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Huddy said that for some high-end developers, developing their own API may allow them to do improve the performance of their gaming while others may see it as a different approach and a means of differentiating themselves from the competition. “The minority of developers who want a change fall into two categories: those like Dice who have highly-tuned, efficient rendering engines, and those like Critech who are selling hardware and could differentiate themselves quite spectacularly from mainstream gaming by going around Direct X,” he said. “Some may be able to do spectacularly good gaming, but for an engine vendor it might simply be a good reason to diverge over the next five years or so.”
Huddy said a difference of opinion has emerged in the industry between those who believe in Microsoft’s API and those who would like to go another direction -- and AMD must pay attention to both. “Many people are still shipping DX9 games, which is still a perfectly reasonable way to go,” Huddy said. “As hardware vendors we want to keep bringing out new hardware that produces something visually exciting. We want to be able to innovate. In the feedback we’re getting, some say ‘move on from Direct X’ and some say ‘DX is absolutely the right place to play.’”
Huddy repeated the point he made in last week’s article that GPU platforms on the PC far exceeded console GPUs in terms of performance, but added that APIs and other middleware for gaming have to innovate and adapt with evolving software code as well as GPU hardware. “If you take the Xbox 360, it’s absolutely dwarfed by modern hardware -- a game on a PC will always have a relatively thick software layer, a console does not.” he said. “We’re putting a lot more horse power at the high-end. But the software layer that lies between the PC running Direct X and the game itself needs to get involved in a lot of transformation.”
As for the point about software developers wanting the API to go away, Huddy said that should not be taken literally. “Making the API go away doesn’t actually mean there is no longer any API,” he said. “They would take a different form.”
Next: The Peculiar Personality Of Game Developers
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