Is DirectX Holding Back PC Game Development?

I found this interesting article over at Tested today that discusses the impact of development APIs on game development.  In the early days of computer games you had 2 basic directions you could go when building a new game, either OpenGL/Glide or MS DirectX.  After the fall of 3DFx and rise of "good" DirectX code it was only a matter of time before we saw games actually depend on DirectX version and performance.

Since the rise of DirectX we see games being released to all platforms at once.  This for the lack of another term indicates they all are almost direct console ports with very little time spent to actually show off what PC hardware is capable of.

In many ways, though, the benefits of APIs outweigh the disadvantages. Without APIs, devs would have to write all the low-level hardware code themselves, making sure their games worked on an enormous range of PC hardware. Additionally, saying PC games "don't look ten times as good" as console games seems to be bordering on a logical fallacy. Ten times the raw processing power doesn't necessarily indicate that the game should look ten times as amazing. As we draw closer to photorealistic graphics, generational improvements will become more subtle than ever.

While I am all for new technology it takes years before these new features make it into PC games and in an age where computer hardware is refreshing every 6-8 months by the time games come out to support the latest technologies the hardware it was built for is often obsolete.

Related Web URL: http://www.tested.com/news/is-directx-holding-back...