WINE and DirectX10...thinking about the future.

[ZephyrXero]

Does anyone have any idea what's going to happen this next year when Vista/DX10 only games start shipping? I know lots of great strides were made in the past year with DX9 compatability, but will we right back to square one when this happens? This kind of question is probably better suited for the actual WINE forums, but it's a question many people will probably be concerned with in the not too distant future...

Microsoft is betting that making games, like Halo 2 and Crysis, Vista/DX10 only is going to get alot of WinXP users to fork over the cash for their next version, but if WINE could get them working relatively easy, I bet we'd see a bunch of new Linux users ;) ...but that's probably being a little too optimistic.

[eqisow]

I don't think we'll see any DX10 only games for a few years. Most of the market will still ahve Windows XP, and companies do not want to lose those buyers. I think MS is shooting themselves in the foot by making DX10 Vista only.

What will suck, however, is OpenGL being crippled on Vista. OpenGL will now be routed through DirectX, much like Wine routes DirectX through OpenGL. This will result in even less OpenGL games, which is bad for Wine because OpenGL games run like a champ currently, where DirectX games tend to run a bit slower. It will also make it even harder to port Windows games to Linux. Unless Linux gains significant market share, I think the only company that will stick with Linux is iD software. And as much as I support them for what they do, I just don't like their games that much.

[livingtarget]

Well epic games et all still have marvelous support for linux (think ut2004 out of the box support). So you can hope for at least some Unreal Engine 3 games ported to linux. I'm pretty sure UT2007 will come, but other UE3 games like Mass Effect and Bio Shock 2 may be portable at least. Native that is.

For wine I just don't know things move forward, but hardly at a fast pace. For each thing fixed you get 10 regressions, if any games work through wine it's the luck of the draw most of the time. Regarding Cedega, who knows, they could certainly pull of DX 10.

I know I won't buy vista just to play games let alone thinking of upgrading to it. If they restrict DX 10 to vista, you'll probably see games support 9 and 10 (experimental) I think. But seriously we won't see any of that till far in 2007. By that time we might have seen edgy eft and another iteration of ubuntu.

No need to worry, we'll just take it as it comes.

[ZephyrXero]

I was just reading on Joystiq or something that DX10 is officially Vista only.

About the id support, unfortuantely Carmack was quoted recently as saying he loves DirectX 10 and Vista and is probably going to switch to using it as his primary development platform now. He's also a mighty big fan of the Xbox360 too it seems :/

And I want to say I read somewhere a few months ago that Microsoft and the major video card manufacturers had came to some sort of agreement where you'll be able to use the manufactuers' drivers (as opposed to Microsoft's crippled ones) so you can still have full OpenGL support and not have to disable Aero and all that BS, so hopefully that whole scare isn't going to be a problem anymore...but who knows?

Also, I think with the continual growth of Macs, hopefully more developers will go back to using OpenGL more often, which in turn will help the Linux community too.

Oh yeah, one more thing...it's rumored that AMD might be buying ATI soon, and if they do, maybe we'll finally get some decent Linux support from them as AMD has always been pretty good about it...?

[chrisost]

What will suck, however, is OpenGL being crippled on Vista. OpenGL will now be routed through DirectX, much like Wine routes DirectX through OpenGL.


I keep seeing this repeated, but as far as I can tell it is incorrect. My understanding is that MS will ship an OpenGL implementation built on top of DirectX. However, vendors (i.e. nVidia and ATI) can ship their own OpenGL implementation with their video card drivers - *just like they do now*.

I imagine then, that the OpenGL scene on Vista will not be any different than the OpenGL scene on XP.

[seth0x2b]

Might I ask a simple question!? AFAIK Opengl does not equal DirectX.Am I wrong?!
What is the connection between the two?!


Cheers

[eddieate]

The transition won't be that quick, everything will still wont with 9c.
Think all the people who shell out for 7900gtx SLI setups or whatever, their going to get a tad upset if their shiny new hardware isint up to even playing new games.
Ed.

[nephesh]

I doubt DX10 only games will be coming out very soon, give it a couple of years and maybe we'll see them (this does not include any silliness that MS attempts).

It must be easier to code for DX or something though because I don't quite understand the mindset of using DX at all when you could use OpenGL and gain that 5% of the desktop market that you are missing out on.

[leech]

This is from memory, which my memory sucks. But I recall at one point reading that up until DirectX 3 it pretty much sucked to program for it. DX 5 on up is a lot easier. Though with comparing to OpenGL, I don't know. Then again I'm not a programmer, let alone a 3D programmer.

I did recently read that John Carmack is quite impressed with DX10, so who knows if Id will continue using OpenGL or not.... It would be a kick to the head of Linux Gamers if Id stopped using OpenGL.

Leech

[slugkilla]

Wow, the past month I have questioned what is so wronge with windoze that I had to switch to linux. I geuss that is a thought from someone who has been away from windows for a couple of years. After reading this, I remember why I hated windows so much. Microsoft does crap like this. Errrrrr. We need to do something about this.....

[Polygon]

DX10 is going to be buggy as hell even for windows when it first comes out, gonna take a while before its patched to a stable state