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AMD Hawaii GPU Launch Live Stream!!! + Comments

ilya

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So that owners of hardware don't have to pay a licensing fee to Microsoft in order to play games on their hardware.

There's a lot more to it than that.

In a nutshell DirectX and consoles are what's holding back game development. Linux is simply a more open, faster platform. Even with today's poorly optimized drivers, Linux graphics performance will still run circles around anything running on Windows. So Linux instead of Windows=more FPS. You also have completely open standards, which makes it easy for developers to make good games.
 

cwestwell

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May 7, 2008
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Microsoft needs to take DirectX open source anyway, this will hopefully drive them to it faster.
 

Arinoth

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Microsoft needs to take DirectX open source anyway, this will hopefully drive them to it faster.

Why would they though? They license it out, so every console that runs DX, which is and has been all of them Microsoft gets a piece of the pie. Also limits competition for gaming for say Linux, since they are all free and thus no one will spend their money to grab DX and then offer it for free on Linux.

The only way we'll see DX on a Linux machine will be Valve steamboxes as Valve will probably be licensing and modifying DX to run in Linux, or they'll just use this new 'tech' offered by AMD
 

Desiato

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Mar 8, 2010
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I don't get the scorn towards DirectX or Microsoft. Gaming performance in Windows compares well to other PCs, aka general purpose computers.

What AMD is attempting is extremely retro. Hardware and vendor specific APIs disappeared for good reason. You cannot compare a hardware agnostic API like DirectX to it.

DirectX, by nearly all accounts, is an excellent development platform. Like all platforms, it has strengths and weaknesses, but years of postmortems tell me it's generally well-liked among devs. It costs Microsoft money to produce, so I'm not sure why they should give it away.

Gaming performance on Linux is an extremely mixed bag and mostly unknown. There are not nearly enough titles available to properly judge. If you read about everything Valve has done to 'fix' Linux gaming the past couple of years, it's clear it was not a viable option for consumers or devs. How well they have improved it remains to be seen.

Can we expect Devs to learn two new consoles, adopt hardware specific APIs on the PC, and also begin supporting Linux at the same time? Good luck with that. Whatever change comes of these announcements, progress will be slow.

If mantle is gaining traction among Devs, you can bet nvidia knows about it and is preparing an answer. Devs are unlikely to support (which means more than initial development, but also testing and maintenance) dx11 + two different hardware APIs on the PC - so we might see an even more fragmented version of red and green team games. More fragmentation and frustration. And, perhaps worst of all, more confusion at a consumer level, further stagnating the PC gaming market.
 
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SKYMTL

HardwareCanuck Review Editor
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Feb 26, 2007
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Montreal
Well, we need to talk SKY into including that in the review. I already ditched a quad socket F for a 7850.

It all depends how long I have the cards for. However, let's just put it this way: the folding performance of cards other than the R9 290 and R9 290X is pretty much a foregone conclusion.
 

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