AMD backtracks on DirectX bashing
"It's a great platform," says chip maker.
PC processor professor AMD has backtracked after accusing DirectX of "getting in the way" of superior PC power.
Actually DirectX maker Microsoft does a "tremendous job" of catering to low-end and high-end hardware, AMD senior director of ISV [Independent Software Vendor] Neal Robison told CRN.
"We're simply letting Microsoft know the feedback we get from game developers," he said. "We've heard from the high-end and the low-end. The very high-end want something more in terms of performance.
"Game developers, AMD and NVIDIA offer constructive feedback because we want to see them continue to innovate."
Richard Huddy, AMD graphics evangelist, accused DirectX of throttling PC power, which is "often" 10-times what PS3 and Xbox 360 can manage. Huddy told CRN that original interviewer Bit-Tech had taken his comments out of context and exaggerated them.
He reiterated: "If you take the Xbox 360, it's absolutely dwarfed by modern hardware." But this time Huddy added the caveat that "a game on a PC will always have a relatively thick software layer - a console does not".
"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."
What's more, Huddy said DirectX is a "highly stable" platform. "It's hard to crash a machine with DirectX," he declared, "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."
Neal Robison added that DirectX made sense of a higgledy-piggledy PC market.
"We saw some of the chaos before Direct X coalesced the industry. In the past there were all kinds of APIs developers had to worry about," he said.
"Every single hardware vendor had to worry about producing their own API [application programming interface], or mimic another vendor's API.
"But," he added, "there are game developers who would very seriously consider tuning their code for a particular piece of hardware."
"It's not something most developers want. If you held a vote among developers, they would go for Direct X or Open GL, because it's a great platform."