Huddy: AMD "committed to supporting" DirectX, previous comments were exaggerated
Richard Huddy, AMD's GPU division and worldwide developer relations manager, has said the firm is committed to supporting Microsoft's DirectX and that his comments made regarding the API last week were taken out of context and exaggerated.
Speaking with CRN along with AMD's senior director of Independent Software Vendor relations Neal Robison, Huddy said only a minute number of extremely high-end developers like DICE want to bypass Microsoft’s API.
“The [Bit-tech] interview started off being about Open GL, and the way APIs are developed,” said Huddy "Obviously there’s pressure from Microsoft on hardware vendors to develop DirectX in a variety of ways. We spend a great deal of time getting feedback from game developers in the early phase of our hardware development, for products that are two or three years away from going to market.
“We’ve received an increasing number of requests from some game developers to get around the limitations of the API. The problem is that games have converged on a particular kind of solution for a particular kind of hardware, either the Direct X API or Open GL. It’s not something most developers want. If you held a vote among developers, they would go for DirectX or Open GL, because it’s a great platform.”
“We saw some of the chaos before Direct X coalesced the industry,” added Robison. “In the past there were all kinds of APIs developers had to worry about.”
“Every single hardware vendor had to worry about producing their own API, or mimic another vendor’s API,” said Huddy. “But there are game developers who would very seriously consider tuning their code for a particular piece of hardware.
“Direct X provides a highly stable platform. It’s hard to crash a machine with Direct X, as there’s lots of protection to make sure the game isn’t taking down the machine, which is certainly rare especially compared to ten or fifteen years ago. Stability is the reason why you wouldn’t want to move away from Direct X, and differentiation is why you might want to.”