DirectX 10 Coming To Linux and Mac

twickline writes "Jeremy White posted the 2009 roadmap for Crossover, and wrote, 'We've just shipped a lot of those "under the hood" improvements for games out in CrossOver Games 7.2. We're really pushing Direct X 9 support pretty far along, and getting ready to move on Direct X 10. ... In addition to our normal work of broadening and deepening our application support in Wine, we're going to try to dramatically improve the CrossOver GUI itself. First, the Linux version will get a fresh new look. But both versions are going to get an interface that we hope will bring the power of the Compatibility Center right into the installation view. The key idea is to make it easier to distill the gathered wisdom on unsupported applications and make it far easier to use.'"

Good news, bad news.

[Anonymous Coward]

The good news: increased base of support for games.

The bad news: Codeweavers makes much noise about their "supported games [codeweavers.com]". But what they don't make explicitly clear is that these games are, for the most part, games that have been reported to work. Don't take my word for it, go and check. Out of 174 games listed on that page, one is "known not to work", 149 get an "honourable mention" (meaning they've been reported to work, but they are not supported by Codeweavers), two get a bronze, and 22 get a silver. So that's 174 games listed, and just 24 of those are supported if there are issues.

Rather disingenuous, really, to have that information tucked away in a pop-up tooltip that only appears when you hover over the medal. I wish them luck, but I can't help but feel that they need to be a little bit more open with their customers.

It also doesn't help that that list hasn't been updated since July ... eight months. Not exactly confidence inspiring, alas.

Re:Good news for normal Wine too

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like wine already started [winehq.org]

Porting to XP?

[RenHoek]

It would be nice if this were to be ported to Windows XP and take away the only reason why I would ever consider Vista/7

Re:Porting to XP?

[David Gerard]

Working on it! [winehq.org]

(Status: doesn't actually, er, compile as yet. And even if it did, the program launcher wouldn't work. But more people to at least solve the inability to compile would be most welcome. Current block: Cygwin's header files are on crack.)

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[robthebloke]

uhm, when you say third party app, do you mean the graphics card driver? (Since you only need to disable v-sync in the graphics card options and the problem is gone)

Re:Good news, bad news.

[jparshall]

Here's the deal, guys. We're not trying to be disingenuous. But we also have finite resources, which means we have to be very careful about what we bite off in the support department. Here at the ranch, we have this funny belief that officially supporting a game means we *actually* have to care about it. That means that we have to treat our customers' questions about that game with some amount of due diligence, stoke up developers to fix bugs on it, etc. Sadly, there aren't enough support engineers on the planet to answer every 13-year old kid's questions about why this one particular sprite in Foozlewars Xtreme 10 doesn't quite render correctly on alternate Sundays under CrossOver. If we officially supported every game we ran, we'd have to put guns against our temples. And that wouldn't be good for Wine development as a whole, now would it? So, mostly, we only officially support the "big hitters" out there, the hot titles, because let's face it, for every World of Warcraft and Team Fortress 2 there's about a buhzillion other titles that *may* run, but only have about 14 passionate players. This, in turn, means that "officially supporting" Foozlewars Xtreme 10 doesn't drive all that much revenue to my bottom line, whereas supporting WoW and TF2 sure as hell *does*. And the bottom line about the bottom line is that the more ca$h there is *under* the bottom line, the faster Wine gets better. But right now, today, while we'd love to support everything, we simply don't have the resources to do it. We thank our customers profusely for giving us the resources we *do* have--your patronage has directly improved Wine. -jon parshall- COO www.codeweavers.com

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[jbarlow]

I honestly haven't seen a 60hz LCD for years. My four-year-old Samsungs are running at 75hz, and current nicer TVs run at 120hz.
 
/takes off pedantic hat

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[Creepy]

The reality is having a refresh greater than 60Hz is pretty pointless with an LCD because there is no phosphor being strobe blasted with scanlines where the eye can detect the flicker and most people can't detect changes faster than 1/30th of a second, much less 1/60th.

    The only use I can think of for 120Hz on a TV is because traditional movies are recorded at 24 frames per second (12 for cartoons, but they double frame) and TV at 30FPS, and since 120/24=5 and 120/30=4 you don't have to double any frame like you would for 60Hz (and 75 is worse...). Still, you are repeating the same frame either 4 or 5 times and since LCDs don't flicker it's overkill (if you slowed refresh for that movie down to 24FPS it'd look just as good). While some professional digital cameras are recording 120FPS or more, it takes a ton of memory to store continuous video at that frequency and I don't foresee that being an issue in the near future (it's certainly more useful from a video editing viewpoint than a TV watching viewpoint).

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[malevolentjelly]

One has to weigh the push M$ has put behind cultivating coders who feel comfortable doing things in DX (with the advantage of support from M$), versus the shops that have the luxury to tool around in GL (id software and a few others).

It's interesting you say luxury there because it takes a lot less time and resources to develop a game for Windows due to superior API's and vastly superior development and testing tools. It's not like game developers are brainwashed or anything- they're just time and budget constrained. Games are tremendously complex and extremely resource intensive, it takes a very consistent and sane environment to do complex modern games.

You're welcome to mod me down, but this is a huge gap in the linux development ecosystem that someone should take seriously. I recommend doing this through the mono project or java because of their nice development tools and consistent environments.

Until the open source world has something comparable to DirectX or Visual Studio or something (if you mention SDL or gdb, I will laugh at you) it might be in their benefit to keep cultivating the wine project to stay on-board with games. Even Apple is behind in this category, and they have REAL development tools (in fact, many new games are getting ported to mac through the Wine-derivative Transgaming Cider). This is one category where Microsoft is leading in more than just OEM-pressure, unfortunately.

Re:Getting rid of Windows

[default luser]

PAE won't help with this problem, because it splits the memory space into multiple 4GB chunks, and you can only access one chunk at a time. Technically, you could have a game use more than 2GB ram using PAE, but the performance hit switching between memory spaces is astronomical, so you'd have to find a way to streamline it.

A flat 64-bit memory space is so much easier. PAE was really intended for multiple server processes to run at-once, with a small hit for process switching. Nothing real-time was ever intended for PAE.