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Geek Culture / Carmack writes ID Tech 5 for dx9, disses dx10

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bond1
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 01:59 Edited at: 19th Sep 2008 01:59
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The full article is here: http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/exclusive_john_carmack_interview_the_godfather_frags_plan_save_pc_gaming

I think you gotta respect this guy's opinion, he basically says Microsoft threw away a mature, stable technology with directx 9, and added features no one asked for with Direct X 10. Here's an excerpt:

Quote: "MPC – Right but DirectX 9 level of shader. Do you really think that Directx 10, and 11 now, are even necessary?

JC – They really aren’t. The things that you get in there are the geometry shaders and a few other things. There’s not a huge draw off that and that’s the danger of leaving an API that’s kind of reached a good stable level. DX 9 is a nice mature setup technology. It’s kind of the natural evolutionary peak sort of the old OpenGL model. It’s really taken that and it’s better. It’s cleaner and better defined.

So you got a whole bunch of people at Microsoft that make APIs. They have the idea that “we made this API that seems to be doing everything everybody really needs but we need to keep doing a new API every year or two because that’s what we do, otherwise they might dissolve our department” or something. So it’s not the same as where up through DX 9 everybody obviously knew what needed to be in the next version. Now, it’s a lot more blind groping around [for new features] and we still don’t feel a strong pull. There’re things [in DirectX 10] we can do with the hardware. I mean any hardware that has a capability, but we can find something useful to do with it. But it’s not worth cutting off any of our market. I just looked at the recent Steam survey numbers and [DirectX 10 card adoption is] just not very good. So I mean eventually it will just be driven by the hardware option and eventually we’ll make a point to [adopt DirectX10]. But I think it’s clear that the Doom project won’t use DX 10 class hardware. We’re going to keep that engine the same with what we got right now.

"


So is it safe to say that after more than a year after it's release, dx10 is a failure?

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Lucifer
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 02:24
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Quote: "So is it safe to say that after more than a year after it's release, dx10 is a failure?"


why is it safe to say that? There are different oppinions about this matter. i've also read positive reviews about dx10, should we just not listen to anything said in them??

Looks funny..
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bond1
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 02:45 Edited at: 19th Sep 2008 02:46
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I was just playing devil's advocate and throwing the question out there for discussion, jeez man.

Being as John Carmack is a pretty respected guy in this field, for him to publicly call out Microsoft like that is something....and the fact that there just aren't that many dx10 games out there - it's interesting.

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Mahoney
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 02:46 Edited at: 19th Sep 2008 02:46
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Quote: "So is it safe to say that after more than a year after it's release, dx10 is a failure?"


It's not at all a failure. It will be awhile before it becomes a smart decision to base an engine on, but that time will come. Though, I think that DX11 will be the truly dominant runtime. The reason for this is simple: by the time Windows 7 is for a bit, Most computers will be running at least Vista, if not 7. Since DX11 will run on Vista, that gives it a possible 50% or higher market.

Also, from what I know, DX10 (and 11) have fixed an issue with the few speed-bumps in efficiency that DX9 had (I can't remember what it was; something with draw-time with certain things). Also, DX11 will introduce multi-threaded rendering.

Quote: "Being as John Carmack is a pretty respected guy in this field, for him to publicly call out Microsoft like that is something....and the fact that there just aren't that many dx10 games out there - it's interesting."


I believe he did the same with all the other DX's. I may be wrong, though. He's just always stuck with OpenGL.

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Aaron Miller
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 03:21
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Quote: "and the fact that there just aren't that many dx10 games out there - it's interesting."

It's only been a year! How many games would you expect to be released within a year?!

Cheers,

-naota

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JoelJ
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 03:33
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Quote: "Being as John Carmack is a pretty respected guy in this field, for him to publicly call out Microsoft like that is something....and the fact that there just aren't that many dx10 games out there - it's interesting."

That wasn't the first time Carmack has dissed down on MS and it won't be the last time.... Carmack is a vocal man about his opinions.

Was Doom3/Quake4 made with OGL or D3D? Because I always thought he just used OGL.


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Mahoney
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 03:34
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Quote: "Was Doom3/Quake4 made with OGL or D3D? Because I always thought he just used OGL."


Doom 3 was OpenGL. I imagine Quake 4 was the same, though I've never played it, and have no idea; it's just a guess.

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bond1
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 04:44 Edited at: 19th Sep 2008 04:50
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Quote: "It's only been a year! How many games would you expect to be released within a year?!"


Well I bought Vista in January 2007...

And it just seems to me, again playing devil's advocate, that if dx10 offered the windfall of performance that it promised, that more developers would be onboard by now. Hey, I bought Vista the day it was released along with an Nvidia 8800. I had read the articles praising how dx10 was the biggest thing since the original Voodoo card. Directx 10 was no mere incremental upgrade, it was going to alter PC gaming by leaps and bounds. A year and a half is a long time in tech-time. Was this all just marketing mumbo jumbo?

I love my 8800, and it's great with dx9 games. Just wondering what dx10 is bringing to the table, and when?

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Mahoney
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 04:54
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Quote: "And it just seems to me, again playing devil's advocate, that if dx10 offered the windfall of performance that it promised, that more developers would be onboard by now."


Few seem to understand the changes that come with DX10. It's not a "windfall of performance," it's a complete overhaul of the structure of the API. It will allow developers to do a lot more with DX. READ: It's not something you'll start up and say "Wow! This is way different!" It's something the developers will start to program with and say "*Phew* This is better."

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david w
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 07:19
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DX 10 is not that much harder than DX 9. The problem is that so many computers are windows xp and the windows vista computers have integrated gfx that they are forced to run DX 9. So the vast majority of XP + Vista pc's are all DX 9.0 only. I program in DX 9.0 and I can tell you one thing is that it is stable and very good at what it does. DX 10 already has 2 strikes against it. 1. Its already been upgraded DX 10.1 so all early hardware does not meet this spec. So games written in 10.1 will not work on 10.0 hardware. So they are back in the boat with 9.0. 2. DX 11 is coming and why even bother with 10 when 11 is just around the corner.

Most people are probably thinking like me. Stick with 9.0 wait for 11 and see what happens. You dont want to alieanate 90% of your potential costumer base do you??????
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Mahoney
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 07:21
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Quote: "Its already been upgraded DX 10.1 so all early hardware does not meet this spec. So games written in 10.1 will not work on 10.0 hardware. So they are back in the boat with 9.0."


You can still write in 10; 10.1 is not forced.

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Jeku
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 07:58 Edited at: 19th Sep 2008 07:58
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Quote: "Few seem to understand the changes that come with DX10."


If there's one thing I've learned about John Carmack, is that HE KNOWS HIS TECH. He knows what he's talking about, and scurries away to a secret hotel room in Texas for long periods of time doing research. I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about, and any game developer worth his salt should at least pay attention to what he says.


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JoelJ
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 08:22
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Quote: "If there's one thing I've learned about John Carmack, is that HE KNOWS HIS TECH. He knows what he's talking about, and scurries away to a secret hotel room in Texas for long periods of time doing research. I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about, and any game developer worth his salt should at least pay attention to what he says."

I very much agree with you. But also would like to add, he's very VERY opinionated. So when he has an opinion, you have no question what that might be.
Sometimes I wonder if he just uses firmer words like he does just to get his point across. He seems to always use absolutes. Either he loves it or he hates it. But of course I haven't read a whole lot on Carmack's opinions.


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Mahoney
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 16:20
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Quote: "Quote: "Few seem to understand the changes that come with DX10."

If there's one thing I've learned about John Carmack, is that HE KNOWS HIS TECH."


I was talking about David, not Carmack. Oh well. . .

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the_winch
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 18:20
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Quote: "I was talking about David, not Carmack. Oh well. . ."


The original point of the thread was Carmack saying from his point of view dx10 is not better for developers.

By way of demonstration, he emitted a batlike squeak that was indeed bothersome.
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Mahoney
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 18:22
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Yes, but if you look back, I was quoting David when I said that many don't understand it, not Carmack.

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Diggsey
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 19:10
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DX10 is necessary, because it's only the new DX versions that cause GFX card manufacturers to add new features to the cards. It may not be that good, but it's a necessary step on the way to better things

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Mahoney
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 19:15
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All of you need to read this; it will answer more than I can.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/opengl-directx,2019.html

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Leadwerks
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 19:18 Edited at: 19th Sep 2008 19:21
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Khronos totally failed with OpenGL3, but at the same time MS is suiciding DirectX and Windows. I am not sure why all of a sudden all these companies turned stupid. This leaves the market wide open for Intel, if they are able to pull off what they are suggesting.

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Mahoney
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 19:21
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Quote: "This leaves the market wide open for Intel, if they are able to pull off what they are suggesting. "


Very true; I hadn't though of that. I suppose we'll see.

Though I know very little about graphics API's, that article I linked to seem to suggest that DX11 might really be something worth using.

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the_winch
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 19:41
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Quote: "Yes, but if you look back, I was quoting David when I said that many don't understand it, not Carmack."


You used this argument.

Quote: "Few seem to understand the changes that come with DX10. It's not a "windfall of performance," it's a complete overhaul of the structure of the API. It will allow developers to do a lot more with DX. READ: It's not something you'll start up and say "Wow! This is way different!" It's something the developers will start to program with and say "*Phew* This is better.""


Yet Carmack a developer is not saying "*Phew* This is better.".

By way of demonstration, he emitted a batlike squeak that was indeed bothersome.
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Leadwerks
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 20:36 Edited at: 19th Sep 2008 20:40
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All DX11 adds that I am aware of is tesselation. At least, that is all I have seen, and seems to be the big new feature they are pushing. They're getting kind of desperate for features to sell. I remember seeing "subsurface scattering" on NVidia's site promoting the 8 series cards, and thinking, "That's all they've got to show off?"

There isn't really anywhere for graphics to go now except better compatibility and just higher numbers of rendering using the same techniques. Here's what I had to say about this a few months ago:

Quote: "There's still lots of room for improvement using shadow maps and rasterizers. We can't render ten million triangles onscreen at a very good framerate. We can render miles of terrain, but we can only draw grass in the immediate area around the player. Why should there be a limitation like that? If I had ten times as much GPU horsepower right now, I wouldn't use different techniques, I would just draw more stuff onscreen. So I think the current technology is pretty stable, and very good for compatibility with future hardware. We'll just see limitations like the number of characters onscreen drop away, and finally be able to render scenes that are as detailed and interesting as real life."


This is good because it means technology is stabilizing, yet it will continue to scale well with improved hardware performance. I won't have to change much code for OpenGL3, and since DX11 isn't a huge change from DX10, I guess Lee won't have to spend a year doing a complete rewrite of FPSX. This lets developers focus on quality instead of always struggling to catch up.
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Mahoney
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 21:17
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Quote: "Yet Carmack a developer is not saying "*Phew* This is better."."


If I remember what I read correctly, he said he's not using because it's not enough of a difference to cut out so many PC users. I'm talking a year or two down the road when Windows 7 is out.

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David R
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 22:05
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This is the way I see it: It's going to be a loooong time until the majority of users are on DX10. In this respect, I think X9 vs. DX10 is irrelevant. I personally reckon (and somewhat hope) that the unification of CPU and GPU will render graphic APIs obsolete


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Jeku
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Posted: 19th Sep 2008 23:07
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Quote: "I personally reckon (and somewhat hope) that the unification of CPU and GPU will render graphic APIs obsolete"


Please explain what you mean. I can't ever see graphics APIs becoming obsolete. There are still many different sound APIs, networking APIs, etc. The unification of CPU and GPU may render graphics hardware obsolete, but even that is pushing it.


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AndrewT
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TBH, I don't really care about any of the fancy-schmancy features like subsurface scattering. I don't care about volumetric shadows and parallax occlusion mapping and geometry shaders. I just want better performance. As long as a game looks decent, I just wanna make sure I can get a steady 60FPS. Valve's got the idea; Half-Life 2 might not have super-amazing graphics, but I can get upwards of 150FPS on it at any part of any level, with over a dozen enemies attacking me, and with the graphic settings maxed out. Crysis, on the other hand, runs at about 25FPS with all settings at High, and slows down to ~10FPS if I approach more than 5 or so enemies at once.

90% of statistics are completely inaccurate.
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Leadwerks
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 03:03 Edited at: 20th Sep 2008 03:05
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Quote: "Please explain what you mean. I can't ever see graphics APIs becoming obsolete. There are still many different sound APIs, networking APIs, etc. The unification of CPU and GPU may render graphics hardware obsolete, but even that is pushing it."

The idea is that programmers will have full control of all rendering, so we'll just be writing our own software renderers, like in the days before 3DFX came along. I am very much in favor of this idea, but I am not sure it will happen within five years.
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Jeku
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 08:41
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Quote: "The idea is that programmers will have full control of all rendering, so we'll just be writing our own software renderers, like in the days before 3DFX came along. I am very much in favor of this idea, but I am not sure it will happen within five years."


Ouch, to be quite honest that would suck. I don't want to write my own sound, physics, and networking libraries from scratch. Rendering, arguably the most challenging part, would be crazy. Just take your Leadwerks engine and imagine writing every single part of that from scratch without any API--- would you even want to do that?

APIs are meant for code reuse and to save time. Why reinvent the wheel?

Unless, of course, the native calls for the rendering are similar to what would be an amalgamation of the best parts of D3D and OpenGL, but I also can't foresee the companies creating a standard that everyone will follow.


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Leadwerks
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 09:36
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I think it would be great. Writing a rasterizer isn't that complicated. You just transform vertices and plot pixels. All the work is done by shaders.
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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 12:25
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As proven by the system I'm using right now, no hardware transform or lighting. Plays at least some games competently. Although that is only about 10% of the equation really. (at least the GPU draws the triangles once the CPU has worked out where to put them)

Not of course, that I dislike hardware T&L. I'd much prefer it.

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Cyrain
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 12:54
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I agree with the people we need to improve "past tech", and not make new features a priority. Everyone nowadays is into making more realistic skin and lighting effects....how about POLYGONS people! A human is made from a million or billion cells.....and we are what...in games only have a couple or a twenty thousand polygons to make humans? Why can't we make a GPU where every single human, animal, vehicle, etc. is made of a GAZILLION polygons...smooth things out people....and work on more realistic texture sizes and rendering.....Shader 4.0 and Shader 2.0 don't matter if my body looks like crappy models from a N64 game.

Game Development....the possibilities
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NeX the Fairly Fast Ferret
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 13:22
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Because more polygons is more processing power which is more heat and more power draw. Unsuitable for portables especially. And it's harder to model in that much detail.

Google NURBS.

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Jeku
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 20:34
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Quote: "I think it would be great. Writing a rasterizer isn't that complicated. You just transform vertices and plot pixels. All the work is done by shaders."


Hmmm, well if there's anyone on this forum that would have the credentials to back up your statements, it's you

By the way do you have any good book recommendations for your rendering techniques or was it largely self taught?


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Leadwerks
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Posted: 20th Sep 2008 21:06 Edited at: 20th Sep 2008 21:06
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My advice is to ignore what everyone else says and test everything yourself.

And learn how the hardware works.
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Aaron Miller
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Quote: "A human is made from a million or billion cells....."

Trillions I heard.

@leadwerks
I agree it wouldn't be that hard - you'd just have to know how to interact with the drivers.

Cheers,

-naota

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Jeku
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Posted: 23rd Sep 2008 03:32
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Quote: "I agree it wouldn't be that hard"


And the award for the Biggest Understatement of the Year goes to...


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