Linux just got Direct3D 9 support by the Gallium3D component which is used by the radeon hd and the nouveau open source drivers.
They are going to use native D3D in wine instead of an translation layer which should increase performance and decrease render errors when using wine.
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-dev/2013-July/041900.html
Nice, let's just hope it doesn't go the same way as the linux native DirectX 10/11 state tracker that was developed a couple of years ago but noone wanted it and it disappeared in oblivion.
Games need to start being made in OpenGL. this Microsoft DirectX API nonsense needs to stop. Not to mention with a few SDKs OpenGL has hardware level access to the GPU.
the D3D 10/11 state tracker apparently never worked and that's why it disappeared. I also hope that this will improve wine and make it easier to play all the games on linux.
Games need to start being made in OpenGL. this Microsoft DirectX API nonsense needs to stop.
I fully agree that games need to adopt OpenGL and DX is a very bad choice for a new project, however there are still many games out there which sadly use DX and we need to make sure they run better on linux. OpenGL and OpenCL should always be prefered over DX and CUDA.
Not to mention with a few SDKs OpenGL has hardware level access to the GPU.
This doesn't sound right at all.
I'm trying the new wine release this weekend, might take a look at the code of the D3D9 state tracker also, maybe something is already working.
I don't really feel that the D3D state trackers are necessary, because I don't feel GNU/Linux is for everyone. I push people to use linux and open source in general all the time, and I hope they get it and do something with it, but at the same time I'm really really tired of the whole linux v. windows thing, in that sense that every time linux comes up, it's in relation to windows, and I find that unfair, because it pulls linux down to something it is not.
In my opinion, a lot of users wouldn't benefit from switching to GNU/Linux, because they would want it to be a consumer product like windows, and they would just end up with some bloated spyware-enabled distro anyways, and probably freak out because they don't know what to do unless they can pay some big company to tell them what to do, whether that be microsoft or canonical, or even valve for that matter. So I don't think linux needs a D3D9 state tracker, hell I don't even think linux needs wine. Linux is perfectly fine as it is without native windows applications compatibility as far as I'm concerned. I truly don't have a problem running windows for the windows games I play as long as they continue to play in anything before Windows NT 6.2, and I'm just using linux for everything else, because windows is not even a contender for everything else I need, I haven't even considered using windows for work or productivity or tinkering with fun technology stuff since 1996. For me, windows is like a software console to play the windows games I like, and, before Darktable 1.2, to run Adobe Lightroom 3.6. As with so many long time linux users, I don't want to adapt to the limitations someone else has put on anything, and that's the bottom line, linux gets things done just the way I imagine it, it's not even about whether or not linux does things better than windows for me, it's the only tool I need, and it's free and I can change it or help other people change it to get what I want, I can implement my own ideas exactly as I want to, and don't have to wait or pay a fortune or put up with crap to get a half baked limiting solution that causes a lot of concern for security and productivity, I want to make money and still have a private life, so I use the most efficient tool to accomplish that. I do hope that the new generation of games uses the advantages of the much more capable linux platform, because I like elaborate games with crazy graphics, but if they don't, that's OK for me too, games are only good for so many hours of entertainment, and the games I play the most are open source games that are native to linux, because I can for instance prepare a Sauerbraten LAN party by in-game creating a cool map with very simple and efficient tools using textures from pics I took from the medieval castle I visited that day with my smartphone, and I only have half an hour to make the map because I also have to get the barbecue going and find a nice DRM-free concert video to stream to my linux TV from my linux smartphone as background entertainment, and we're good for a night of social game-based real-life entertainment. And that is 90% of my entire gaming activity. And if I game with my wife or with kids, that's on playstation 2 or wii, because it's convenient for gaming together, and the nintendo titles are what kids want, and those are wii only. And if I game alone, which is not so much to be honest, I just start up windows, and although windows gets on my nerves with all the usual crap people have to put up with, I only have to put up with it for very limited time, and I don't care what others use to be quite frank. As I said, windows is like a software xbox to me, and I don't want my xbox on my linux install. I can't think of a single use scenario where a better wine or a D3D state tracker could improve my linux experience, unless it outperforms windows for some slower framerate games like Metro, if I would want to play those. And that's also the only case scenario I can think of that would lift the state tracker and wine to a mainstream thing: if the performance would be better than in windows, which is possible, but will require a lot work, while the games already run fine in windows, so I don't know whether there is much benefit to that, unless of course it becomes a thing for Gabe Newell to be able to play legacy games on the steam box without taking a performance loss, but would he invest into technology that enables people to play games they already bought, rather than in selling them new stuff, I don't know, maybe to make the platform more accessible...
So great if wine and the D3D9 state tracker work, but I don't really care. And I think something like that is at least part of what happened to the D3D10/11 state tracker a couple of years ago, as the code rotted because not that much linux users saw any real benefit in their use scenario.
I understand what you are saying. Personally I don't even have a copy of windows anymore and I also don't want to buy another hard drive just to install Windows on my machine. Dualbooting also messes hard with my workflow and I don't want to care about yet another system. Because of that, I have to use wine for everything which doesn't run natively on linux but on windows. There are super cool old games out there which I love to play and wine makes it possible to do so but there are often render errors and I hope that the new state tracker will improve this.
I know that linux doesn't *need* it. It's just great for everyone who loves to play games and doesn't have or doesn't want windows.
edit: I just noticed that you are using linux since I've been 1 yo. This is weird :p
Totally but it should be that they go back to as Open GL was once ahead of DX before MS got their claws in grrr.