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TransGaming Support For DirectX 11?
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Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#1 - 2012-03-26 05:29:17 UTC
I'm expecting that CCP wouldn't have started this conversation if they hadn't checked with TransGaming already, but can we check that the TG wrapper around EVE Online will support DirectX 11 on Macs with appropriate video cards?

I currently have an 11" MacBook Air w/NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256 MB, and I'll shortly be getting whatever iMac Apple release in the pending refresh.

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Verite Rendition
F.R.E.E. Explorer
#2 - 2012-03-28 09:30:34 UTC
Transgaming and WINE in general are far away from supporting DX10+ as well as they support DX9. It doesn't help matters that DX10+ doesn't map nearly as well to OpenGL as DX9 does.

In any case I wouldn't be particularly worried. A DX11 client isn't going to cause the DX9 client to be discontinued any time soon. CCP would lose the still disturbingly sizable XP market along with Vista/7 machines with ancient DX9 hardware and/or netbooks.
Vorlain
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#3 - 2012-03-29 04:32:59 UTC
I am a little concerned that CCP Solomon has said in the Tessellation thread;

The Trinity rendering abstraction work we are undertaking at the moment will essentially make the engine API agnostic (DX11 is a rendering API). Theoretically this means we could build Trinity up to support both Direct X and OpenGL. This is a massive, theoretical could, there are no plans to support OpenGL for the next year or beyond.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1016223#post1016223

do I take that to mean CCP plans to drop support of OSX and Linux users?
Mara Rinn
Cosmic Goo Convertor
#4 - 2012-03-29 04:58:57 UTC
Vorlain wrote:
do I take that to mean CCP plans to drop support of OSX and Linux users?


No.

At present, EVE runs on the Mac using Direct X emulation as provided in TransGaming's version of cider (or whatever it's called in the Mac version). Thus being rendering API agnostic would EVE to send drawing instructions to an underlying OpenGL API, which would require far less work from TransGaming's engine since it would be translating Windows OpenGL calls to Mac OS X OpenGL calls, which is far, far easier than converting Direct X to OpenGL.

Thus the rosy future for Mac OS X and Linux is an EVE client which runs faster due to far less API conversion being done, and ideal has fewer graphical glitches due to corner cases where EVE exploits a particular feature of DirectX which doesn't map cleanly to OpenGL.

Having no plans to support OpenGL in the near future means that we won't be going to the happy place for Mac OS X and Linux users soon, but EVE should be continuing more or less on the present course until such migration to happy place happens.

At least, that's my take on it. I'm not a DirectX or OpenGL programmer.

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Ivana Twinkle
Viziam
Amarr Empire
#5 - 2012-03-29 11:57:02 UTC
I would prefer they got the mac client running properly before looking at dx11
Shroomazon
Sons Of 0din
Commonwealth Vanguard
#6 - 2012-03-30 10:01:21 UTC
In all seriousness, I've just packed in doing anything big on the Mac client and bit the bullet and did a dual boot. It's amazing how much smoother it runs, even though I have it on higher settings.