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John Carmack, of DOOM, Wolfenstein, and Quake fame, has spoken out on the issue of Direct3D vs OpenGL in an interview with the folks at bit-tech. Check out the article here. Note that Carmack is still using OpenGL in his game engines because of cross-platform compatibility reasons, but prefers Direct3D’s more modern API.

It’s sad to see OpenGL in such a state of disrepair that even a contributor (id Software) to the specification denounces the standard.

P.S. Happy π day.

More news from this year’s Game Developers Conference shows some amazing next-gen graphics from Epic Games through their Unreal Engine. It’s certainly worth checking out the article at Tom’s Hardware right here.

It’s almost weekend, and time for a lighthearted post on the two realtime 3D computer graphics libraries that are available on Windows in 2011: OpenGL and Direct3D. The reason I mention the year is simply because of the fact that two years from now, this information will be as untrue as the Wikipedia article^* on this matter due to rapid hardware and software developments. But for now, let’s bash it out.

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Sandy Bridge is Intel’s new microarchitecture, slated for release in January of 2011. Sandy Bridge processors will effectively phase-out the current lineup of processors, based on the LGA 1366 socket, with processors fitting a brand new socket, LGA 2011.

While I understand the need for technology to move forward, and am an avid user of Intel CPUs myself, I can’t help but feel underwhelmed by the reviews, especially on the IGP (integrated graphics processor) front, the part that concerns me greatly.

The tech that Intel chose to use on the die is the HD 3000, and it’s little brother the HD 2000. Let’s hope it’s nothing like the GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) X3000 and family, the scourge of the entire IGP world. Please, Intel, please.

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Apparently, the DirectX team has had a blog since late April of this year it’s just not very popular I guess.

They’ve posted a shipload of information over the last couple of months, so if you’re like me and had no idea this existed, you’ll have quite some reading to catch up to. It’s mostly about Windows 7 and the new graphics APIs (Direct2D, DirectWrite, etc.) but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Yeah, I don’t have the DX11 logo yet…Today the August 2009 DirectX SDK was released on MSDN, strangely enough the August SDK was released in September.

This release contains the first official release of Direct3D 11 (RTM), which was previously only a technical preview. According to the release notes, this version of Direct3D 11 will only work on the RTM version of Windows 7, not on the RC and Beta versions. So I guess only vendors and MSDN subscribers will be able to develop software until Windows 7 hits the retail market.

There’s also the issue of pure Direct3D 11 hardware not being sold yet but that should be right around the corner if the SDK is here.

I don’t often recommend books, especially when it comes to DirectX/Direct3D. There are many monstrosities out there that should never have seen the light of day.

Once per week or so I browse a local Barnes and Noble hoping to catch a book I haven’t seen before. It rarely happens since their inventory is very stagnant, but still. A month or two ago I accidentally browsed the Graphics/Web section and found “Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 10″ by Frank D. Luna.

The title, publisher (Wordware) and cover were kind of off-putting so I almost didn’t buy it. But I’m glad I did since, in my case, it has become my number one DX10 reference. It’s compact, concise, always around my desk and well written so give it a shot if you have 30 bucks or so to spare.

Today Intel released it’s new issue of “Intel Visual Adrenaline” featuring a three page interview with Tom Forsyth about Intel’s upcoming Larrabee GPU, which is x86 based and fully programmable.

Click here to read the PDF, scroll down to page eight (8)

Larrabee will support a rasterization pipeline as well as raytracing but Forsyth mentions raytracing to be more of a technical feature than a mainstream implementation. Regardless of this, for graphics programmers this should be good as there will finally be a piece of hardware that actually supports realtime raytracing.

Direct3D as well as OpenGL will be supported in addition to the much anticipated programmable route, either through C++ or pure assembly, which should open up the card for people interested in parallel computing.

Sadly there’s no definitive answer from Forsyth on how many cores Larrabee will actually contain. I guess we’ll have to wait for that a bit longer.

PS, if anyone is at GDC listening to Abrash and Forsyth tomorrow, let me know what you got from it.