Here’s an interesting about-face. Last week we told you of AMD spokesman Richard Huddy’s comments regarding the DirectX API (I now type “API” with an undue confidence), and specifically how it gets in the way of PCs realising their ability to be ten times faster than consoles. Well, now they’re saying words to the effect of, “Um, we didn’t say that, and even if we did, we didn’t mean it.” More specifically, they’re claiming the bit-tech story took the quotes out of context, and according to CRN, “exaggerated” them. Update: bit-tech responds to this below.

In the interview from last week with CRN, he says that what he meant was that a “very small number of high-end developers” take issue with DirectX, who have asked AMD for ways to avoid using the API. Apparently these developers include DICE, along with Crytek. However, “It’s not something most developers want.” Most, he claims, would happily choose DirectX or Open GL, because “it’s a great platform.”

The interview quotes contain an awful lot of “No, Microsoft, we love you!” comments. As many of our commenters observed, the pre-API days were apparently far worse for developers and hardware types says Huddy.

“Every single hardware vendor had to worry about producing their own API, or mimic another vendor’s API. But there are game developers who would very seriously consider tuning their code for a particular piece of hardware.”

But DirectX is super-stable, he insists.

“It’s hard to crash a machine with Direct X, as there’s lots of protection to make sure the game isn’t taking down the machine, which is certainly rare especially compared to ten or fifteen years ago. Stability is the reason why you wouldn’t want to move away from Direct X, and differentiation is why you might want to.”

I am left with more respect for all those developers who manage to crash my machine despite it, then. The good news is Huddy continues to insist that the PC is far more powerful than the consoles, and repeats the point that DirectX is inhibiting access to the full power of the tech in their chips. So, um, er.

This all happened a week ago, but we didn’t notice it then because we are distracted by the shiny colours of games. So thank goodness for GI.biz.

We asked bit-tech editor, James Gorbold, to comment on the suggestion that they’d misquoted and exaggerated Huddy’s comments. He told us,