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Why Robin Makes Batman Better I was fortunate enough to sit in on Martin Slater’s BioShock post-mortem down at Game Connect last weekend.
With hands firmly clenching his speaker podium, Slater held his ground against a steady bombardment of questions on BioShock. I found his experiences working with Microsoft’s DirectX 10 the most interesting, so I’ve replicated them here from data carefully extracted from my voice recorder:
[DirectX 10]offers your gameplay nothing … DirectX 10, probably for the next three, four, five years is not important to you. Microsoft are going to tell you everything under the sun differently. Everybody under the sun is going to tell you differently.
I’m not sure it offers your visuals anything either, judging from Crysis and its configuration file silliness.
DirectX 10 isn’t all bad though – hey, Microsoft didn’t go to all that trouble for nothing:
You’ve got the business side and you’ve got the games side. The games side, you want to minimise the technology because you want to maximise the amount of time you spend interacting with game design. DirectX 10, for all your game programmers, is a beautiful place.
I can’t help but agree with Slater. I also think people need to start understanding that DirectX 10 and Direct3D 10 are two different things – one is a collection of APIs, while the other is one of those APIs.
From what I can see from this post over at Crysis-Online.com, you don’t need Windows Vista and Direct3D 10 to get all those gorgeous effects that are supposed to be “exclusive” to the new API. Windows XP and Direct3D 9 appear to cope with it fine, and even boast better performance.
My home PC is still out of commission (waiting for a new motherboard now), so I can’t test the legitimacy of this, but it looks kosher. Keep in mind this is not a hack to get Direct3D 10 working on Windows XP, just to get Crysis pumping out D3D 10-like graphics in D3D 9.
Crysis was meant to sell Vista to gamers. Seems it’s not the killer app we thought it was.
The details of the tweak after the jump.
DX 10 Features in Windows XP – MUST SEE [Crysis-Online.com]
Gears of Wars hits PC in about a month, so Microsoft put together this rather chunky fact sheet to remind us why we should buy the game. To summarise: The PC will have some new content, DirectX 10 support and a game editor that will let you create your own levels using the Unreal Editor.
Hit the jump for the full fact sheet via Beyond Unreal.
In an interview with German site Heise Online, Gabe Newell has professed his undying love for DX10′s Vista exclusivity. Or…he would have, if he actually loved it, instead of hating it. Real bad. He says Microsoft’s decision to make the latest DirectX Vista-only has harmed the PC games industry, with few companies bothering to use it since few gamers can take advantage of it. Valve’s own, albeit always handy, online surveys revealed only 8% of gamers were using Vista, despite it being over nine months old. To the other 92% – you dig those heels in, Gabe’s got your back. Gabe Newell: DirectX 10 for Vista was a mistake [Heise Online, via Shashdot]
The newest iMac revision, announced earlier today at the Apple Town Hall event, not only features an attractive external visual upgrade, the guts are pretty nice, too. The new base iMac comes equipped with the ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT, with upper-tier versions of the iMac featuring the ATI Radeon HD 2600 PRO, both DirectX 10 capable video cards. That means, anyone looking to run DirectX 10 supported games like Crysis, BioShock, and Gears of War on their Mac via Boot Camp can do so without having to abandon the comforts of Mac OSX.
Prices range from $US1199 to $US2299 with LCD screens running from 20″ to 24″. For the record, the lowest end iMac in the new configuration just meets the minimum specs for BioShock. Interested gamers with thousands of dollars and Mac gaming on their minds should probably look somewhere in the mid-range. And, yes, you can use a two-button mouse, for Christ’s sake.
This concludes my Apple Computers viral marketing broadcast. (Buy a Mac.)
iMac – Technology [Apple]
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