A informative read for DX10

[Regs]

For those who know little about what maybe coming soon...

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6143883/p-4.html

 

[MBrown]

Interesting.

 

[Stoneburner]

6-8 times performance increase due to greater efficiency? YAY! Between this and the bridge I bought last week life couldn't be better.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Stoneburner
6-8 times performance increase due to greater efficiency? YAY! Between this and the bridge I bought last week life couldn't be better.

They've been holding back that much performance? No way that is possible...

 

[BassBomb]

probably UP TO , thus happen in a select case, real world likely very little

 

[DeathReborn]

Originally posted by: BassBomb
probably UP TO , thus happen in a select case, real world likely very little

Select case = Halo 2 I bet.

 

[BFG10K]

I'd probably say they've picked the API path that provides the most bottlenecked scenario.

In any case I have no doubts that Vista will still be faster than XP to a certain extent.

 

[mindless1]

DirectX 10 will increase game performance by as much as six to eight times. Much of that will be accomplished with smarter resource management, improving API and driver efficiencies, and moving more work from the CPU to the GPU.

What a great idea, since we all know the typical user has a 500Mhz CPU and a FXGTLXR99999-Dlx Quad Crossfired-SLI video card array. Not. I suspect What MS is going to be doing is trying to offload some of the bloat of the OS to the video card so it seems like less of a pig of an OS. Then all involved will only tell you about select performance gains, never the whole picture. Marketing 101- trick them into thinking they need what they don't.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

I love the bit that says "If this is DirectX 9, imagine how Unreal Engine 3 games will look in DirectX 10". ROFL!

 

[Cooler]

Originally posted by: HamburgerBoy
I love the bit that says "If this is DirectX 9, imagine how Unreal Engine 3 games will look in DirectX 10". ROFL!

If its not coded for Driect X10 then it will not be any better or could be worse as the code could be done via software emulation.

 

[letdown427]

I think it's more we all hope that it won't be a 6-8times better performance, as otherwise, all our stuff will be redundant if it doesn't support dx10 or d3d10 whatever.

If they're going to offload stuff from cpu to gpu, will they have the intelligence to check the system first? Maybe if someone has just upgraded to a quad core processor, but haven't quite updated their grahpics card yet, they might want to instead have a couple of cores ofloading gpu work when they game. I don't know how feasible that is, but it'd make sense, would be like giving your gfx card a big core clock boost. Well, it would seem that way, I don't know enough about how they work to really comment further I guess.

Programmers are still going to have to program games so they're backwards compatible with DX9 anyway, and if DX10 is so completely different, then their dream of making life easy for game developers is a bit moot for a good couple of years at least. And then there'll be DX11 and so on anyway. A lot of non-bleeding edge enthusiasts might even skip dx10 altogether. Meaning they'd only be programming dx10 for the 1% of bleeding edge sli'd 8xxx users, and the casual new PC buyer, who probably won't have the performance to take advantage of it anyway. Hmm.

Even I'm bored of this waffling now.....

 

[BenSkywalker]

They've been holding back that much performance? No way that is possible...

There is a serious issue with the way DX has handled certain types of geometric data that has created an enormous bottleneck. This has remained in place as it doesn't become a serious issue until you are dealing with large loads of small geometric areas(trying to word it as simply as possible).

In terms of what you can expect- considerably more complex models at much higher levels of performance. Take a look at something like Fight Night Round 3 on the 360 and it makes any character models on the PC look extremely antiquated by comparison- this is partly due to limitations of DX and DX10 will remove this issue.

 

[F1shF4t]

If they finaly made DX as optimised as on consoles it would be great, i mean how many comps with the same spec as the xbox can play say halo even remotely close to what the xbox can.
If they finaly fixed all that up it would be seriously sweet. And hopefully this new efficiency can be used by currewnt dx cards also. But i guess we'll see whan it come out

 

[stelleg151]

Thanks OP. Wasnt as exciting as I was hoping for though, seems like DX10 is really just integration of Vista GUI capabilities along with performance optimization of DX9.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Originally posted by: HamburgerBoy
I love the bit that says "If this is DirectX 9, imagine how Halo will look in DirectX 10". ROFL!

Fixed.

 

[A5]

Originally posted by: Dark Cupcake
If they finaly made DX as optimised as on consoles it would be great, i mean how many comps with the same spec as the xbox can play say halo even remotely close to what the xbox can.
If they finaly fixed all that up it would be seriously sweet. And hopefully this new efficiency can be used by currewnt dx cards also. But i guess we'll see whan it come out

Well, if you set Halo to 640x480 on High settings, then you can see how your comp compares to an Xbox (IIRC, Halo 1 didn't have any HD support - I may be wrong though)

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: A5

Originally posted by: Dark Cupcake
If they finaly made DX as optimised as on consoles it would be great, i mean how many comps with the same spec as the xbox can play say halo even remotely close to what the xbox can.
If they finaly fixed all that up it would be seriously sweet. And hopefully this new efficiency can be used by currewnt dx cards also. But i guess we'll see whan it come out

Well, if you set Halo to 640x480 on High settings, then you can see how your comp compares to an Xbox (IIRC, Halo 1 didn't have any HD support - I may be wrong though)

Halo on XB has support for "EDTV", not HDTV, so I think its 480p (640x480). Halo 2 is the same (480p), I think.

 

[akugami]

Tim Sweeny 2-4x increased texture usage in games by offloading the textures to virtual memory or system memory? They kid right? I've seen the performance of those video cards that offload some of the things stored traditionally in the video cards RAM to the system memory and the performance penalty is not pretty. It's doable and on a low end system it doesn't matter but on a higher end gaming rig it seems like it might look pretty but incur a huge penalty performance wise. I guess I'll just have to see it to believe it.

Performance increase of 6-8 times. I don't doubt it for a minute...for limited features. However, an overall performance increase of 6-8 time? Don't believe it for a minute. It's like the overclockers and their overclocked RAM. Sure, Sandra may show them with 2x the memory bandwith, performance, etc but in real world testing and usage. The performance increase is small. Not saying it's not noticeable, just very small.

It seems like they are putting an effort into making the API's more efficient and faster and that's a great thing. However, it doesn't seem like graphically DX10 is going to be heads and tales better than DX9. They even state it's mostly an incremental step up from DX9.

 

[Regs]

It's all in the programming of the software. For instance , look at linux compared to windows, and you can see a huge difference in performance. It's just has been so long for updated software for games other than Direct X and video card drivers people have forgot that performance is obtained between both the software and hardware.

 

[orangat]

Is dx10 only implemented in vista?? Even if the performance increase on only 2x instead of 6-8x, this would be an unavoidable upgrade.

 

[RobertR1]

Originally posted by: orangat
Is dx10 only implemented in vista?? Even if the performance increase on only 2x instead of 6-8x, this would be an unavoidable upgrade.

Correct. DX10 is only Vista native and will not run on XP.

 

[orangat]

Dang. That means I would have to upgrade from win2k.
A 6-8x performance increase is a must've and Microsoft has every gamer by the balls.

 

[Munky]

Originally posted by: orangat
Dang. That means I would have to upgrade from win2k.
A 6-8x performance increase is a must've and Microsoft has every gamer by the balls.

That's what MS wants you to think. Of course, by the time DX10 actually becomes available, you'd need a DX10 card, and the r600 will probably provide a big boost just by itself, not from DX10. But I dont believe the API by itself will give you anywhere even as good as 2x performance increase in actual games. And hearing about all the new "security" features of Vista, I may not even upgrade to it at all.

 

[akugami]

I'll upgrade to Vista when Service Pack 1 comes out for it. Basically most of the beta testing will have been done by all the early adopters at that point. I didn't upgrade to XP until SP1 and I don't plan to upgrade to Vista until SP1.