Which do you prefer: Vendor-based or uniform standards?

[Anarchist420]

I personally prefer vendor-based rather than Microsoft's uniform standards, by a small margin.

Microsoft's DX specs have gotten a lot better starting with SM4.1, but SM 2.0 (e.g., z-buffer limited to 24 bit, no requirement for w-buffer which a lot of games used back then) and 3.0 standards were weak (e.g., Z-buffer was still limited to 24 bit, no requirement for AA to work with HDR, no requirement for texture filtering) and SM4.0 wasn't perfect either, since it didn't require AA to work with deferred rendering.

I just think that if nvidia were allowed to work out all their own standards completely, then they would be better than MS's specs, while ATi would probably be a little bit worse.

 

[Lonyo]

You prefer vendor based why?
Because they will make it difficult to get games which work across multiple platforms?

Evidence shows that NV like having their own standards.
Evidence also shows that Intel is improving its integrated graphics quality.

Having a single (or two) open standards (DX and OGL) means that everyone can join the party assuming they can make the hardware.

We already had individual standards many years ago, and ended up with proprietary APIs and extensions, some of which thankfully died, some got incorporated into the standards.

I'm not saying that every gamer should care about Intel integrated graphic, but that wanting individual standards while focusing on a "2 party" system is short sighted and idiotic, not to mention that wanting different standards is stupid in and of itself.

And IMO, consoles hold back progression more than something like DX, so it's hardly like we would be light years ahead of where we are if we didn't have DX. That can also be shown by how little progress has been made by PhysX. NV bought it, made it NV only, and it's gone pretty much nowhere over the last 2 or 3 years since they had it. Having proprietary standards or adding extra stuff doesn't necessarily push things forwards as much as you might think.

 

[digitaldurandal]

I'm not saying that every gamer should care about Intel integrated graphic, but that wanting individual standards while focusing on a "2 party" system is short sighted and idiotic, not to mention that wanting different standards is stupid in and of itself.

I agree with you on everything except the quoted text.

Every PC gamer should care about IG. Why should we? Because the more powerful that IG gets the bigger the market becomes for PC games. Once IG is beating the xbox360 - then that is when we can expect for sales of games to increase.

Currently the problem is that people with IG do not buy many games because most of them will not run on their machine.

What we need is a better standard graphics to help push more games and more commitment to those games after the fact instead of release and forget for PC. We want to increase our market share so vendors pay more attention to us.

As far as vendor vs standard based. I do not see a single good reason to split the standards even more. I doubt either company wants to go through the process of recreating the wheel and I think it would hurt PC game and hardware sales to do it. I don't think its even a question. Open standards are what saved PC gaming years ago why would we switch back?