[mdlug] Interesting information about Windows "7"

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Aaron Kulkis

> >  Well, actually, many games require particular hardware on the video card to
> > run. For example, Hardware T&L, or shaders, or texture compression, or
> > whatever.
> 
> But the game writer is NOT writing custom code for
> that particular card...

 Well, the difference to the end-user is kind of academic. Either way, you need
a particular set of cards to play the game, or you're SOL. For Linux, the game
"Cold War" needs a particular set of features. It'll play on my machine with an
Nvidia 5700LE, but it won't play on my parents with a GF 4 MX400.

 More, differences in "shader models" end up forcing programmers to write separate
code for Nvida and ATI cards in many case, though apparently that's settled down a
bit in recent cards, from what I gather.

> NOBODY is doing "bare metal" programming on Windows
> the way they did during the DOS days.

 Nor did anyone claim that...

> But it's still done through the DirectX API, not
> directly interfacing with the card.

 Actually, DirectX before version 9 did expose much of that in terms of
"capabilities", and it was up to the programmer to tailor things to the available
capabilities. OpenGL had some core functionality that could be counted on, plus
extensions. Not all of the core functionality was always accelerated, but when it
wasn't there were software fallbacks.

> But nobody is writing Windows games by writing code
> that bypasses DirectX to directly load GPU registers
> and directly address the card memory.

 No, but that's not the same thing as "not writing code specific to
particular models of hardware".

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                (313) 227-2317
 
 "Una saus victus nullam sperare salutem." - The one hope
       of the damned is not to hope for safety.
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