work, DX10 can run on Mac OS 10 and Linux very well?
    • MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6Oh yes, because they already having DX9 working so well......
    • dukeeeey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3it would be possibly if someone ported it
      and graphics card manufacters wrote the drivers
      but i doubt it will ever happen, although saying that, I think wine runs a few direct x apps/games.
    • Ademan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4"A few"? HAHAHA

      (That's by no means saying that WINE is perfect, as it's far from it, in fact, for a lot of things it flat out sucks, but practically every windows game uses DirectX for input and sound, if you meant Direct3d, there are still plenty of games it runs, of course, again, it's not perfect, but that's mostly because the only thing WINE developers have to work with are the DirectX docs from MSDN, which don't describe behavior as well as one *really* needs to actually implement DirectX)

      The other big barrier to WINE running dx9 games specifically, is that turning HLSL shaders into GLSL shaders is NOT an easy task. There is, however a large similarity between HLSL and NVIDIA's Cg (Identical? i've never used HLSL but i've read code from both and they look identical), which last i heard was being used to help with the translation.

      Anyways, OF COURSE other platforms can have all of the Direct3D10 effects, they're available right now on appropriate hardware (NVIDIA 8 series)

      Porting Direct3D10 itself over to linux and mac (most likely through the WINE project) is a totally different story, as implementing an API based on documentation rather than specifications, is quite hard.

      cheers
      -Dan
  • euphemizeme, on 10/12/2007, -1/+19"RTFA before you reply"

    I can picture your fingers shaking with anger as you wrote that line... pressing harder than necessary against the keys as your face contorted in rage while you perceived what people might say.
    • thejadedmonkey, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I RTFA, and I couldn't make heads nor tails of it!
    • OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1[quote]I can picture your fingers shaking with anger as you wrote that line... pressing harder than necessary against the keys as your face contorted in rage while you perceived what people might say.[/quote]

      You're a perfect example of one of those people.
  • DeFex, on 10/12/2007, -6/+8Is that why they broke openGL on vista?
    • MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8They, uh, didn't break OpenGL in Vista.

      The way windowed OpenGL apps were going to be handled was a little iffy, but they changed that about a year ago. It's not like it's easy to run OpenGL in an app when your desktop is Direct3D accelerated. How full screen OpenGL was handled was ALWAYS going to be the same way that XP handled it: Leave it up to the graphics drivers to deal with it. I'm not sure how OpenGL in windowed apps is handled anymore, but it's not the same way it was originally intended to be.
    • OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1[quote]Is that why they broke openGL on vista?[/quote]

      They didn't want to support it at all. The only reason they did is because so many pro 3D graphics apps and high-end hardware uses OpenGL.
  • MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3Buried as inaccurate. Don't get me wrong, the article looks accurate, and is probably a good read, but the title and description are horribly misleading and have very little to do with the article.

    The driver model in Vista was developed with Direct3D 10 in mind. They were literally designed to work together. All of the relevent components in Vista that deal with DX10 would have to be ported over to using the XDDM driver model, which would be no small task.
    • consonance, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2This is just another Microsoft-bashing article. I clicked the link and couldn't figure out what the title had to do with the article until I read the comments.
  • Alphabet, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6*****, I hate sites where
    [clicks to next page]

    you have to click just to
    [clicks to next page]

    just to read
    [clicks to next page]

    more of the story.


    All of that ***** could have been put on one page.
  • HappyScrappy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10This article doesn't cover the main aspect of DX10 that MS uses as an excuse to not port DX10 to XP.

    That is, in Vista, the kernel schedules GPU tasks. This allows multiple clients to use the GPU simultaneously without having to have intimate knowledge of how every client in the system is using the GPU. In that way, it is just like CPU scheduling allows CPU multitasking.

    This was needed for Vista because the system uses the GPU to render the UI, while a game may be trying to use it too.

    And this cannot be easily ported to XP. Note that GL doesn't do this scheduling either, and it cannot since GL is outside the kernel.

    However, under XP, the system doesn't use the GPU at all, so the game using the GPU is the sole client and you don't need this scheduling unless the game itself has multiple tasks to schedule.

    So what MS could do (and if I were NVidia I would beg them to do) is bring DX10 to XP with the caveat that games can only have one task using the GPU at once since there is no scheduling. This would allow XP to have much of the DX10 functionality.

    But the executive version is MS isn't going to do this because they are using DX10 was a lever to sell copies of Vista.

    P.S.: the article in question is useless in arguing this point. Poor choice by the submitter.
    • OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1[quote]P.S.: the article in question is useless in arguing this point. Poor choice by the submitter.[/quote]

      There's very little documentation so far about supporting DX10 hardware in XP and other platforms. If you know of any, maybe you should submit it to Digg?

      I assume game developers already know about all this, so maybe we'll have something other than John Carmack's interview to explain it to the non-believers and the MS trolls.
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