[...]Sweeney: I think Microsoft is doing the right thing for the graphics API. There are many developers who always want to program through the API - either through DirectX these days or a software renderer in the past. That will always be the right solution for them. It makes things easier to get stuff being rendered on-screen. If you know your resource allocation, you'll be just fine. But realistically, I think that DirectX 10 is the last DirectX graphics API that is truly relevant to developers. In the future, developers will tend to write their own renderers that will use both the CPU and the GPU - using graphics processor programming language rather than DirectX. I think we're going to get there pretty quickly.
I expect that by the time of the release of the next generation of consoles, around 2012 when Microsoft comes out with the successor of the Xbox 360 and Sony comes out with the successor of the PlayStation 3, games will be running 100% on based software pipelines. Yes, some developers will still use DirectX, but at some point, DirectX just becomes a software library on top of ... you know.