[mdlug] Interesting information about Windows "7"

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Aaron Kulkis

> >  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.

> But modern windows games are written against the ActiveX
> API. .. as more cards meet the minimum PERFORMANCE
> specifications of the game, they too can be used to
> play the game.

 Er, sort of. It's the same game as before - on a higher level, true, but
from a practical perspective a specific set of cards are needed for the
games. (It's DirectX, BTW - ActiveX is the horribly insecure web browser
plugin scheme.)

> ActiveX is hardware neutral -- if it wasn't, then Windows games from 3
> years ago which required what was then bleeding-edge hardware would be
> completely unplayable on a new system with today's bleeding-edge
> hardware.

 Emulation changes that somewhat. I can run Atari 2600 games on my Palm
Pilot. I can run old DOS games without anything resembling an ISA Soundblaster
card in the box. But yes, having an abstracted API helps a lot. The problem is,
the DirectX API abstraction layer is paper-thin. Entirely too much dependence
on the underlying hardware leaks through.

 Consider "Hardware Transform and Lighting", a key feature of modern games;
essentially, matrix processing to handle large numbers of vertexes and polygons.
In OpenGL, you don't have to do anything special to get the benefit of Hardware
T&L - you just use the standard OpenGL calls, and if they're hardware-accelerated
they'll operate much faster. In DirectX, you have to have entirely different
code paths.

> the game writer is writing for specific on-card capabilities...which again, is
> NOT the same as writing for a specific hardware implementation (such as the
> color palette begins at memory location 0xABCDEF00)

 It's a bit higher-level than hardcoded memory addresses, yes. But the implementation
that Microsoft did - DirectX - leaves so much to be desired.

 In a way, you're right - it's possible, for example, to implement DirectX on top
of OpenGL, as Wine does. However, because of the hardware lumps poking up through
the API, it's *much* tougher than the converse, implenting OpenGL on top of DirectX.

> That's the WHOLE PURPOSE of an operating system --
> to abstract common, mass-produced hardware, so that
> they are roughly interchangeable, to the extent of
> the capabilities of the hardware (Nobody would expect
> a 360x360 dpi CMYK printer to produce output on par
> with a 1440x720 CcMmYK printer. And nobody expects
> a 5 ppm printer to produce output at the speed of a
> 20 ppm printer.)

 That's a decent analogy... except imagine that the call to produce a red dot on the
low-res printer was entirely different from the call to produce a red dot on the
high-res printer. DirectX forces that kind of knowledge onto the programmer in a
rather large number of cases. It's gotten much better since the days Carmack slammed
it - from what I hear, DirectX 9 is not half bad - but it's been a long, hard road
to that point and the transition isn't quite complete yet.

 Sincerely,

 Ray Ingles                                            (313) 227-2317

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