AMD Walks Back Comments On DirectX Performance Impact

After an interview in which he said DirectX was "getting in the way" of using the true power of PC graphics hardware, AMD GPU division worldwide developer relations manager Richard Huddy has re-stated the company's commitment to Microsoft's PC game creation standard. In an interview with technology news site CRN, Huddy said only a select few developers had expressed to him a desire to go around the current driver standards, including Battlefield developer DICE and Crysis developer Crytech. “It’s not something most developers want,” he said. “If you held a vote among developers, they would go for DirectX or Open GL, because it’s a great platform.” AMD senior director of ISV relations Neal Robison also pointed out to CRN that most developers have welcomed the stability and standardization that come with developing through DirectX. “It’s hard to crash a machine with DirectX, as there’s lots of protection to make sure the game isn’t taking down the machine, which is certainly rare especially compared to ten or fifteen years ago," Robison said. "Stability is the reason why you wouldn’t want to move away from DirectX, and differentiation is why you might want to." While developers can get more direct access to the graphics hardware by using an alternative to DirectX, such as Open CL, Robison said it takes a particular type of obsessive programmer personality to think they could replicate all of DirectX's features better on their own. Huddy pointed out that hardware makers and API makers like Microsoft are constantly putting pressure on each other to make sure both sides are continuing to make the best use of each others' technology. "AMD needs to innovate, as a gaming company and as a CPU company," Huddy said. "Microsoft needs to do the same thing. We’re making sure that the synergy between us is a highly cooperative one. If they were to say ‘graphics is a done deal’ that would be a big problem. They haven’t said that.”