Farewell to DirectX?



The Xbox 360's Xenos GPU has a less then a tenth of the processing power of a top-end PC GPU, so why don't PC games look ten times better?



AMD's head of GPU developer relations, Richard Huddy, says games developers are asking AMD to 'make the API go away'

Despite what delusional forum chimps might tell you, we all know that the graphics hardware inside today's consoles looks like a meek albino gerbil compared with the healthy tiger you can get in a PC. Compare the GeForce GTX 580's count of 512 stream processors with the weedy 48 units found in the Xbox 360's Xenos GPU, not to mention the ageing GeForce 7-series architecture found inside the PS3.It seems pretty amazing, then, that while PC games often look better than their console equivalents, they still don't beat console graphics into the ground. A part of this is undoubtedly down to the fact that many games are primarily developed for consoles and then ported over to the PC. However, according to AMD, this could potentially change if PC games developers were able to program PC hardware directly at a low-level, rather than having to go through an API, such as DirectX.says AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy.Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is:Of course, there are many definite pros to using a standard 3D API. It's likely that your game will run on a wide range of hardware, and you'll get easy access to the latest shader technologies without having to muck around with scary low-level code. However, the performance overhead of DirectX, particularly on the PC architecture, is apparently becoming a frustrating concern for games developers speaking to AMD.says Huddy,Hold on, you might be thinking, weren't shaders supposed to enable developers to be more innovative with their graphics anyway? Indeed they were, and the ability to run programs directly on the graphics hardware certainly enables some flexibility, particularly once we got past the fixed-function shaders of DirectX 8. However, with the exception of a few quirky-looking indie titles, there's no denying that many PC games look very much like one another.says Huddy,