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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

That's great.. if you are on Windows. I get that Microsoft works on Microsoft-technology, but it really doesn't help adoption or global development as a whole. DirectX doesn't work anywhere except Windows PC's and the Xbox. That's no biggie for Microsoft, but it's bad for everyone else.

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AMD just announced their owm real-time ray-tracer based on Vulkan:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12552/amd-announces-real-time...

There is a value to having competition. My guess that if it works out and Nvidia and AMD have it implemented on silicon, then they will push to have those features accessible through a Vulkan interface.

I love open standards as much as the next guy but for something like this where the utility is still an open question, I'd rather than some just makes an implementation for just their technology. The alternative is that your open standard is full of half baked experiments and trimming a standard is a huge pain.

Yes to competition, but this isn't really that, this is plain vendor lock-in, and it is not really competing anywhere except within the Windows ecosystem itself, where it practically has a monopoly.

If DirectX were to be used on Linux and macOS, you'd have some real competition, but that is not the case.

> DirectX doesn't work anywhere except Windows PC's and the Xbox.

And most new phone chipsets. And a lot of old phone chipsets. And a lot of ARM-based single board computers. And a lot of non-Xbox consoles like the Switch have hardware support for DirectX...

DirectX is in a lot of places you would not expect.

What? All of those places have hardware support for DirectX, but none of them (barring Windows phones) actually have DirectX running on them.

iOS and Android both don't support DirectX, so the hardware technically being compatible is irrelevant, especially with Windows Phone now discontinued.

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