What Direct X for SOW?
 

Please accept my apology if this has been asked before. Does anyone know what Direct X SOW will be in? 10, 10.1, or 11? I have been slowly piecing my new computer together over the last 6 months in preperation for SOW. The only things I have not gotten are the components at the heart of the rig, namely the CPU, MotherBoard, and Graphics Card(bought dual channel DDR 3 becuase I know for sure I am going with AMD Phenom II or the new Intel Lynnfield). I am probably going to wait until the last part of this year or early next year for the new ATI 5870 and the rest, but prices on the radeon 4800 series are looking very attractive (4890 for less than $200 on New Egg!).

It sure is tough looking at what I have so far and having to wait to buy the main components, but it is going to be very much worth it the first time I push that throttle forward on what promises to be the greatest flight sim ever made. Your thoughts are much appreciated.

Open GL, like Il*2.

With support for Open GL from Ati drying up, it's looking like nVidia time to me. Unless anyone knows better.

The problem I get with OpenGL in Il*2 with recent Ati drivers (it didn't happen with older cards with older drivers) is that the buttons at the bottom of the screen disappear, as does the mouse pointer. I forgot about the buttons disappearning, so I went back to OpenGL to see what was wrong with it, and that was what it turned out to be. The buttons are still sort of there, if you can get the mouse cursor into the right place you can click them, but sometimes the cursor is flickery, but usually it completely disappears when you move it off the map above the buttons, which means you can estimate the position, and click around, but it's not what I want, DX may be slightly worse (lines on the map aren't quite right for one) but it's better than having to mess about like that at the end of every mission. If anyone has any fixes for that, it would be most appreciated.

As well as that, I get relatively bright (not flurescent or anything but not dark as a shadow would be) lilac shadowing on aircraft, and the famous if relatively infrequent multi-colour artefacts when guns are being fired.

I am sure all latest cards would be greatly supported, yes OPEN GL but as with IL2 it had an option for Direct X, besides Oleg couldn't affort to block out one type of brand seeing as Both Ati / Nvidia are huge.

Still more than a year to the estimated release so , if you're buying a card now it wouldn't be for SoW.

I'm not saying Oleg wouldn't support the cards, I'm saying the cards might not support Oleg.

If Oleg sticks with OpenGL as the preferred renderer, and open GL is abandoned by Ati, then there won't be much Oleg can do about that, sure we can hopefully run under DirectX but if that's not what the simulator is designed for then presumably it won't be quite as good. I can see that with all the versions of DirectX about (7, 8, 9.0a, 9.0b, 9.0c, 10, 10.1, 11) that must be a royal pain to deal with, but it does seem to be the case that OpenGL is being dropped.

I still think a release this year might happen.

If a release happen this year i'll go running down Beverly Hills Naked i promise, screaming anything you want.

More likely to be Open CL

But Im sure there's no need to panic, the new sim will be backwards and forwards compatible with open GL CL / DX9 10 11 12 13 14 etc etc.

ATI just demonstrated open cl on a Radeon 4000 gpu card at Game Developers Conference March 2009.

So they are not abandoning anything non Dx .

For a minute there you had me hopeful.

Wikipedia says OpenCL is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

That is, as I understand it, it's a way of using a GPU as a CPU, not using it for graphics processing. Ati have an OpenCL demo because they want to allow people to access their GPUs as Floating point processors, like nVidia's CUDA (I'm not sure from the Wikipedia page whether CUDA is accessable via OpenCL).

OpenCL isn't a graphics language like DirectX or OpenGL are. I'd like Ati to be convinced to wholeheartedly support OpenGL.

You would do best to read the discussion here to get an understanding of what's happening.

http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boa...643#Post256643

http://www.opengl.org/discussion_boa...&Number=245351