DirectX is 'getting in the way' of developers pushing top-end PC - which are several times more powerful than Xbox 360 - to their limits.
That's according to AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy, who told Bit-tech: "It's funny, we often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.
He went on to say that "being able to have total control over the machine ... is what the very best games developers want," saying that one of the most frequent requests from developers is "Make the API go away."
"By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft - no doubt at all," said Huddy.
It's not a notion shared by all, however, as having a standard 3D API allows developers to ensure their games will run on a widest range of different hardware, and lets them easy access to shaders.
"Wrapping it up in a software layer gives you safety and security,' explained Huddy. "But it unfortunately tends to rob you of quite a lot of the performance, and most importantly it robs you of the opportunity to innovate."
However, this often leads to games also looking overly similar, says Huddy. "The funny thing about introducing shaders into games in 2002, was that we expected that to create more visual variety in games, but actually people typically used shaders in the most obvious way."
"That means that they've used shaders to converge visually, and lots of games have the same kind of look and feel to them these days on the PC. If we drop the API, then people really can render everything they can imagine, not what they can see - and we'll probably see more visual innovation in that kind of situation."
EA Games label president Frank Gibeau has recently said he sees PC as "an extremely healthy platform", adding: "It's totally conceivable it will become our biggest platform."
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/29 ... -graphics/
