AMD: DirectX is holding games back
 

AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy, has made a remarkable statement.

According to the man, Microsoft's DirectX is actually holding back game performance on PC. In fact, it's DirectX that's making that games on consoles don't look SO much worse than games on PC (next to the fact that often developers just make ports of console games for PC):

'It's funny,' says AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy. 'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.' Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is: 'Make the API go away.'

'I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers,' he says, 'and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all.'

http://www.fragland.net/news/AMD-Dir...es-back/25609/

he might want to clarify that DX9 is holding back DX ;)
since consoles are stuck at DX9 and they make up 80% of sales, if you do multiplatform, making sure games on 80% look good enough will give you more revenue and profit, than dedicating another dev team to make a PC version of your game.