[fsloth]

"An open platform allows free choice of technologies to use it with."

Which are also made by companies just like Microsoft.

It's really hard to combine gaming enthusiasm (with the exception of retro gaming) with love of the 'free choice' and not be delusional.

The main reason: the GPU. There is very little value in having an open specification, if the implementation sucks. And the complexity of the graphics stack is such that nobody but huge monoliths that can focus lots of paid personnel to implement the GPU, implement the drivers, fix the drivers, fix the drivers, fix the drivers...

It's grueling, backbraking work to make a complete hardware based graphics stack.

Yes, there is MESA - so if software rendering suffices one can use more open options.

We can argue what do we mean by "gaming" of course. Solitaire, chess, tuxracer - yeah, I agree, free is very doable.

GTA v, Witcher 3 ( triple aaa titles) - you need a BigOrg to mind your graphics stack, of which there are only handfull on earth, of which Microsoft is one, and not worse as the others (if we limit discussion to games).

[shmerl]

> Yes, there is MESA - so if software rendering suffices one can use more open options.

Mesa has hardware accelerated implementation of OpenGL. You don't need "big org" to do it. But it surely helps if they put resources into that work.

> of which Microsoft is one, and not worse as the others (

It's worse than many others because their goal is not to improve the graphics stack, but to lock everyone into using MS systems.

[fsloth]

>> Yes, there is MESA - so if software rendering suffices one can use more open options. >Mesa has hardware accelerated implementation of OpenGL. You don't need "big org" to do it. But it surely helps if they put resources into that work.

The hardware specific driver is the more laborious thing to get correct. Well, OpenGL as well, but the driver is what I was after, not the specific API on top of it, and if the driver is buggy the OpenGL implementation on top can only try to patch things only so much.

>> of which Microsoft is one, and not worse as the others ( > It's worse than many others because their goal is not to improve the graphics stack, but to lock everyone into using MS systems.

I don't think there is any way MS can lock everyone into using their system.

I would claim MS has driven innovation in hardware accelerated realtime graphics by providing a stable and tested API at a time when OpenGL implementations were buggy and broken due to the messy work Khronos did with the standard and the way the implementations were done.

[shmerl]

> I would claim MS has driven innovation

Not really, especially recently. They were pretty slow (because OpenGL was even slower to evolve), and only woke up when AMD voiced their interest to open up Mantle (which became Vulkan). So AMD were the main innovator in the recent times, when graphics APIs are concerned.

[CyberShadow]

Sorry, you are talking about something else too.

My comment was about monopolies and how they creep into other fields through lock-in and proprietary technology which restrict choice. You have warped my comment into one advocating for a fully open platform stack, a strawman. At this point, why not also argue that the games are open source too? I mean, that would be nice, but it wasn't what I was saying.

> Which are also made by companies just like Microsoft.

And that's fine, as long as it doesn't come with strings attached such as "This technology shall only run on Microsoft Windows" or "All users of this technology, even open-source projects, must pay royalty fees".

[fsloth]

Sorry, - strawman was not intended. As a person with some experience in the graphics industry, the way I see it: if one uses hardware accelerated real time graphics capability, one is always effectively locking some parts of the rendering codebase in to some specific hardware platform. No matter what the API used to program the platform, you are effectively locked in to very few vendors. There really is no rational reason to highlight Microsoft as especially bad player in this market - on the contrary (as long as they are not the only game in town, of course).

[shmerl]

> There really is no rational reason to highlight Microsoft as especially bad player in this market - on the contrary (as long as they are not the only game in town, of course).

How are they a good player, if they could back Vulkan instead of pushing lock-in DX12, but they didn't? It's clearly bad.

[fsloth]

If they would actively block good Vulkan implementations on Windows - yes, that would be a dick move. Is that the situation, though?

[shmerl]

They actively block it on Xbox.

[fsloth]

Ok, fair enough. Although I don't see the benefit of opening multiple graphics API:s on a closed hardware platform that is the Xbox console.

[viraptor]

> The main reason: the GPU. There is very little value in having an open specification, if the implementation sucks

I don't know, maybe we should try. Currently the implementations suck, because there's no specification, not the other way around.

> And the complexity of the graphics stack is such that nobody but huge monoliths that can focus lots of paid personnel to implement the GPU, implement the drivers, fix the drivers, fix the drivers, fix the drivers...

Substitute GPU / graphics stack with general purpose OS. Sounds plausible, yet there are lots of people working on that huge monolith for free and getting paid.