‘Vista blows’ says DirectX creator

Posted at: 11:05am 25th March 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Alex St John, one of the three engineers who developed DirectX, says he now wants to ‘slap’ Microsoft

One of the creators of Microsoft’s original DirectX specification, Alex St. John, has hit out at Windows Vista, saying that it’s holding back PC gaming.

When the guys at ExtremeTech asked if he saw DirectX 10 as a viable gaming platform, St. John replied that: ‘There are several, complex answers to this. First, Vista blows. DirectX came with it…you just want to slap Microsoft and go, "What the hell were you thinking?"’

Along with Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom, Alex St. John created DirectX for Microsoft in the first place back in 1995, but he now thinks that the resource-heavy OS is preventing PCs from being able to compete with consoles in the gaming industry.

‘The PC's a fantastic gaming platform,’ said St. John, ‘superior to anything anybody's every imagined, superior to every console, and Microsoft and Intel put crap in the PC that make it not so good. And so if you see a PC that is not denuded by things interfering with it by Microsoft and Intel, in many cases like an Intel crappy graphics chip, or a bloated Vista operating system, it's a fantastic gaming platform.’ St. John reckons that if ‘the mass market PCs that everybody buys did not come with these crappy graphics chips on them and was not burdened with a fat OS, that the PC would be a larger contiguous gaming platform than all the next-generation consoles combined.’

St. John also sees the restrictions of current graphics chips as a problem with PC gaming in the future, and thinks that Intel’s future strategy with Larrabee using x86 cores could have a lot of merits, as could Intel and AMD's forthcoming CPUs with integrated graphics.

Intel and AMD are ‘producing next-generation CPU/GPUs that are hybridised,’ noted St, John, saying that they could ‘have the kind of abilities where the CPU and GPU could, theoretically, produce real-time ray-traced worlds with highly realistic physics and environmental interactions all happening in tandem on the CPU.’ He described the current situation as ‘the end of PC and console gaming as we knew it, it's gonna be something new from here on out.’

Would you have bought Windows Vista if you could have had DirectX 10 on Windows XP? Could a ‘bloated’ OS really be holding back PC gaming, or is Alex St. John just nit-picking? Let us know your thoughts.

Read the full interview here.