Gamers Don't Need Vista or DX 10 Says Carmack

Freshly Exhumed writes "In an interview with Marcus Yam at Daily Tech legendary PC/Console game creator John Carmack holds forth on DirectX 10: 'Personally, I wouldn't jump at something like DX10 right now. I would let things settle out a little bit and wait until there's a really strong need for it.' and then zings Microsoft's marketers over DX10's mandatory use of the Vista OS: 'Carmack then said that he's quite satisfied with Windows XP, going as far to say that Microsoft is artificially forcing gamers to move to Windows Vista for DX10.' There are a few good tidbits on Xbox 360 vs. PS3 development, and a fairly clear disinterest in Wii as a platform for his company's products is shown."

Not Daily Tech's Interview

[mewsenews]

This is a summary of an interview conducted by Game Informer [gameinformer.com].

Re:Interesting that he's not interested in Wii dev

[AKAImBatman]

Why don't he push the graphical limits on cell phones then?

Um... he did?

http://www.doomrpg.com/ [doomrpg.com]

Here's an interview with him on his role in its development:

http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=62 343 [eurogamer.net]

Re:One thing..

[ardor]

Besides, OpenGL already supports all and more features of the D3D part of DX10

Wrong. OpenGL only has an EXT extension for geometry shaders, but no superbuffers, texture arrays etc. so there is still much left.

(with better performance to boot)

Thats not the fault of Direct3D, its 100% a driver issue. nvidia cards are made for GL, hence the (slight!) performance advantage. On ATI cards, its totally different.

and vista doesn't even support DX10 yet since you need the DX10 graphics drivers that hasn't been released yet

You need new HARDWARE for this functionality, not just new drivers. Get a 8800.

Re:OpenGL

[TheRaven64]

Yes, I noticed that. I suspect he switched at some point during the long hiatus while the ARB failed to finalise OpenGL 2.0. Things seem to have picked up a bit in the OpenGL camp recently, so maybe he will switch back in a few years.

Re:Make up your mind, Carmack...

[ichigo 2.0]

DX10 by itself doesn't require Vista, but they decided to get rid of the legacy cruft and re-wrote the entire graphics system. This allows neat things like multi-tasking and virtual memory handling for GPUs, but requires completely new drivers. This also supposedly enables a much higher performance, a game running on DX10 should be a lot faster than the same game running on DX9, assuming that they both use the exact same shaders. So yes, they could port DX10 to XP, but this would require two different kinds of DX10, with different features (no virtual GPU memory on XP = lame), and with different levels of performance. IMO the clean break is a good thing, but the HDCP bloat makes me hesitate to upgrade.

Disinterested is a little strong

[Pablo El Vagabundo]

"You can get ten times the graphics power, and you can make a prettier picture, but when somebody makes a new IO device that really changes the way that people interact with the game, that's going to have a larger benefit there.

"So I'm really pleased with what they're (Nintendo) doing with the Wii and with the DS-and they're doing innovative things,"

"But our current generation of game technology is not targeted at the Wii. Maybe that was a mistake on our part originally, but we have been looking strictly at the 360, PS3 and PC as what we want to simultaneously develop on. We probably aren't going to be able to hit the Wii with the same technology platform."

I think he is very interested in the Wii. Just the projects and engines they have are not a fit for the platform.

Personally I believe the GFX on the Wii are grand. I luv the controller and the who package is sweet.

Re:Interesting that he's not interested in Wii dev

[Thansal]

Carmack: You know, we've never had a good relationship with Nintendo, from really early products we did a long time ago. And for the most part, we just said, "Fine." We're busy with other stuff, and we just haven't been that tight with Nintendo. On the up side, I really do respect what they're doing, where for years, I've been saying--you probably heard me at QuakeCon--I will go on about how IO devices are where the really big differences are going to be made in gaming. You can get ten times the graphics power, and you can make a prettier picture, but when somebody makes a new IO device that really changes the way that people interact with the game, that's going to have a larger benefit there. So I'm really pleased with what they're doing with the Wii and with the DS--and they're doing innovative things. But our current generation of game technology is not targeted at the Wii. Maybe that was a mistake on our part originally, but we have been looking strictly at the 360, PS3 and PC as what we want to simultaneously develop on. We probably aren't going to be able to hit the Wii with the same technology platform.

Source [gameinformer.com].

This is actualy a dupe of an older /. report of the orginal article, as opposed to this one where it is a /. report of a summery of the original article.

So yes. Carmack (and thus ID) have stayed away from Nintendo because of bad dealings, and no real NEED to work with them. This time around he is thinking it might have been a bad idea to stay away from the Wii.

My bet is that once they have the current Tech that they are working on up and running he will look into making stuff for the Wii. And I for one look foward to it.

Also, he is looking to port Orcs and Elves to the DS. Source [kotaku.com]

Re:OpenGL

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. It also shows that the slowness with with OGL incorporates new features in a huge hinderence. Back when he was making those statements OGL was much better to develop for than DX. DX though didn't stand still and has eclipsed OGL for the most part.

I don't think OGL is eclipsed by D3D. Just look at the most recent OGL version, which is 2.1. It supports pretty much the same features as D3D9. And with the new extensions, like EXT_geometry_shader4 and EXT_gpu_shader4 and others, OGL is on par with D3D10.
Also this year we will see OGL 3.0 which will be a thorough revamp of OGL.
So in conclusion, I have to disagree that D3D eclipses OGL in any way of functionality. In way of market share though, that's another matter.

Re:Interesting that he's not interested in Wii dev

[UnknownSoldier]

I can understand John's sentiment. I just started doing Wii development this week. It doesn't have stencil support, pixel shaders, or vertex shaders -- even the PS2 had vertex shaders; which I'm already missing the general "funkiness" of the PS2. Faking the stencil with such hacks as the alpha buffer is getting kind of tiring.

One of our other developers jokingly called it a "GameCube 1.5" -- which is very appropiate.

The nunchuck (controller) is cool, and while it would be up to design to come up with some innovate uses, the hardware by itself, just isn't that impressive. Of course, it is always the games (or lack of them) that make (or break) a platform.

Cheers

Re:Wait

[Uncle Rummy]

What you're forgetting is that the mentality of using a PC has changed over the last 10-15 years. Back in the standalone DOS days, people typically would boot up a PC to perform a specific task - use a word processor OR work on a spreadsheet OR play a game, and turn it off when they were done.

These days, people tend to use a PC as an always-on, networked multifunction device that is booted once at the beginning of the day and left running as they switch back and forth between tasks - check email THEN use a word processor THEN look something up with Google THEN play a game THEN check email again THEN play the game some more THEN search the web for a walkthrough...

Forcing the customer to turn his PC into a single-function device to play a game makes him change his entire routine, and would likely be a dealbreaker for most people outside the hardcore gamer crowd.

Re:OpenGL

[Locutus]

Didn't Microsoft get SGI to start working on a new, joint path for OpenGL? 'google'ing for it I found this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/29/ms_quietly _dumps_windows_opengl/ [theregister.co.uk]
and this nugget on the joint project:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_graphics_A PI [wikipedia.org]

The project was called Fahrenheit and was initiated around 1997. Knowing, from history, how Microsoft works it would appear that Microsoft wanted to teach their developers a thing or two about 3D graphics and steer 'the competition' in another direction to slow their momentum. IIRC, there was a bit of interest in 3D on the desktop in the mid 90's with SigGraph and Comdex vendors showing VRML and even some OpenGL extensions to Java. Definately enough motivation for MSFT to throw a million or two at a diversionary project. At the same time, they're likely to also have driven any of their development 'partners' like gamers or CAD vendors away from OpenGL and toward D3D. I think even Carmack was getting pressure from MSFT to use D3D instead of OpenGL around that time but I'm just guessing there.

Oh, and ZDNet has always been a Microsoft mouth piece and you've got to put on some thick filtering glasses when reading their articles/marketing materials. DataQuest was very good at putting together 'reports' tuned to shine a good light on Microsoft and darken out the competition. I've seen them called DataGuess more than a few times.

IMO, Microsoft did get involved with OpenGL and used their time tested methods of pushing it sideways as it found ways to market and purchase marketshare for their replacement product(s). I've been impressed with how resilient OpenGL has been. Xgl/Compiz run quite nicely on a little laptop and I've seen more than a couple of Java applications using Java3D with performance being quite good.

LoB

Re:Interesting that he's not interested in Wii dev

[laffer1]

The sega genesis was 16bit and competed with the SNES. The Sega CD addition was marketed as two 16 bit processors... the 32x addition was a bit weak, but I loved star wars arcade and NBA Jam TE. Doom locked up on it about halfway through.

The Saturn was killed in part by the additions to the genesis. My mother wouldn't buy me one since she just spent all the money on the Sega CD and 32x. I was in high school then. I also went to buy one myself but the only store in town who sold saturns was out (Toys R US) I never did find one.

The dreamcast failure was a real bummer. Its a great console. My genesis, dreamcast and xbox are the most played systems I have. I also have almost every Nintendo system except the Wii and DS. I like the dreamcast over my xbox. Both run a form of windows.

Nintendo will sit on the Wii for 3 years or more. Graphics don't matter anyway. The playstation had terrible graphics and people loved that. Games are the most important thing. In many ways the SNES was superior to the Genesis and yet Sega had a huge following because the games were fun.