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Katilian on 22 February 2008
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Played_Out said:
 

@ Katilian
So you don't think MS leverages it's market position to push new proprietary standards? Why do you think they created DX in the first place rather than encouraging an open standard? DX ensures MS retains a stranglehold on the computer games market as games cannot be easily ported, and PC gamers are therefore effectively forced to use Windows. Proprietary standards are the reason Windows has remained on top for so long (.doc specification?)


 Oh MS definitely does, don't get me wrong. DX10 though, while it might be being used as leverage, as I've mentioned requires an overhaul of the driver subsystem to support GPU virtualisation and process sharing. This makes it extremely difficult to port back to XP.

Is there anything else in Vista that is a new proprietary standard that I've missed?

  As for DirectX's inital creation, I actually think it is something that MS has done right. While it would be nice to have an open standard, at the time of DirectX's creation, there really wasn't anything similar. Remember that OpenGL is competing with Direct3D, not DirectX as a whole. How exactly do you expand on OpenGL to include input/sound/network/etc.. support? SDL is an attempt at this but even then it is still a wrapper around various subsystems (DirectX on Windows, Quartz on OSX, Xlib on Linux).

 Is there any genuine crossplatform equivilent to DirectX?