http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114150-Bethesda-VP-Developing-For-PC-is-a-Headache

http://www.geeks3d.com/20110317/low-level-gpu-programming-the-future-of-game-development-on-pc/

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1535975&postcount=8

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/1

http://www.industrygamers.com/news/pc-developers-just-want-direct-x-to-go-away/


I said that the game is pretty stable as itself ... looking on the application it's day vs night compared to other engines. To nobody's surprise (the ones that know what im talking about), Frostbite 2 is nothing special and i think IDTech5 beats it in everywhere except maybe large open maps, but Frostbite 2 is still not sandbox like Cryengine, you still have 2D mountains image for the background.

Also Blizzard always got terrible engines, and Starcraft 2 engine is preety darn ancient - ofcourse Blizzard supports modding community and i have no objection since im an active modder right there; but Carmack explained this well, the more easy the game is to mod the more sacrifice you make for the performance because SC2 you let simple XML and Trigger scripting for a broader audience to be able to modify , but script-interpreters are always slower than the true programming language ...



It is harder to develop for PC than current consoles , especially because Carmack (and others that try) doesn't get close enough to the GPU hardware than he'd liked to, if the GPU industry allowed that, game developers could write their own drivers/ASSEMBLY (i think?) optimizations that override official driver or something.

So he said there is to be "seen some light in the end of that tunnel" ... so will Doom4 be the first project to break the driver bottleneck.

GPU drivers should have a kind of "platform" or "extendability without affecting anything else" so the GPU vendor releases drivers, there can be stuff similarly like ATI Catalyst Application Profiles but actually the "optimization extensions" from the game's actual developer and not only for

This will let PC developers to further optimize performance right ? So if Carmack get's hands on this he'll make Rage run at 200 FPS




TLDR: Developers can get closer to the hardware (low-level) on consoles, than they can get on PC. What a pity, PC has so much more brute horsepower but the drivers are just terrible for both vendors, obviously a team of 50-100 driver-guys can't optimize super-perfect-carmack-style for EVERY game that ever been released.

Just relax for a bit ... and imagine how PC games would play if developers had access to every* hardware on the PC to the lowest-level. I bet this is what Carmack is dreaming of. (but practically we only need the GPU low-level access, not everything)

Now ... just imagine if low-level programming would not be possible for developers on consoles: Crap games, useless console ...




Now that you guys all know ... CAN YOU STOP ACCUSING ID SOFTWARE PLEASE, and enough with that refund nonsene.

So basically ... in the perfect low-level world , CUDA , DirectCompute and OPENCL are all a waste of time.

So they're going backwards or what ? ... i hope it doesn't affect else ... hopefully only those that want to compute.

there you have it

The PC market ... it wasn't piracy.

The biggest enemy ... who else than Microsoft ... again



Microsoft doesn't want better PC games as bias.

Let's report this to EU competition commision and let them fine microsoft again for abusing the market , as they have no direct competition they should open support for hardware access and other stuff they're locking up.

Also beware, escapist is sadly loaded with a lot of inexperienced teenagers blabling about piracy which is a stupid discussion as it's totally not the main problem.


I should have linked some other news source.

this will help boost there xbox sales :foodndrink:

In an ideal world you could write straight to the metal code, yes. There are a number of practical problems with that idea however. First is that there are too many different hardware variations around. Being down to two major manufacturers helps a lot for sure, but even that is one too many, and would require writing at least two completely different rendering backends for a game engine that may not be able to share code. Even if there were only one, all it takes is a new hardware generation to come out and we're likely throwing out all existing code and starting from scratch. Not very productive. Yeah, the API does get in the way, but it really needs to.

This is more or less the same situation as we had with sound cards under MS-DOS back in the 90s. Everybody ended up coding to the SB16 specification, every manufacturer ended up emulating SB16, Creative couldn't evolve the spec because things would break, and no other manufacturer could introduce their own innovations.

It's not just the API either. Modern operating systems prevent direct access to hardware and for very good reasons - all it takes is one misbehaving program to bring down the entire system. Remember how frequent BSODs were under Windows 9x? Want to go back to that? Me neither.

I think it's also a very convenient position for a hardware vendor to take too. Of course AMD would prefer if game developers coded directly to their hardware and if the resulting code wouldn't work on a competitor's. So would NVIDIA, and Intel (or at least those in Intel who care about this) would probably too. Muscling out competition can be a strong motive for avocating a certain approach. Don't think that AMD are nice guys just because they've got an underdog reputation. They know that they're in a fairly cut-throat competitive business in which they need to survive.

One final consideration is that hardware vendors may not actually want this to happen. Imagine if the latest and greatest visual orgy ran at over 500 FPS on their 3-year-old parts? Who are they going to sell next year's hardware to? How are they going to be able to justify the upgrade cycle? At the very least there would be a shaking out period of a coupla years before everything settles back down again, and that would be a coupla years during which a lot of potential sales wouldn't happen.

An interesting note regarding the draw calls remark in the geeks3d link - Rage's setup actually provides one very elegant solution to this problem. Because everything you see is just represented by a single extremely large texture, the number of draw calls required for a hugely complex scene is quite significantly reduced. No need to change textures means no need to break a drawing batch which means that drawing batch sizes can be significantly higher and number of draw calls can be significantly lower. Check out the file called "rendererPerformanceLogs" in your Rage directory - there are huge polycounts going through per-frame with a very low number of draw calls (and it would be even lower but for the requirement to do frustum culling). That's one fairly important technical achievement that tends to get lost beneath the obsession in some quarters with how textures look up-close.

Indeed, it's just that people like carmack don't care about the compatability tradeoff without APIs. The benefits overload the apparent downside. It's not impossible to make compatability not such an issue, the point is it's harder for a company because they would a whole different GPU low-level code for different GPU vendor , Carmack obviously can tackle this and they have solutions that other people who aren't as experienced may be illogical.

Developers don't really care about ease of porting ...


Carmack perfectly put this (generally speaking) into perspective when he said how there are better tools on Xbox than on PC. In "better" he probably meant that he can access lower level hardware than PC but we couldn't have know exactly back then at qukecon, plus, microsoft puts some debug tools for free on X360 but it would cost you thousands on the PC.

The downside of PC gaming can be co-blamed on Microsoft them self. Microsoft is quite a hated company, they don't really help promote any major hardcoe PC tournament and they also closed down Enseble Studios.


Also - im saying that those that WANT to use no API can have access, im not saying everyone should use NO API right away.

The tools thing is actually incredibly important. The combination of PIX and the Debug Runtimes for Direct3D on the PC absolutely wipes the floor with anything OpenGL has to offer, and, while I haven't got personal experience of the 360 tools, I have heard that they totally wipe the floor with PIX/Debug Runtimes for D3D from a number of different sources. This can be easy to underestimate, but an incredible amount of otherwise productive time can go into debugging, and anything that makes the job easier or faster is a very useful thing indeed (Microsoft's C/C++ development tools are vastly superior to anything in the Linux world and this is a very large part of the reason why - MS have what is just flat-out the best debugger you can get - and you don't even have to pay for it).

Actually, the correct example was that they include "anolyze" (for static code) in the "super ultra platinum 10 thousand dollar Visual Studio" for PC. But devs get it for free on X360. Since ... reasoning is that Microsoft will shoulder some blame from buggy X360 apps but they don't give a [censored] on PC.

Microsoft has been really biasing X360 that it's been doing negative on

I think this should be brought to EU courts or whatever as Microsoft is abusing dominant market position. If they want let them do stuff for X360 but they shouldn't purposely hinder PCs with their dominant operating system.

Actually, the correct example was that they include "anolyze" (for static code) in the "super ultra platinum 10 thousand dollar Visual Studio" for PC. But devs get it for free on X360. Since ... reasoning is that Microsoft will shoulder some blame from buggy X360 apps but they don't give a [censored] on PC.

Microsoft has been really biasing X360 that it's been affecting PC not just indirectly but also purposelly, that's absurd.

I think this should be brought to EU courts or whatever as Microsoft is abusing dominant market position. they can do stuff for X360 but they shouldn't purposely undermine PCs with their dominant operating system and making such absurd ways of business practices that affect the whole industry overall, benefiting only it's console.

I think Carmack said that in the QuakeCon 2011 QA also.

However that would still mean that multiplatform developers will have the static anolysis tools available to them for Windows apps aswell.

Yes ... i didn't recall it exactly before but did now, it's from him that i heard that, nobody else said it

Carmack's famous .plan btw
http://www.bluesnews.com/archives/carmack122396.html


For those that wish to know why openGL ...


Still ... for Carmack, the driver's are problem and basically other stuff, OpenGL still doesn't give him full hardware access apparently ...

That "plan" was written fifteen years ago when Dx was the new kid on the block and just plain svcked. Microsoft didn't get its act together until they came out with Dx 9 years later.

The biggest advantage openGL has over Dx is its faster and Carmack is simply attempting to extend that advantage by suggesting programming closer the metal. It will happen eventually, but the question is when and how. The raw bandwidth potential of sparce voxel octrees demands some sort of optimization if we are to take graphics to the next level that much sooner, but heterogeneous architectures to leverage all that bandwidth are still in their infancy as is the programming technology. In general it is wiser to wait for the hardware to be produced and then see what kind of software would be nice to have, but Carmack is one person who might have a clearer idea as to when the software should dictate the hardware.

That doesn't mean DX is closer to the metal - one thing's for sure and that he knew it would take long for DX to improve and in his mind look it took microsoft 15 years ...

By the way about carmack saying that PC is not the leading platform for RAGE.

Those that still may not understand:

Yes that was their plan , but obviously he knows they made a mistake in the E3 interview when he says it should be developed for PC and then deployed on consoles, not the other way around like now ... we'll get incremental updates for PC. But this was the plan and they're obviously too much ahead to change it and they're rolling it out.

We said already it was all (unneeded) PR Language to distance them selfs off the driver problem, Doom4 should be all about PC. Not only are the PC guys allready flat out over the drivers, you have to go to step it up and piss them off even more, many of them don't get the whole story because they didn't follow Rage until release.

I think with some proper response people could get trust back for Doom4. I know it's mostly noobs that rampage all over, it doesn't matter they're a minority , it matters that they're spreading false beliefs for new customers, and what is the most trusted game advice, mouth-to-mouth and forums. ... Just loook neogaf a bunch of noobs talking for 20 pages and they're all wrong + the site's stupid registration and i couldn't post a thing to correct em.

Direct x has enjoyed a virtual monopoly in some 95% of all games for many years. If openGL didn't happen to be much more useful for enterprise purposes it would have been crushed under the boot of Microsoft long ago. That it would eventually be left in the dust by Dx was a foregone conclusion. Microsoft has always counted on the fact that by the time most programs are fully optimized the hardware they were originally designed for is obsolete anyway. They don't need to be closer to the metal anymore then they need to worry about Apple replacing them as the monopoly of choice. Not that I'm rooting for MS or monopolies mind you... its just a fact of life.

Carmack doesn't really care about what Apple will do next ("enlarge by 300% = innovation") or whatever monopoly, he and other's want to make game closer to the metal no matter what, it's really obvious seen that carmack has this attitude throughout the years, and i support him, he's for innovation he's the one that pushes forward his talent and doesn't care about corporations and their practices, you should be thankful we still have these kind of people in industry.

The idea that Carmack doesn't care about corporate practices is laughable. Id software deliberately kept their company small so they could pursue their own dream, but with the id tech 5 engine they've finally expanded and entered mainstream corporate life. I am glad Carmack and id decided to take their own path, but I'm also glad they know how to work within the limits the corporate system imposes or we'd never be able to appreciate their work.

Just a clarification, but when you say "not the other way around like now," it comes across like you're suggesting that for Rage, id Software developed for consoles then deployed on PC. If that is what you're suggesting then that is not correct. What he said was that the way it's done now is where the game is developed "live" for all three platforms.

It is maddening beyond belief how many people believe the PC version of Rage is a "port" (one can argue all they want that Rage is "consolized" or point out the PC version's driver problems, but it is by no useful meaning of the word a "port"). It's also maddening how many people believe that what Carmack said was that "it was a mistake to develop Rage for consoles." His quote was about how the game was developed, NOT its target market.

(I'm not saying you believe either of those things, Stewox. Just pointing these things out in general.)

Carmack's rant of 1996 is no longer relevant. Even as far back as 2001 it was quite clear that the situation had changed: http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/slashdot.html#s20010818x221025


My own experience of programming in the two APIs is that D3D is actually faster, by 20% or more. I'm not the only one who's discovered this either: http://aras-p.info/blog/2007/09/23/is-opengl-really-faster-than-d3d9/


(This is from one of the guys who works on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_%28game_engine%29 so it's safe to assume that he knows what he's talking about. Note also the "broken hardware/driver workarounds" comment).

I personally find D3D to be a lower level API, despite the fact that the runtimes do impose an extra layer (although this extra layer could quite easily live in a GL driver too, so the argument is up in the air). One reason for this is that D3D lets you do what's on the hardware and only what's on the hardware (another myth is that D3D software emulates a lot of stuff - completely untrue). GL on the other hand lets you do a lot of things that are not actually supported in hardware, and in many cases the driver must support them through software emulation. 24-bit/3-channel textures are an example - they don't even exist in hardware but yet they're part of the OpenGL 1.1 specification so they must be supported by the driver. How? You guessed - software. 10-pixel wide anti-aliased stippled lines? No support in consumer hardware, part of the OpenGL 1.0 spec, must be supported by the driver, therefore software emulated. Exceeding your max number of indexes in a draw call? Drop back to software. It's all over the place and it can happen any time without warning.

Well still - IDTech5 doesn't work like anything else on the market. So he prolly knows what's right for him.

that's abstraction, DX has a lot of features that pretend to do what they tell you to do.

Well any sort of closer to the metal programming won't be seen till the next generation. Gaming is now ruled by console generations and companies like NVIDIA, INTEL, ATI need to sit and talk to the developers and ask them what kind of control they want in the next generation of hardware. We have already seen Unreal's Samaritan demo and ID tech 5 is something that can truly benefit with some hardware level changes. The next gen of consoles will also shape what kind of graphic cards we see the future.

No one expected this console generation to be so huge. Many PC devs switched to multiplatform development. Most devs will keep future consoles as the first development platform and then PC. Due to this GPU manufacturers will also have to consider finding ways to keep everything compatible across the board. They probably didn't see it coming last time but this time they should be more prepared.

Microsoft was smart and made sure that some games would be easily ported to windows with some of their tools. XNA is an example of that. Sony had no such strategy and hence lost on a lot games. I can see Sony having something to have their PS games easily ported to either their mobile or PSP devices.

1st Rule: They are corporate commercial companies, they won't "sit down and talk" ... low level stuff doesn't benefit them yet, unconvinced.



Moment of silence ... only the best survive on PC.