2 hours ago, the incredible smoker said:

For the non believers : why do directx exists if dos was not better then windows for game programming back in the days.

Drawing such far conclusions is a tricky business.

One simple counter-argument is that DirectX obviously means that a second Microsoft product was used, which no doubt means more income for the company. Whether it was actually much better than whatever already exists isn't that relevant in these cases.

On 11/9/2017 at 10:09 AM, JoeJ said:

DirectX is mainly a abstraction to access GPU. DOS had this too, remember 3Dfx Glide.

It's easier to use DirectX than to write a software rasterizer, and today better spend your time on learning something else than software rasterization (except you have a good reason or you are Bruce Dell  )

It's also MUCH easier to work with Windows than with DOS. Remember those horrible close to metal tricks with VGA / EGA modes, Soundblaster vs. Gravis Ultrasound. Just annoying and nothing to learn at all.

On 11/9/2017 at 12:12 PM, Infinisearch said:

Its also easier to use DirectX than it is to write to the metal on different 3d hardware or even one piece of 3d hardware.

On 11/9/2017 at 6:54 PM, JTippetts said:

Before the ModeX days, in the days of the weird transition from Hercules/monochrome stuff, through CGA and EGA to VGA, it was kind of messy. To make your game work on as large a range of hardware as possible, you had to write a LOT of custom code paths.

7 hours ago, the incredible smoker said:

why do directx exists if dos was not better then windows for game programming back in the days.

That is basically why windows uses directx.

So what i mean : for windows without directx compared then its better to use DOS.

the end, all agree.

38 minutes ago, the incredible smoker said:

So what i mean : for windows without directx compared then its better to use DOS.

Not really because windows supports multithreading and multiple processors, DOS doesn't.  So if we limit ourselves to the CPU for processing on both DOS and windows then once again windows has the advantage.

51 minutes ago, the incredible smoker said:

So what i mean : for windows without directx compared then its better to use DOS.

the end, all agree.

No, we do not all agree.

Windows without DirectX is still very much usable. In fact, the parts of DirectX that aren't Direct3D are deprecated, so really "DirectX" nowadays means "Direct3D". I don't know of anyone using DirectInput, DirectSound was replaced with XAudio2 which is theoretically succeeded by WASAPI, and DirectMusic doesn't even have complete documentation available anymore!

Even if we didn't have Direct3D, we'd have OpenGL, Vulkan, and Mantle (on AMD cards). And this is just talking about hardware access APIs - never mind the support for multicore computing and virtual memory and bigger address spaces and other such nice things. Using a 32 (now 64-bit, for the most part) OS confers advantages beyond merely those provided by DirectX.

I'm a little fuzzy on what you think DOS does better, because from where I'm standing, running Windows 10 in November 2017, it does nothing better. I'm furthermore not sold on the relevance of this discussion to Quake, apart from "Quake originally used DOS" - which is true, but also meaningless, since it's been ported to multiple OSs since then, including Windows (twice!).

10 minutes ago, Oberon_Command said:

and virtual memory and bigger address spaces and other such nice things. Using a 32 (now 64-bit, for the most part) OS confers advantages

Thanks forgot to mention that.

edit -  related is also that starting with windows 95 a flat address space is used instead of segments.

On 11/4/2017 at 10:34 PM, Michael Davidog said:

yes, iirc today OpenGL/DirectX make a lot, but I feel that I need to know how it was done under the hood. Software rendering.

there a old book, the black art of 3d game programming,  https://www.amazon.com/Black-Art-Game-Programming-High-Speed/dp/1571690042