- Joined
- October 18, 2006
- Messages
- 3,201
The problem runs even much, much deeper than people want to recognize : Directx as a whole is a tool "to bind them" onto ANY platform MS wishes to !
Directx was imho NOT invented to make things for programmers and gamers easier, it was simply made as a TOOL to force gamers AWAY from DOS and OS/2 and BeOS !
Well, that's vastly exaggerated IMHO .
I remember a time in the mid 90s that would best be described as a fucking mess. There was OpenGL, there was 3Dfx Glide and there were about a handful of other proprietary technologies/features out there (like cards from Matrox, S3, ATI Rage which all had their own little specialties and with the companies behind these cards all pushing their own little agendas to get more market share).
Remember that the 3Dfx cards were only add-on cards (until the Voodoo 3 at least) so everyone had one of those other 2D-only or 2D/3D cards in addition to a 3Dfx card.
Now what developers had to do was make their games work on as many cards as possible and so they had to program the Glide stuff (and maybe OpenGL for non-Glide cards in parallel) and then they also had to take care of the proprietary features of some cards and finally they had to make sure that there was a pure software mode for older cards that had no 2D or 3D acceleration at all. And then at the very end some poor soul had to test all of this crap, too, and make sure that it would work on all cards and techs. A nightmare.
So when MS basically won the OS wars with Windows 95, they realized that there was a need for standardization and so they began to push DirectX (or Direct3D in particular) to become standards.
This is only a good thing in my opinion. The very last thing that the PC gaming market needs as the nail in the coffin is more fragmentation or more complications in getting games to work on the PC/Windows platform.
- Joined
- Oct 18, 2006
- Messages
- 3,201