Direct3D State Tracker Will Not Be Open-Source

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Direct3D State Tracker Will Not Be Open-Source

Zack Rusin of VMware announced the other day that they are working on a DirectX 10/11 state tracker. This caused quite a discussion in our forums and now Zack has clarified his remarks...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=Nzk3NA

[Apopas]

So no Direct3D to Linux... what a pity...

[waucka]

Hm. Not that much of a surprise. Still...VMWARE, I AM DISAPPOINT.

I agree with Zack, though: we really should support OpenGL. Therefore, I for one will not purchase any games that are tied to Windows.

[mbouchar]

Do they have a deal with Microsoft to have some NDA documentation of the Direct3D API to help with their implementation?

If so, then this explain why the state tracker cannot be open-sourced

[marek]

So no Direct3D to Linux... what a pity...

Not true. Joakim Sindholt is working on the open source Direct3D 9 state tracker _for Linux_ (the VMWare's one works only on Windows) and I think it's a matter of time until someone else starts working on other versions of Direct3D.

[wswartzendruber]

So is Windows considered its own Winsys?

[waucka]

Isn't a Gallium3D state tracker supposed to be OS-independent? Since the D3D state tracker Zack is talking about is Windows-dependent, I suspect it contains all sorts of badness.

[Ragas]

If someone wants to have an open source dx tracker he could build it ... and it's not said, that vmware won't opensource this driver after a while ... when the commercial benefit of closed source is gone they have no need or interst to keep it closed.

[rohcQaH]

Since the D3D state tracker Zack is talking about is Windows-dependent,

it's not, but D3D-apps are windows-dependant in ways that gallium cannot solve. Hence it'd be absolutely useless to run the D3D state tracker on linux. Even Wine doesn't want one.

Still, closed source? I guess they're afraid that virtualbox/KVM/others use G3D for 3d-accelerated windows guests, thus stealing vmware's new killer feature. That's only fair after vmware spent all the money, but still sad.

[mbouchar]

Direct3D is a closed source library on top of a hardware driver. ATI and nVidia are implementing a driver that is used by the library. A Direct3D state tracker would probably not re-implement the complete Direct3D library, so this state tracker would be windows only.