When I was young, I was a bit jealous of consoles as they could run games that couldn’t run properly on my much more powerful PC. And then came DOS4GW. Suddenly, it seemed like programmers had finally access to the power of my machine and nothing will be the same ever since.
Doom, 1993
Today we desperately need a new DOS4GW paradigm. AMD released this summer a “low-end to mid-end” $150 processor which contains a quad-core CPU and 400 stream processors. To give you an idea the PS3 has an one-core CPU and 7 stream processors.
Also, PCs come today with a minimum of 4 gigs of RAM that is, eight times what the X360 has. And it’s the minimum.
I watched Carmack’s Quakecon keynote and I understand his frustration better. It’s not that Windows or DirectX are inherently bad, it’s just that they do too many things while taking priority over the game you try to run for various reasons.
We need some sort of DirectMetal so that the OS enters in über-compact mode, kills everything and gives the game full access to hardware. A lot of games don’t need that much of power but the point is to stop using programmers for optimization purpose (and stupid fixing issues) and more for creative, features purpose. It’s not just to access a tremendous amount of power that it would be great, it would also push people to try things, knowing that it would run smoothly. I don’t know maybe it’s just me, but it makes me cringe a bit to see developers sweating to optimize code so that some 3D -I didn’t say game- can run in a browser at 15 fps. Today, with the machines we have? Fuck me, this is ridiculous.
So:
– Full access to orders of magnitude more powerful machines compared to what we have now, without having to aim hardcore gamers either (remember, low-end mid-end processors).
– Performance scales better and is much more homogenous than what we have now with DirectX or SDL.
– Programmers regain freedom and they can once again have fun and create cool shit, leveling up skills for everybody.
– Designers can dream again and try to push things forward instead of staying in the comfort zone.
– If we have app stores, we shouldn’t be too concerned about security problems.
The only bad thing I see is that you wouldn’t be able to alt-tab to your browser to read the walkthrough. Yeah, less cheat!
So Microsoft, open source community, let’s do this.