Alex St. John: <paraphrase> only DX7 was good</paraphrase>

[Sunday]

Many call this guy: a father of DirectX, and he might be, but reading its lamenting in "Computer Power User" column I've got impression that this guy is foremost super egocentric, and one of those senior people that think of them self as the creators of the present reality, and on base of that they're biggest smartasses!

His column in the May issue of CPU is spreading on two pages and is, is… well indescribable in few words, so I'll just use the first one that crosses my mind: ridiculous!!
I'll give you just one quote:

From version 3. To 7.0 DirectX supported a 3D paradigm that lent itself to progressive hardware acceleration and general-purpose interactivity. It was very good at handling highly interactive environments with many moving objects and light sources, although there were distinct limitations to its potential realism.

3D chip makers wanted to improve on this so Microsoft made a radical change to Direct3D in DirectX 8 that for the first time introduced pixel and vertex shaders. Although we'll never know for sure, in retrospect I wonder if this architecture "advance" wasn't actually a major step backward. Pixel Shaders were a real-time implementation of a lighting effect in noninteractive movies.

Although theoretically improving the possible "realism" of a scene, using them placed severe limitations on the versatility of a 3D environment in real time. For example, to use pixel shaders, you had to rigidly define all the lights and light properties in a scene, which essentially shackled the truly dynamic lighting capabilities of DirectX 7. Only recently in later generations of Direct3D has some versatility of DirectX 7 been restored while preserving the benefits of enhanced realism associated with the use of pixel shaders"

As I wrote, this is just a part of "The Saint's" lamenting in this hilarious article… he goes on about the physics, and some other crap…

 

[digitalwanderer]

Any links? I'd like to read the whole thing.

 

[Sunday]

Any links? I'd like to read the whole thing.

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