Microsoft's Wickham 'Shocked' If Carmack Doesn't Warm To DX10

Author: by Staff

Talking to Gamasutra, Microsoft's Director of Games for Windows Rich Wickham has responded to John Carmack's equivocal comments regarding DirectX 10, suggesting: "I will be shocked and amazed if id doesn’t build a DirectX 10 title some day... and I will suspect that it will be sooner rather than later." The comments came as part of a recent in-depth feature quizzing Wickham about Games For Windows Live, Windows Vista, and the recent push to further publicize the Games For Windows brand. Wickham was responding to a recent Game Informer interview with Carmack in which the id Software co-founder commented, when asked whether Quake Wars would be a DirectX 10 game: "There’s no massive pull for me for DX10. It would be more a question of if we don’t think we’re going to get done until Vista is broadly adopted, it might just save us development and support things to say it’s a DX10 game--but there’s no huge thing where we’re dying to use any particular DX10 feature. It would just more be a question about practically, is the market there where we can write off everything else? Quake Wars is definitely not DX10." In response, the Microsoft exec claimed to Gamasutra: "What I believe Mr. Carmack said was that he did not currently see a compelling reason to develop on DirectX 10... We obviously work with id, and a lot of id’s progeny." Wickham, confident that the company's approach will be vindicated in the short to medium term, went on to suggest: "Stay tuned... I will be shocked and amazed if id doesn’t build a DirectX 10 title some day... and I will suspect that it will be sooner rather than later."