A few days ago, AMD GPU division worldwide developer relations manager Richard Huddy stated that DirectX is "getting in the way" of improving PC graphics, but today he affirmed that AMD is firmly committed to it.
Speaking to technology news site CRN, Huddy explained that only a handful of developers are interested in avoiding DirectX and coding directly to the graphics card. DICE, the developer behind Battlefield series and Crytek, the developer behind Crysis are some of those few.
"It's not something most developers want," Huddy admitted. "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 then added that DirectX's stability is the most important reason why developers prefer to stick with it. "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."
Huddy then noted that hardware makers such as AMD and API makers such as Microsoft are constantly putting pressure on each other to make sure that each side's products make the best use of the other side's.
"AMD needs to innovate, as a gaming company and as a CPU company," he explained. "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."