Topic: Direct X 11 - Update: DX11 officially released for Windows Vista (Reply 11)

[MysterD]

Here's some info on Microsoft's upcoming Direct X 11 graphics API for Windows.

DirectX 11 detailed; Vista and DX 10 / 10.1 hardware supported

21 Comments by Christopher Grant Jul 22nd 2008 2:55PM
Filed under: PC

At its GamesFest event in Redmond today, Microsoft shared the first details of DirectX 11 – the numerically superior successor to DirectX 10.1 – which will feature full support for Windows Vista, as well as future versions of the popular operating system. Worried about hardware? DirectX 11 won't just ignore your fancy DirectX 10 or 10.1 cards – nope, it offers support for both of those standards, as well as for new DirectX 11 hardware.

But what's new and exciting about DirectX 11, you ask incredulously. How about a "new compute shader technology" that gets your GPU ready to do more than just boring old 3D graphics – instead "developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor"?

Not doing it for you? How about "multi-threaded resource handling that will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines" since, y'know, most every computer nowadays has multiple cores?

Or "support for tessellation" which allows "developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close"? Something in there has to tickle your fancy.

What it probably means for most of you is this: as hardware manufacturers develop new chipsets to take advantage of DirectX 11's new features, you should be able to snag some of that older 10.1 gear for a song.

[Xessive]

Great ideas, but it still feels like Microsoft is just fishing. DX10 never really lived up to any of its claims before release; not to mention the bogus hype that was going around at the time.

[MysterD]

Great ideas, but it still feels like Microsoft is just fishing. DX10 never really lived up to any of its claims before release; not to mention the bogus hype that was going around at the time.

Sounds more like DX10.5 than say a DX11 API.
I say this since DX10 and DX10.1 vid card hardware will actually support DX11.

[Quemaqua]

DX10 was broken simply because nobody gave a shit about it, they restricted its use to a ridiculous extreme, and it didn't offer anything compelling.  I couldn't give less of a flying fuck about DX11.  There's simply no reason for me to care.

[gpw11]

Sounds more like DX10.5 than say a DX11 API.
I say this since DX10 and DX10.1 vid card hardware will actually support DX11.

I was kind of under the impression from the quote that older cards wouldn't have the full features of DX11, but whatever software features could be supported by DX10/10.1 cards and would be backwards compatible with older cards.  You know...like how DX has always worked.

[scottws]

That tessellation thing sounds a whole lot like ATi's TruForm, which has been around forever.

The parallel processing thing sounds interesting until you consider that it still has to pass through a bus either way.  It's not slow, but it's not like the CPU and GPU are sitting side-by-side or anything.

[gpw11]

That's a good point about Truform.  That was actually a pretty bad-ass feature that died too soon because of a lack of good software support.  Sure, it looked a bit weird, but I think with time it could have been great, especially considering the lack of any real performance loss.

The parallel processing thing strikes me as being a little weird considering all the hype behind Nvidia's Cuda.  Hell, I think even ATI recently got onboard (I think).

[scottws]

I just read the CUDA entry in Wikipedia and realized that while I'm a fairly proficient computer technician, a computer scientist I am not.  I caught a few bits, such as the programming stuff about the float vs. double data type and recursive functions, but that's about it.

As far as TruForm, the only game I remember that I played that supported it while I had an ATi card was Serious Sam: The Second Encounter.  I remember it was nice-looking in the game except for the health cubes, which ended up being almost spherical with TruForm on.

[gpw11]

The thing about TruForm is that you could force it on any game but it would look kind of fucked because it would round things that weren't supposed to be round.  In order for it to work properly developers had to program the game in order to tell the card what to tessellate and what to leave.  I think....I might be wrong about this entirely, but sometimes it just looked fucking weird. 

With CUDA I haven't looked at the technical jargon at all because it's totally going to be above my head but my layman's summarized understanding is basically this: Nvidia has opened up their GPUs to be accessed directly through the Cuda compiler, essentially making it possible for developers of various software programs to utilize the GPU (or unused horsepower of it) to act as a math or physics co-processor either in conjunction with the CPU or completely independently. I'm sure that's either overly optimistic or just plain wrong in some sense, but from the buzz that's what I've gathered.

[MysterD]

6 pages worth of info from EliteBastards.com on some of the upcoming features for DirectX 11.

[MysterD]

Anatech got a huge article talking about DX 11.0 on Windows Seven.

[MysterD]

DirectX 11 Released by Microsoft for Windows Vista users through Windows Update.

[Xessive]

To go with MyD's announcement:

The first DirectX 11 benchmark released on the basis of Unigine engine