Aaaaaaaare you ready to platform war? AMD’s Richard Huddy has claimed that PCs are “at least ten times” more powerful than consoles, and blamed DirectX for inconsistent performance issues.
“It’s funny. We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it’s very clear that the games don’t look ten times as good,” Huddy told Bit-Tech. “To a significant extent that’s because, one way or another and for good reasons and bad – mostly good – DirectX is getting in the way. I certainly hear this [‘make the API go away’] in my conversations with games developers.”
At the moment, DirectX is an industry standard graphics API – it’s kind of impossible to develop for PC without developing for DirectX. Unless you’re the deviant John Carmack, anyway. Or the guys who did Amnesia: Dark Descent. Or anybody else who uses OpenGL instead.
“By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that’s going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all,” Huddy explains before anybody can ask difficult questions about OpenGL.
“If we drop the API, then people really can render everything they can imagine, not what they can see – and we’ll probably see more visual innovation in that kind of situation.”
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