CoH and 163.11 beta

HardWarrior

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Jan 26, 2004
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I must admit that I was starting to wonder how much DX10 would add to the game. After all, sort was bolted on to an existing game, and the DX10 patch for CoH was reported by many as being a performance killer. The performance issue seems to have been squashed by 163.11 beta. What was once a visually stunning game is much moreso now, and without the game-killing performance lag that was present.

 

HardWarrior

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Originally posted by: postmortemIA
Nice intro! But you haven't described what is that you got better with Dx10.

Sorry. ;) Far more detailed textures, as well as ambient debris which makes those textures come alive. Like I mentioned, even with this extra boost in visual appeal, performance now is as smooth as butter, on my rig at least. I was starting to think that DX10 wasn't as hot as MS sold it as being, but if the benefits I see in CoH translate into FPS's, we're in for a real treat.

 

Noema

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Feb 15, 2005
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The game does look quite a bit better on DX10, specially lighting and textures.

However, even with 163.11 the game is pretty much unplayable on my 8800GTS 640MB at 1680x1050 with DX10. Even though the new drivers did increase performance (went from avg. 21 to 32fps in the performance test), minimum frame rate is horrendous, sometimes dropping to 4 or 3. Sure, lowering the settings helps, but then, if I set them too low, the game starts to look worse than in DX9, and in DX9 I average over 70fps. I'm sure a 8800GTX or Ultra can handle it, but for the rest of us, DX10 is not an option yet.

I've already given up playing DX10 games on my GTS.
 

HardWarrior

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Jan 26, 2004
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Well, at least the gulf between you and DX10 has gotten smaller. All it takes for you now is faster hardware. I really didn't think that there was that large a difference between a GTX and a GTS.
 

Noema

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Feb 15, 2005
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To the game's credit: It does look mind-blowingly awesome in DX10 mode. The lighting. The particles...I'd never seen better clouds of dust, ever, in a game. And the textures are fantastic. They really seem to have depth, as opposed to the strechtech, deformed bitmaps we see in most other games up close.

I'm playing a night mission (with Paratroopers, to disable some German rockets) and the shadows and lightning are incredible, some of the best I've seen.

If I turn off AA and use medium shadows, I can get avg. 40fps with DX10 at 1680x1050, which is very playable. It just gets a bit sluggish when moving the camera around.

I'd post some pics but for whatever reason I can't seem to be able to capture screenshots when playing in DX10.
 

HardWarrior

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That pretty much sums it up! :) It's great to see DX10 finally deliver.

The sad thing, for me at least, is that SupCom won't get the same treatment. When GPG decided to kill the DX10 patch, the forum mods (GPG) let the place turn real nasty for people who didn't take kindly to being fibbed too. One of the common retorts was that DX10 wasn't worth it anyway, and besides, how could SupCom POSSIBLY look any better.

:laugh: DX10! :thumbsup:
 

aka1nas

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Aug 30, 2001
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In SupCom, I don't see what the point would really be as you would spend all of the time zoomed out too much to look at the realistic pretty lighting reflecting off your highly-detailed units. :p
 

HardWarrior

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Originally posted by: aka1nas
In SupCom, I don't see what the point would really be as you would spend all of the time zoomed out too much to look at the realistic pretty lighting reflecting off your highly-detailed units. :p

With all due respect, we don't all play SupCom the same way as you do.

 

imaheadcase

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May 9, 2005
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Soft particles in CoH is fantastic,when a building is falling the dust actually interacts with surroundings, like tanks moving thought them it "swirls" around the tanks.

I don't know what other poster is talking about, its very playable on 8800GTS, I play on 24 inch Dell monitor and gameplay is smooth
 

HardWarrior

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From what I understand, the inherent smoothness is a facility of the way DX10 handles graphics manipulation:

From the Crysis forum

It seems that a lot of people here are pesimistic.
Maybe you forgot that unified shader means shaders can be utilized as needed, wich means NO MORE stalling.

And believe me, effects can be done much much faster & efficient, 6-8 times faster isn't just random marketing **** for noobs. (MS's gotta pay me for saying this)

Oh you want an example?
Cube Mapping in DX10. In DX9 generating 1 cubemap requires 6 passes (for all 6 sides), while in DX10 all 6 sides of the cubemap can be generated in only 1 pass, with the use GS and render target array. (MS CubemapGS sample)
Imagine the speed gain if you have many objects to be cubemapped.

And the DX10 skinning I told you about in previous post, stream-out can really up the fps on multiple pass rendering. (MS skinning10 sample)

One traditional problem with GPU skinning was that if multiple passes needed to be performed on an object, the object needed to be skinned once for each pass. Take, for example, a scene with 3 shadow mapped light sources and a skinned character. To generate shadows for each of the lights the character needs to be drawn 3 times, once from the point of view of each light. (NOTE: Amplifying and streaming geometry to multiple render targets using the GS could also help aleviate this problem.) This would require that the Vertex Shader skin the character 3 times. The unfortunate reality is that this is two times too many. We really want to skin the character once and save this transformed character to use for the remainder of the frame. That way, if we had a scene that required 10 passes, the character wouldn't need to be skinned 10 times.

Fortunately, Stream Out allows us to do just that. Direct3D 10 allows the sample to skin the character once and stream the results out to a buffer in video memory. Then, for the remainder of the passes, the application just uses the pre-skinned vertices. For a character that may take 10 passes to render, this is 9-fold savings in vertex processing.

This sample does not render multiple passes, but instead renders the character multiple times. It's the same problem, just stated differently. When Stream Out is disabled, the application skins the character each time it renders it. However, when Stream Out is enabled, the skins the character once, saves the results via Stream Out, and renders the multiple characters using the pre-skinned geometry.

^ actual, real proof; denial would be just stupid.

Not just cubemapping or skinning, everything will be faster if the programmer can well utilize the new features of DX10.

I believe Crytek is really damn good at this.
 

MarcVenice

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Soft particles are indeed super amazing. I saw it first on a dx10 trailer from World In Conflict, it's no longer dust clouds and such acting is if there are no other objects in the world. I tried it myself in Vista with my 8800gts, and it worked like a charm. There's a lot of marketing hype around dx10, but this is a big improvement if you ask me.
 

Noema

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Feb 15, 2005
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Originally posted by: imaheadcase


I don't know what other poster is talking about, its very playable on 8800GTS, I play on 24 inch Dell monitor and gameplay is smooth

It is playable, as I stated later. I just had to tweak the settings a bit.

I play with no AA and get very nice frame rates at 1680x1050.

 

Noema

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Feb 15, 2005
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Okay; here are some caps of CoH in DX10. Screenshots were originally taken at 1680x1050; rescaled to 1024x640.

Running at highest settings with no AA and x16AF.

These are cut scenes rendered in real time with the game engine; I particularly like the shadows from the canopy and foliage. This scene ran relatively smooth, just a bit choppy here and there when the camera did some long pans.

1
2
3

I'll try to post pics of the same scene in DX9 later.

 

Molondo

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Sep 6, 2005
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gonna try out the drivers.
EDIT: not sure what happened. I installed the drivers, and it restarted automatically and it was doing funky stuff. It went into cycle where it would restart. I reseted it normally and now its running.

Driver version: 7.15.11.6311 ..??
 

HardWarrior

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Jan 26, 2004
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Yup, that's the version I have installed. You do remember that this driver is for the 8xxx series only, right?