Quote: "A developer always produces a new product a few years ahead of it going to market. I think TCG have probably got their timing just right"
We shall see, remember this product is already 5months after when they projected to release it; despite this fact the market still hasn't caught up enough for it to seem financially sound.
I mean one of the biggest differences with DirectX10 over previous releases, is you
must have hardware to support it in any form. This also includes having the Operating System.
Yes, the home market has really taken up Vista quite well with at last check 70million people using it worldwide now. The thing is very few have been willing until recently to spend money on DirectX10 cards. Simply because until very recently there were no budget solutions.. as is shown in the Valve survey something echoed throughout many like GameSpy and Futuremark, system spec checkers; is the most common graphics cards are between budget and mid-range not even from the previous generation but often a generation or two behind.
Shader 3.0 cards for example are just becoming popular enough to make it worthwhile creating software that supports it.
You could argue, that a few years back when shader cards were just coming to market that id Software took a big leap and gamble on that the technology would eventually catch up to their engine. The gamble sort of paid off with them leading the pack in what could be done with the technology.. however other companies like Core Design werent so lucky gambling on DirectX9.0 when it was first released.
The question isn't so much is this the best time to act, but realistically ... is TGC big enough a name to pull it off?
If companies like Crytek are having second thoughts about the techonology and frankly they're pretty much a safe bet on if something will sell or not now; then the answer for TGC even with NVIDIA backing them up is no.
It's a simple fact that cards don't sell software, it's the software that sells cards.
Quote: "No body's gonna hire a DX9 programmer anymore, face it, not when they have DX10 programmers to choose from! It's the sad horrifying truth behind it all. If you get stuck behind the crowd of everyone being "assimilated" into the new systems, you're out of a job."
Get a grip, DirectX9 is going nowhere. It takes atleast 12months for transition between software and hardware, with longer and longer development times; I would say we won't be seeing any worthwhile DirectX10 games until atleast this time next year. Even then it's going to take until CES or E3 2008 for other companies to start following suit.
Part of the problem with DirectX10 is as I said above, it's an all-or-nothing move. With DirectX9Ex providing the enhancements between DirectX9.0c and 10.0 bridging the gap between not only Windows platforms but also the Xbox 360 enhancements to DirectX9; frankly it would suggest if any DirectX10 development goes on it's going to take a back-seat to DirectX9 for the forseeable future.
Yes, we've been shown a visual enhancement from the technology; but at the same time we've also been shown that the hardware just isn't there yet to support these enhancements.
Frankly I've yet to see any real benefit over DirectX9 Ex.. I mean I've seen Lee claiming alot of things from the earlier FPSC X10 videos, but quite frankly I've seen Gears of War running happily on a budget Shader 3.0 card at 60fps; and FPS Creator X10 nor the DirectX10 enhanced games imo really add that much (if any real visual enhancement) over that game which is still using old Dx9 technology.
I mean this is all like saying "OpenGL3 will be the end of traditional OpenGL1.x/2.x when it's released", it'll not only take time for people to learn; but also for the hardware to support it; then developers to support it, etc..
the whole process takes much longer than the 9months that DirectX10 itself has actually been officially out of beta. Hell it spent 6months alone in Technical Preview, let alone however long they'd been working on it before hand.
