Xbox 360 can't run DirectX 10, confirms ATI

@Rootbeer

Microsoft could still do that if they wanted to, it wouldnt be much more than a number to most people. It wouldn't be appropriate for 360 and PC to share the exact same DX version though, there's plenty that's unnecessary for both systems. See Goodwins excellent post. It doesn't make sense from a developer perspective to do what you're saying. Porting between PC and 360 is still relatively a piece of cake with Microsofts XNA tools, as DX doesnt stand still porting issues are always an issue.

Microsoft are doing a similar thing to your idea in Vista anyway with the rating system, which is a much finer way for consumers to see how good their PC is and what games it can run. Microsoft are doing alot with their "Games for Windows" initiative to make PC gaming simpler and similar to the 360 experience.

DirectX10 from a programmer's point of view is an API. Hence there can be a physics API and if it's implemented by hardware on the video card or software on the cpu is irrelevant except with regards to performance. For a gpu to be "compliant" it has to have hardware implimentations. ATI demoed a physics co-processor card on Gamespot's Last Word running along with an X1900 card.

It should be noted that unified shader support isn't really a DX10 feature. It could have been easily implemented in DX8 if anyone were shipping such hardware back then. Once a shader pipe has been assigned a role it looks the same as a non-unified shader of either type. The main difference comes at setup time. The game queries the GPU's driver for what number of shader of each type is available and runs the game accordingly.

The big difference with unified shaders is that the shader roles can be assigned rather than being hardwired. This also means that provisions must be made for running old games that don't know about unified shaders. The driver will report back a number each of pixel and vertex shaders in line with the traditional ration in previous GPU designs, then assign the shaders on its own so that the old game never knows the difference.

#24

Stumper, the DX10 spec was only vaguely defined when the Xbox 360 was far along in the design phase. It was always known that the 360 would be a DX9 system as its design is directly driven by DX9 requirements. It was also known then the DX10 would introduce a lot of new stuff and wouldn't be shipping for a very long time. That DX10 will be native in Vista reflects the delays in Vista, which was originally intended to have DX9 as its native version of DirectX.

Making the Xbox 360 forward compatible to DX10 was an impossible objective for its intended schedule.

The Xbox Live Gold account is entirely optional. If you've no desire for online multiplayer there is no cost at all, yet the cost of entry for the platform remains substantially lower. Such service do not run themselves for free. Sony will extract the costs from the consumer by less direct means but the costs will be there.


#28

Potato, I greatly doubt the issue can be attributed to a lack of texture compression. That feature has been native in Nvidia GPUs for quite a long time and is certainly in the RSX. More likely the space used is just gobs of FMV in MPEG-2 rather than the far more spae efficient VC-1 codec used on the Xbox 360. Sony has dragged its heels on supporting modern codec use in HDTV content and Blu-ray is suffering for it. If they could deliver decent tools for H.264/VC-1 support to studio producing Blu-ray products, what is the chance they done any better for the PS3 developers?

It is arguable that the PS3 has less texture memory available than the Xbox 360. Both have 512MB of RAM but the PS3 has three times as much, 96MB, reserved for the system. 64MB for texture storage is very non-trivial. On top of that, the PS3 uses a split memory architecture. The section intended for the RSX is faster than the 360's unified memory but also a good deal smaller. Moving textures from the other memory section involves a performance penalty that makes it unsuitable for texture storage unless they're procedurally generated textures generated by the Cell, in which case the delay may be worthwhile to have those effects.

#30

Lou, that is simply wrong. As of this writing there is no physics API coming out of Microsoft. Ageia's PhysX is available for the 360 and PS3 developers in software mode. Havok will likely follow.

What DX10 does offer is features that allow physics to be implemented in a more efficient way. This can be an API like PhysX or a developer's dedicated engine. This is pretty important as getting right with DX9 on the PC is a lot of work right now, as seen in the poor implementation for the Ageia PPU card in GRAW. This is pretty much a non-issue on the Xbox 360 since the overhead from competing Windows operations is non-existent and the platform is multi-threaded and multiprocessor by default. Developers on the 360 have a lot of guaranteed processing resources for implementing physics while PC developers have to deal with a high level of hardware variability.

Physics hardware on the Wii is extremely doubtful. ATI and IBM reps have been coy because it would look bad for them to just come out and say almost nothing has changed other than a die shrink, allowing a higher clock rate, and additional RAM. A physics hardware implementation would mean a substantial investment in silicon real estate. This is rather improbable when they won't even admit to the platform having so much as DX8 era dedicated shaders.

#42

If the primary attraction of the PSP is to run emulators and homebrew, then it is a complete failure to Sony. They produced the PSP as a platofrm on which to sell games for profit. Not as a toy for homebrewers sold at a loss.

If you want an open platform for such projects, get a PDA. Just be prepared to pay a lot more since the maker won't reserve all the profits for software sales.

#47

Rootbeer, all they would have changed is that we'd now be discussing DX11 support rather than DX10 support. If the DX10 spec had been frozen far enough back to allow the 360 GPU to fully support it, it would have been a minor upgrade of DX9 instead of the major leap it is intended to represent.

DX9 is the culmination of many generations of DirectX design. It allows experience DX developers to transition quickly but at a cost of not making the most efficient use of the hardware. Several developers have indicated that DX10 on the PC will allow them to do more with existing DX9 systems. This has less to offer Xbox 360 developers beause the gains are mostly tied to PC issues.

There has ALWAYS been distinct PC and console implementations of DirectX. DX8 was very new when the Xbox shipped, so it made less of a difference then but there were still major differences between the versions and those grew over time. DX9 has been out for a good while but that hasn't made it a nightmare to port DX9 games like HL2 to the original Xbox, especially compared to the other consoles for potential ports.

The Xbox 360 will not receive a version of DX10 in terms of the hardware feature set support but that doesn't mean there will not be an Xbox 360 SDK with APIs compatible to DX10 for the purpose of easily porting code for those hardware features that are supported on the 360. Developer's lives will be simplified where possible.

PC gamers do not care if their setup meets or exceeds the console du jour. They care whether it's better than what they had previously. Considering how long DX9 hardware has been in PCs, matching the Xbox 360 is hardly a concern. Just as when the Xbox shipped, consoles are catching to where PCs have already tread. The difference is that consoles make it a pure plug and play experience while PCs offer the bleeding edge for those willing to pay.

# 42 wrote:

Don't you mean your psp is more crippled now? The needless updates are what destroyed the psp and ps3 will be in for a hard road if they patch for only security reasons like the psp.
********************************************************

That is within the eye of the beholder. I love every update that has come with my PSP. The home brew stuff available is nice, don't get me wrong. But not worth the risk of 'bricking' a $300 unit (my price). Sure I would love to play some old NES or SNES titles on my PSP, but I'd much rather have the features added from the Firmware updates.

Yes I am aware of the 2.71 firmware emulator, but again, rather not take the risk of 'bricking' my PSP or the constant frustrations from having to research and troubleshoot issues caused by home brew software. Again, opinions are like a-holes... everyone has one and they all stink but your own. :)

Anyone think M$ will have enough balls to release their next next-gen system within the next 2-3 years (keeping par with the previous console's life cycle)?

Xbox 360 has been in development since 2003.

" So, does the PS3 support DirectX 10?"

No, it doesn't use DX at all. Instead it uses a modified OpenGL. The result being that games (edging photo-realistic quality) like Crysis will be easier to port to the 360 using its DX9.5 (for want of a better label), but it will be possible for both to run such games but they just won't look as good as their PC counterparts - in little under twelve months from now, what did Sony say about future proofing?

the main reason this is really news is because the xbox360 gets most of it's games through PC ports, and many 360 games get ported over to the PC. if the 360 can't easily support DX10, than it will be that much tougher to port PC games to the box.

Besides, consoles tend to have engines built from scratch to be unique, so a standardised set of tools would tend to make most of the games about the same thing. Sort of.. sorry, hard to put into words.

With the future of consoles by comparison with PCs, yes.. PCs will always have the edge in raw power, but consoles have more potential in the first year or two because of optimised code. I mean, Half-life two can run on the xbox (scaled down, I know), on a processor that is what, 4-5 years old? Try running half-life 2 on any PC from back then. That's why consoles are weird, they have locked in specs, but thy somehow keep getting more and more powerfull through optimization. Another reason Dx10 won't be too much of an issue unless they port games without optimization.

Well said epobirs...
You make some great and intelligent points.
I have to say it's kind of refreshing as opposed to the "monkey-fling-poop fanboys" that usually clutter joystiq.com, kinda wish they would go back to ign where they belong...

"Consoles are obsolete (wrt to their PC bretheren) the day they are announced. Not really news to me."

I guess some people would rather have a one-off cost of a couple-hundred bucks for a machine that will last them a life cycle of roughly 5 years than dump a few thousand dollars into a gaming PC which will also be "obsolete" as soon as you buy it, since newer, better, and more expensive technologies are perpetually arriving on the market, which btw you have to continually shell out the bucks for if you don't want to be laughed out of the elitist PC gaming circle.

Enjoy your never-ending cycle of upgrades which will end up costing you money orders of magnitude greater than what console gamers expend for a similar experience over the same period of time.

360 can't run Guitar Hero

AHAHAHUAHAUHUAHUEHAUEHAUUEHAEUAEA

I thought the E3 demonstration of Crysis was running on DX9? This isn't such a big deal anyway, the 360 still looks damn good.

Not surprising, since DX 10 hardware probably won't come out until mid 2007, and the Xbox 360 came out in November 2005, and its hardware was complete a little bit before then.

Also, it doesn't really need it too much, it already seems to work on an enhanced version of DirectX 9 written just for the 360. So its better than typical DirectX 9 but its not DirectX 10, its more of DirectX 9.5. Also, DirectX 9 is already doing many impressive games so I am sure it won't be too much of an issue.

Plus, this isn't an issue in consoles anyway, the PS3 uses the Nvidia G70 GPU, which in PCs is a DirectX 9 card (though its more than likely using OpenGL in the PS3), so the PS3's GPU won't have any advantages when it comes to technologies. Infact, I've seen several benchmarks showing the PS3 and Xbox 360 will be EXTREMELY close in technical capability.

Also, PC hardware will always be more advanced, because PC video cards evolve so darned fast, there can be a much more powerful video card in like six months (sometimes even sooner than that) and the top of the line video card you just got becomes mid-end. So its kind of a never-ending battle. This is also why PC video cards lose their value really quickly.