DirectX 11.2 for Windows 8.1 and Xbox One only

[Kenmitch]

What's held back? It can be done in the driver as software only and until I see any evidence that is makes any difference I wouldn't be tossing out doom and gloom for Nvidia.

Doom and gloom for NVidia?

My response to him was over his comment about how it would be unfair for GCN to have a hardware accelerated version.

I see nothing unfair about letting tier 2 hardware support run on GCN desktop cards....After all it's a feature waiting to be used.

Time will tell if it matters one way or the other so no need to get your nipples twisted....Yet

 

[Tuna-Fish]

I don't see any AMD specific features, nor would I ever suspect microsoft of ever allowing that. DirectX was designed to support a wide variety of platforms, by microsoft's definition DX is meant to be for the PC but configuration agnostic.

DX has supported plenty of features when only one of the vendors had them. Render-to-texture comes to mind first. It just means that one vendor's cards will be one version behind, and support the full feature set in next gen. DX picking to implement a feature means that MS has decided that the feature in question is a winner, and the other manufacturer has to copy it.

In this case, since it's purely a performance feature that can be emulated in software (but much slower), they went with a system where all GPUs can support DX11.2, but some will be slower at it.

Can the PC even use system memory for texturing?

That's not quite what Tiled Resources/AMD PRT does. Basically, the idea is to use a small texture atlas to texture from, and maintain the rest of the textures somewhere else. The big win doesn't come from shuffling memory pools, but the fact that texture compression methods are awful compared to modern image compression (for example, jpeg). The reason for this is that texture compression must support random access ("I want this pixel here, and nothing else"), and DCT images can only be decompressed linearly. In practice, DCT is more than an order of magnitude more space-efficient than the best texture compression at a similar quality level.

So, textures of things near the player are kept in the small atlas, and the ones not near him are stored in a more compressed form. This can be used to either deliver much more texture quality, or to fit those textures in less ram. It was pioneered by Carmack in Rage (Megatexture), and spread like wildfire among console titles because of the minimal ram in the machines.

However, as you might remember from the rage launch rage (heh), the Carmack method suffered from annoying amount of pop-in. PRT is a feature AMD added to make this kind of texturing more efficient and lower latency (so less pop-in).

For that matter, I don't even see anything worthwhile in this version of DirectX. I'm not sure why others have complained about it being for Windows 8.1 only, as 11.2 is an irrelevant DX upgrade (just as 11.1 was) and is completely optional.

I very empathically disagree. This is the DX level that will matter for the next 8+ years, because it matches the features of the GPUs in both consoles. Any multiplatform games that want to use all features on consoles will demand DX11.2.

 

[cmdrdredd]

DX has supported plenty of features when only one of the vendors had them. Render-to-texture comes to mind first. It just means that one vendor's cards will be one version behind, and support the full feature set in next gen. DX picking to implement a feature means that MS has decided that the feature in question is a winner, and the other manufacturer has to copy it.

In this case, since it's purely a performance feature that can be emulated in software (but much slower), they went with a system where all GPUs can support DX11.2, but some will be slower at it.


That's not quite what Tiled Resources/AMD PRT does. Basically, the idea is to use a small texture atlas to texture from, and maintain the rest of the textures somewhere else. The big win doesn't come from shuffling memory pools, but the fact that texture compression methods are awful compared to modern image compression (for example, jpeg). The reason for this is that texture compression must support random access ("I want this pixel here, and nothing else"), and DCT images can only be decompressed linearly. In practice, DCT is more than an order of magnitude more space-efficient than the best texture compression at a similar quality level.

So, textures of things near the player are kept in the small atlas, and the ones not near him are stored in a more compressed form. This can be used to either deliver much more texture quality, or to fit those textures in less ram. It was pioneered by Carmack in Rage (Megatexture), and spread like wildfire among console titles because of the minimal ram in the machines.

However, as you might remember from the rage launch rage (heh), the Carmack method suffered from annoying amount of pop-in. PRT is a feature AMD added to make this kind of texturing more efficient and lower latency (so less pop-in).



I very empathically disagree. This is the DX level that will matter for the next 8+ years, because it matches the features of the GPUs in both consoles. Any multiplatform games that want to use all features on consoles will demand DX11.2.

And everything is available through software. There is no hardware requirement. When we actually see if the software solution is 25% slower or whatever then I can start to care lol

Doom and gloom for NVidia?

My response to him was over his comment about how it would be unfair for GCN to have a hardware accelerated version.

I see nothing unfair about letting tier 2 hardware support run on GCN desktop cards....After all it's a feature waiting to be used.

Time will tell if it matters one way or the other so no need to get your nipples twisted....Yet

No offense...I was quoting you but speaking generally. Nothing meant to or against you directly.

 

[Barfo]

Halo 2 PC anyone?

 

[blackened23]

On a different topic, while many were disappointed with Windows 8 and I acknowledge the shortcomings, Windows 8.1 is shaping up to be very nice. I think a lot of folks will be pleasantly surprised. As far as the start menu goes, personally I never really used it aside from shutting down/going into sleep and using the "run" menu.

I think it will please those who have stuck with Windows 7. The best part for me is the fact that windows 8.1 will *finally* support DPI increases in 2.0 increments as OSX does as opposed to the strange 1.6 increments currently implemented in Windows 7. If you use an ultraportable computer this is an absolutely huge change which will make high resolution screens much, much more usable; essentially, anything that supports "retina" on OSX such as chrome or firefox will automatically have high DPI settings applicable to windows 8.1 - As things are, you can increase DPI but it doesn't quite look right at times especially on a portable. That will change now - and this even helps high resolution screens for desktop PCs as well. This in addition to the multi monitor changes make this a pretty exciting OS upgrade for me.

I know this won't change the complaints, whining, etc but this is just my opinion.

 

[tweakboy]

Games use DX10 ..... most of them,, DX11 some titles,, sounds more like DX12 with all those improvements...

 

[Arkaign]

I'll consider Win8 once more if I can get a non-hideous version of it. Maybe with an aftermarket util. The flat, square look just takes me back to Windows 3.x, in a bad way. I know they targeted mobile hardware with the dial-back of features, but jeez, I wish they'd given us a choice. Making my 5Ghz PC with SLI 670FTWs look like my old Tseng 1MB Windows 3.1 486 is not really what I want in a desktop OS. And Metro just plain sucks for a desktop.

I have Win8 Pro on my old SSD, but I only boot to it now to get updates and get back to Win7 as fast as possible. It's the first time I've hated a new OS so much. 95 came out, thought it was cool. 98, even better. ME, skipped it as I had moved to Win2K. XP Came out, all good in the hood. Vista came out, worked okay for me, got way better with SP1/SP2 and better driver support. Win7, flat out loved it. Win8? Effing terrible.

I can tell that the entire 'idea' behind Win8 actually has nothing to do with being 'modern', 'efficient', or anything at all to do with usability. It was entirely a dollar-and-sense decision to challenge Apple/Google for the tablet/phone $$ through a captive pay-wall app sales platform. Sticking that crap on my Windows desktop just pisses me off. I don't have a touchscreen, I don't want a touchscreen, and that's a slow-ass way to get stuff done in a work/production desktop environment.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Maybe its mW but I don't stare at the borders of windows when I am doing stuff. I care about utility, stability, and speed. Windows 8 delivers that.

 

[Fastx]

For those interested I thought this was a good read (link) in relationship to the info below the link imo.

12/2011
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5261/amd-radeon-hd-7970-review/6


NeoGAF’s member ‘LukasTaves‘ shared the five key features of DirectX 11.2:


- Hardware overlay support (Similar to Durango’s display panes, allows the developer to render the 3d graphics of the app at lower than native resolution, while keeping 2d ui at native res composing the final frame at a native resolution). Developers can also target a framerate and let the gpu dynamically scales the 3d graphics to try to meet that criteria (basically dynamic resolution changing is now fully supported by the api)

- HSL shader linking. W8.1 store apps can compile shaders in runtime, so the behavior of the shaders can be dynamic. However compiling is slow, so this feature allows you to pre-compile shaders at build time and link them at runtime, this way you can create new dynamic shaders without the performance hit. Dynamics shaders could be used for instance for a game to test the performance of the device it’s going to run and modify to a simpler or a more complex version of the shader to maintain the best visual quality while maintaining the target framerate. It’s also useful for building shader library dlls that can be shared among different projects and each app decides how to build their shaders from this library.
- Mappeable gpu buffers. This is great for compute scenarios with collaboration of the cpu and gpu. They provide api support for the cpu directly access the gpu memory without needing to copy the buffer back and forth. For 11.2 it’s going to be onlye for compute so it’s only buffers, not graphical objects.
- Low latency present API. Basically api support for the system to tell the app when it’s the best time to start rendering and showing the content on screen, to allow the shortest latency possible. By using this api they were able to reduce latency from 3 frames (at 60fps) to less than 1.
- Tiled Resources which is api support for hardware accelerated virtual texturing. It’s basically hardware support for mega texturing.

 

[Attic]

DX was introduced with Win7. To not even support the upgrades of DX 11 into the OS it was sold on is a cheap business tactic.

Glad I've dropped adding anything MS into my tech list for the past 2 years.

 

[Bateluer]

Microsoft continues to unload round after round into its foot.

I think they've moved up to the knee and pelvis now.

 

[Arkaign]

Maybe its mW but I don't stare at the borders of windows when I am doing stuff. I care about utility, stability, and speed. Windows 8 delivers that.

Utility for me is worse in Win8. Stability and speed I see zero difference. It probably matters for tablet-level hardware perhaps.

 

[Skurge]

Utility for me is worse in Win8. Stability and speed I see zero difference. It probably matters for tablet-level hardware perhaps.

I must agree with him. Windows 8 has been faster and more stable for me. I don't know how utility is worse for you. It's the same for me. I pin everything I need to the taskbar since there is so much unused space there. Multi-monitor mode on Win8 is infinity times better than on 7. So much better that, you couldn't pay me to go back to 7.

 

[Red Hawk]

DX was introduced with Win7. To not even support the upgrades of DX 11 into the OS it was sold on is a cheap business tactic.

Glad I've dropped adding anything MS into my tech list for the past 2 years.

They did bring DirectX 11.1 to Windows 7 through Windows Update, so I'm not worried about DirectX 11.2 not coming to Windows 7. I'd only be worried if they were naming it DirectX 12.

 

[ShintaiDK]

They did bring DirectX 11.1 to Windows 7 through Windows Update, so I'm not worried about DirectX 11.2 not coming to Windows 7. I'd only be worried if they were naming it DirectX 12.

Thats not true. You only got some DX11.1 features via the platform update for Windows 7.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chuckw/archive/2012/11/14/directx-11-1-and-windows-7.aspx

 

[toyota]

have not read through the thread but i thought cards only went to 11.1 for AMD and 11 for Nvidia.

 

[Aikouka]

Utility for me is worse in Win8. Stability and speed I see zero difference. It probably matters for tablet-level hardware perhaps.

I upgraded to Windows 8 for my Haswell build, and it doesn't really bother me at all. I did prefer Windows 7's Aero look, but I don't really mind the Windows 8 look so much. I use StartIsBack to put the start menu back, and I don't ever go to the Metro screen. My only real complaint is that you can't turn UAC off without going into the registry, and if you turn it off, you cannot properly use the Microsoft Store in Windows 8. So, right now I used some settings to tell it to auto-accept all UAC prompts. UAC was normally one of the first things that I disabled in Windows 7 as I never needed it.

I do like the new file copy dialog and the new task manager. I knew I would like 'em ever since I saw the preview photos.

One thing that hasn't affected me that I'm not too keen on is that Media Center doesn't come with Windows 8, and if you want to pay for it, you have to have the Professional version. Kind of lame since Professional mostly includes business-oriented enhancements over the normal version.

 

[poohbear]

Developers will only start making use of hardware features if there's a sufficient amount of users out their who can actually experience it. Hardware support has to come before software support, and Nvidia is not helping by lagging in that.

but if the next gen consoles already have support for DX 11.2, then the hardware is already there. They just have to port it to PC.

 

[blackened23]

I upgraded to Windows 8 for my Haswell build, and it doesn't really bother me at all. I did prefer Windows 7's Aero look, but I don't really mind the Windows 8 look so much. I use StartIsBack to put the start menu back, and I don't ever go to the Metro screen. My only real complaint is that you can't turn UAC off without going into the registry, and if you turn it off, you cannot properly use the Microsoft Store in Windows 8. So, right now I used some settings to tell it to auto-accept all UAC prompts. UAC was normally one of the first things that I disabled in Windows 7 as I never needed it.

Curious, do folks really use the start menu that much? When I use windows 7, I use the start menu primarily for finding things such as the control panel, running programs manually via the run prompt, or shutting my PC down. Rarely, if ever, do I actually go searching for an application through the start menu. On my windows 7 box I have pretty much all of my important applications icon'ed on my desktop.

Do folks really use the start menu regularly for application access? I don't think i've used the start menu in that manner in a very, very long time.

 

[Arkaign]

Curious, do folks really use the start menu that much? When I use windows 7, I use the start menu primarily for finding things such as the control panel, running programs manually via the run prompt, or shutting my PC down. Rarely, if ever, do I actually go searching for an application through the start menu. On my windows 7 box I have pretty much all of my important applications icon'ed on my desktop.

Do folks really use the start menu regularly for application access? I don't think i've used the start menu in that manner in a very, very long time.

I have no desktop icons, and only a select 3-4 taskbar pins at any given time. Everything else I press the windows key, start typing, and then launch what I want. I much prefer not having my screen disappear for *any* amount of time while this happens. I have it slightly customized with small icons, etc.

With the startisback/start8/etc, it helps imho, but it's still a barren/ugly GUI with Win8. I think they intentionally punished the 'desktop' user in trying to push people towards the 'modern' tile UI as often as possible. A great example is the built-in PDF launcher. Full screen metro. There was a bug, might have been Adobe's fault, that still opened PDFs for one of my lawyers in the metro side of things even after installing the latest Adobe reader. Installed latest Foxit, and the problem went away.

I'd have a lot fewer complaints about Win8 if they'd simply offered more choices to the user :

Desktop / Start Menu / Aero mode, or enable : Touch/Metro and/or 3.1-style UI manually. Hell, even make the Touch/Metro/3.1 UI the default, but simply offer the choice to revert back for the other things. That's all it would take, them swallowing a bit of their hubris, and me and millions of others would be much happier with Win8 immediately. Hell, I'd go from complaining about it to praising it in one fell swoop.

This is a great read on things :

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usability/

If you forget about the fact that advanced/experienced users can adapt, and just realize you have a lot of daily-use business users (Microsoft's bread and butter) who are used to getting things done in a particular way, changing this with the Metro/Tile focus has the exact opposite effect of bringing more efficiency to their workflow. You add confusion, delay, and there's just no reason for any of it.

It was a business decision for the sake of chasing Apple/Google profits/app store by forcing it through the desktop. Even Apple isn't forcing desktop kb/mouse users to use iOS. It's this artificiality to the moves that irritates me. And there are some utterly laughable things, like bringing the tile/touch UI to Windows Server.

If and when there are things that are only possible on Windows 8 that I need to do, I'll boot to it more often. Until then, I'll let it collect dust, probably until Win9 (by which point they'll either give us a choice, or have hopefully improved the metro/tile design).

 

[Pariah]

One thing that hasn't affected me that I'm not too keen on is that Media Center doesn't come with Windows 8, and if you want to pay for it, you have to have the Professional version. Kind of lame since Professional mostly includes business-oriented enhancements over the normal version.

It was free for few months after release for all versions. I know that doesn't help people now, but as someone else said here, I got Win8 for $40, plus the media center update was a free addon. Now Windows 8.1 is another free update. Not sure what there is to complain about there. I spent twice as much on SimCity. That was a tragic mistake. People trashed Win8 for not having anything worth upgrading for among other things. Now that MS is giving people a reason upgrade, the complaining changes to why is MS "forcing" us to upgrade? Why won't they give all the new features Windows 8 has to Windows 7 users for free so we don't have to upgrade? Can you really not figure out the answer to that on your own? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

 

[Aikouka]

It was free for few months after release for all versions. I know that doesn't help people now, but as someone else said here, I got Win8 for $40, plus the media center update was a free addon.

Honestly, I don't really mind paying for it if (and this is a big "if") Microsoft actually supports it. However, I highly doubt that Microsoft will support Media Center. I have a HTPC with a Ceton infiniTV 4 that uses WMC7, and there are definitely annoying bugs or just a very user unfriendly nature.

One of the big problems that I mentioned is that it's only available for Windows 8 Professional installations, which makes no sense.

Now Windows 8.1 is another free update. Not sure what there is to complain about there.

I didn't recall anything that great when I read about Blue, but I wanted to make sure that I didn't miss anything, so I checked it again. At least from what I can see, the majority of the changes involve Metro or adding Metro-based apps. The only 100% beneficial change that I see is Start to Desktop. The Start button returning just opens the Metro screen, and actually breaks all of the Start button programs! :| Keep in mind that most Start button programs also enable Start to Desktop.

Do folks really use the start menu regularly for application access? I don't think i've used the start menu in that manner in a very, very long time.

I'm not sure about others, but I do use it sometimes. I may have a dual-monitor setup, but I am typically using both monitors at the same time (right now, Firefox is open on both with a video in the other one). Since the desktop is typically covered, I tend to not favor it so much.

Also, I think the Pin-To feature creates a great convenience and is probably one of the best convenience features added in Windows 7. It allows you to create this hierarchy where you can put the most common applications on your taskbar. Although, I try to keep the taskbar fairly uncluttered, so I also tend to pin items to the start menu. Start menu pinning has an advantage over the desktop too as it allows you to access the Recent Items menu just like the taskbar does.

With the startisback/start8/etc, it helps imho, but it's still a barren/ugly GUI with Win8. I think they intentionally punished the 'desktop' user in trying to push people towards the 'modern' tile UI as often as possible.

The only issue that I really have with the GUI is how they integrated the minimize and maximize buttons directly into the title bar. From a design choice, I think that's fine, but their implementation hurts usability. I use very dark window frames, which is usually the gray option with intensity turned down. The minimize and maximize buttons are black, and if your title bar color is too dark, you cannot see them. I think it's a rather silly oversight on Microsoft's side.

I don't think Microsoft had a goal of pushing desktop users to anything. I think Microsoft's main focus of Windows 8 was mobile devices and attempting to create a unifying experience between all mobile platforms. It's actually kind of similar to the problem that most enthusiasts have with Haswell. Intel wants enthusiasts to buy the more expensive LGA2011 models, but they stagger the releases so heavily.

 

[djsb]

I didn't recall anything that great when I read about Blue, but I wanted to make sure that I didn't miss anything, so I checked it again. At least from what I can see, the majority of the changes involve Metro or adding Metro-based apps. The only 100% beneficial change that I see is Start to Desktop. The Start button returning just opens the Metro screen, and actually breaks all of the Start button programs! :| Keep in mind that most Start button programs also enable Start to Desktop.

One huge change is that searching is no longer segregated into Programs/Settings/Documents bins. Or so I have heard. Now granted, it was a regression to begin with so this only brings it back up to parity with W7, but it is technically a big improvement.

 

[Remobz]

Thats not true. You only got some DX11.1 features via the platform update for Windows 7.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chuckw/archive/2012/11/14/directx-11-1-and-windows-7.aspx

Oh crap

 

[stahlhart]

Oh crap

And that update was the one that broke 3DMark Fire Strike, to boot (KB2670838).