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Comment by quincunx | Hacker News Reader

MS has had a tendency to do things differently for the sake of doing things differently (eg. for instance clip-space range/w from 0..1 instead of -1..1) but I love the candor in this document:

"D3D9 and prior had a terrible Pixel Coordinate System where the origin was the center of the top left pixel on the RenderTarget"

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There are precision issues with -1...1. 0...1 is actually the right choice IMO.

I'm currently updating myself with Vulkan (which is mostly based on modern OpenGL). The Vulkan clip range is 0.0 to 1.0.

ARB_clip_control extension allows to use 1..0 range, improving precision: https://developer.nvidia.com/content/depth-precision-visuali...

> MS has had a tendency to do things differently for the sake of doing things differently

It's probably for the sake of "making sure it's hard to port".

E.g., .net in 2008 called "culture" a thing that has been referred to as a "locale" for at least 30 years at that point, with naming conventions and all. I find it extremely hard to believe that they were unaware of it -- yet, the vast majority of .net programmers I've known had no idea what "locale" was, and believed microsoft invented "culture".

It's not necessarily candor. Could just be people in the current team criticizing the decisions of previous team members.

Might be, but this is an official document. You don't usually find these type of statements in such documents, that's why I like it.

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