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."

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

[dalmiroy2k]

He may still be a little angry towards Nintendo because of Wolfenstein 3d for SNES. Id Software had to remove blood, Nazi stuff and more in order to port the game. I still remember he said he will never port a game to a Nintendo platform again, but then again Quake and QuakeII eventually got released for N64.

Xbox 360 lowered the need for Vista

[thyarcher]

With the increase in home theater systems, and Xbox 360 adoption, Microsoft has actually moved the major drive for DX10 graphics to their console. While this move pushes them into the living room, it lowers the need for people to move to Vista and DX10. We all know that games drive the video card/driver market. With the games now on the 360, the computer OS being Vista is less relevant.

Carmack and OpenGL

[zoftie]

Since day one Carmack disliked DirectX and promoted OpenGL...

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

[CastrTroy]

Things aren't the same as they used to be. The video game landscape has changed. Nintendo has plenty of games with blood now, and probably wouldn't stop you from killing Nazis in a game, which I fail to see anything wrong with. If you're going to have a shooter where you kill people, you might as well be killing Nazis. And not all of Carmacks games were bloodfests either. There's plenty of games that he could have ported to Nintendo without making any changes. Think of Commander Keen. Anyway, Nintendo isn't the family friendly system it used to be. Well, it's probably still the most family friendly system, that contains the most games playable by the entire family, but that doesn't stop it from having it's share of violent games.

Re:OpenGL

[Lazerf4rt]

That just shows he's objective. I work in game development, and back when he said OpenGL was better (vs. DX6) I believe he was right, and now that he prefers DX9, I believe he's right too. His integrity is pretty good. He focuses on the technology right in front of him, without being distracted by politics or favortism.

Re:Carmack and OpenGL

[Xipher]

If you haven't seen his other interviews, he has stated he thinks DirectX is becoming a good API now, and that they might start using it.

What Is DX10 Really About?

[blueZhift]

From Carmack's comments regarding DX10 and the Xbox 360, I wonder what Microsoft is really up to here. On the surface, tying DX10 to Vista, looks like a strong armed tactic to force gamers to Vista. Clearly, game developers aren't likely to abandon XP anytime soon. Carmack also had good words to say about the Xbox 360, so could the real plan be to nudge developers into more Xbox 360 development and off of the PC? I know, strange plan, but games made and sold for Xbox 360 = royalties for Microsoft, games for the PC do not. Of course, there may not be a plan at all. This could be evidence of different parts of Microsoft pulling in different directions.

Re:OpenGL

[EastCoastSurfer]

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.

Re:Wait

[Gr8Apes]

Personally, I haven't figured out why game companies don't use their own bootable linux distro w/ OpenGL and end their dependence on the ever shifting MS platform once and for all.

Games used to be on bootable floppies, and worked. If you consider that currently Linux distros work pretty well, and can be highly customized to boot, it seems a reasonable approach.

What if...

[sottitron]

What if he had said DX10 was absolutely necessary and that everyone should go out and buy Vista on Jan 30? How many people would have listened to him? (This is not intended to be flamebait or trolling. This is a genuine question as I am not an graphics savvy geek)

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

[Kurayamino-X]

Not only that, but he's said in an interview that he enjoys programming for phones, that working with the limited resources is fun. He also codes ordinary hardware drivers to "Ground" himself if I remember correctly. So yeah, he does everything from drivers to simple games to brain liquifying 3D awesome. I would not put coaxing a little more Uberness out of a Wii past him.

Two things

[Sycraft-fu]

One is bringing the PC in line with the 360 and making ports easy. Apparently it's pretty minimal effort to port from the 360 to a Vista/DX10 system (I say apparently because the information is second hand to me, I'm not a game programmer I just chat with them).

However the main thing is just new API with new features for new hardware. Graphics card companies want to keep pushing forward with more features, game devs need an easy way to use those, DX10 is the answer. The biggie is unified shaders. The idea is rather than having discrete pixel and vertex shaders, which are kinda two sides of the same coin, with different APIs you unify all that. In the case of nVidia's 8800 card it's not just unified in the API but the actual hardware. There's just general shaders on the card, that can be tasked to do whatever's needed. That means that if you have a scene that's geometry heavy but pixel effect light you get more shaders working on that, and you can swap around in teh very next scene.

So it's just more new shit, like all the past DirectXs. DX7 brought hardware T&L, DX8 brought programmable shaders, DX9 brought fully programmable shaders (there were more advances in them as well) this is just the next step.

Re:OpenGL

[metamatic]

Well, there's also the issue of how much of OpenGL is actually supported by the drivers you can get.

I don't know what it's like on the Windows side of things, but on the Mac even basic OpenGL stuff like smooth polygons and lines is totally broken. You have to resort to horrendous hacks involving textures just to get an antialiased line.

Re:Carmack and OpenGL

[Locutus]

From what I've read, DirectX sucked until Microsoft got the lead SGI developer out of SGI's hands.

Microsoft diverted SGI's attention away from OpenGL and toward the Fahrenheit project, failed to provide the product required to make the joint project work on Windows, and then, after 5 years of dragging their feet, they terminated the project and hired SGI's lead developer away to the MS DirectX project.

Typical MSFT 'innovation' technique. Come to think of it, didn't they hire away all the lead tools designers from Borland just before announcing something called MS .Net? That should ring a bell with some.

LoB

He's said this before

[Paralizer]

There was an article [slashdot.org] a week or so ago, and on the second page [gameinformer.com] there was an interesting quote from Carmack.

Carmack: It's a tough thing for Microsoft, where, essentially, Windows XP was a just fine operating system. Before that, there were horrible problems with Windows. But once they got there, it did everything an operating system is supposed to do. Nothing is going to help a new game by going to a new operating system. There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there really aren't any for Vista. They're artificially doing that by tying DX10 so close it, which is really nothing about the OS. It's a hardware-interface spec. It's an artificial thing that they're doing there. 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.

I think most people skipped over this because the primary focus of the article was about Carmack discussing why they would rather develop for the XBox360 over the PS3, but this was still a gem. In fact, this article seems to be a reiteration of this very quote.

Re:What Is DX10 Really About?

[fithmo]

could the real plan be to nudge developers into more Xbox 360 development and off of the PC?

Actually, Microsoft seems to be working very hard to eliminate the difference between developing for the Xbox and developing for the PC. Evidence of this can be seen in their XNA Game Studio [microsoft.com] which allows homebrew developers to write games that will cross compile for both Windows and the Xbox 360. Ironically, however, I can't get the damn thing to even install on Vista.