Why DirectX11?

Why is DX11 coming out? Current DX10 hardware can't even produce good DX10 visuals at a decent framerate. In fact, DX10 slows down framerates in most titles without really enhancing any visual gameplay. DX10 simply turned into a feature set which enable certain extra effects. The same thing can be done using DX9, but game companies receive more money to make DX10 look a little better.

So is DX10 the Vista of DirectX; which simply failed so DX11 is taking over? What if DX11 is the same thing as DX10, and just adds a few extra effects to the cost of even more performance? I'm pretty sure DX9 remains the highest performing and can still look as good as any current DX10 title. Crysis is probably the best example of this, since their developpers spent the most time with DX10. The game looks almost the same from DX9 to DX10. Then you can go into the game files and modify them for DX9 to look identical to DX10. There goes the DX10 marketing.

I am a little frustrated with this, because I was excited about DX10 and all the promises, and buying this new hardware along with Vista to get the "experience". I am glad I purchased a new video card, since it plays DX9 titles extremely well.

When I do buy a DX11 card, it will definitely not be for the DX11 feature set, but for the performance it achieves on any platform including DX9,10 and 11. Hopefully, this time around DX11 delivers something new. Not just a couple more shrapnel pieces or a few more rocks, but a step forward towards performance, removing some overhead (for real this time), and maybe add some new visual features.

/rant
-D

DX 11 is coming out because 90% of it was supposed to be released in DX10.

Why wasn't it? nVidia's hardware couldn't do it so they whined & moaned until MS decided to hold off on releasing the portions that nVidia couldn't do in hardware.

Now they are finally restoring the features that should have been released in DX10

Can curent top end gpu's render dx11? I too was under the assumption that dx11 is like a "patch" with some extra features. Similar to DX10, but much easier to write?

No, current GPU's cannot render DX11. They are DX10 and DX10.1.

^^^

Stupid additional registers and stuff

I thought ATI 10.1 GPUs could render dx11.

Bobnova said:

I thought ATI 10.1 GPUs could render dx11.

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They have support for features that DX11 contains that were meant to be in DX 10 like dribblesnort said (like tesselation), but the implementation changed so they don't support the DX11 version.

in two days they will, though

[EDIT]
WTF... double post, how the hell did that happen??

dribblesnort said:

DX 11 is coming out because 90% of it was supposed to be released in DX10.

Why wasn't it? nVidia's hardware couldn't do it so they whined & moaned until MS decided to hold off on releasing the portions that nVidia couldn't do in hardware.

Now they are finally restoring the features that should have been released in DX10

Click to expand...

Well as a mega-corp like Microsoft you have to pander to the lowest common denominator unfortunately. nVidia is the second largest GPU manufacturer in the world, if they (MS) releases something that nVidia does not support, software coders are not going to support it, and you get other companies developing hardware that could totally kick *** but is not software supported, and thus wasted.

I suppose it does create some parity though lol

What would really put the green bun in the oven is if ATi released a BIOS update for there 10.1 cards to upgrade to 11. That would be AWESOME! (wont happen though, as it would hurt new GPU sales)

Neur0mancer said:

Well as a mega-corp like Microsoft you have to pander to the lowest common denominator unfortunately. nVidia is the second largest GPU manufacturer in the world, if they (MS) releases something that nVidia does not support, software coders are not going to support it, and you get other companies developing hardware that could totally kick *** but is not software supported, and thus wasted.

I suppose it does create some parity though lol

What would really put the green bun in the oven is if ATi released a BIOS update for there 10.1 cards to upgrade to 11. That would be AWESOME! (wont happen though, as it would hurt new GPU sales)

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I understand, believe me. However, what bugs me is that MS put the specs out in the whitepaper and made them available to ATI and nVidia. ATI said, "okay. let's knock this crap out." nVidia said, "Hey MS go **** yourselves!", and MS caved.

If they had left in the original options, and people saw the performance and picture difference between ATI and nVidia, ATI would have been selling way more cards than nVidia and would be in a better position today.

The key to DX11 is backwards compadibilty.

Rather than throwing out old constructs in order to move towards more programmability, Microsoft has built DirectX 11 as a strict superset of DirectX 10/10.1, which enables some curious possibilities. Essentially, DX10 code will be DX11 code that chooses not to implement some of the advanced features. On the flipside, DX11 will be able to run on down level hardware. Of course, all of the features of DX11 will not be available, but it does mean that developers can stick with DX11 and target both DX10 and DX11 hardware without the need for two completely separate implementations: they're both the same but one targets a subset of functionality. Different code paths will be necessary if something DX11 only (like the tessellator or compute shader) is used, but this will still definitely be a benefit in transitioning to DX11 from DX10.

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Previously, every DX update required almost an entire overhaul of your code. Now Microsoft has adopted a very good model, in which you could program your game for DX11, but it would still run perfectly fine on DX10 hardware (minus the cool new stuff in DX11, which really isn't all THAT much).

DX11 also gives multi-core processors more support through a newer system of parralell resource loading to the GPU. (Easier to program parallelism into your game for multi-core CPU's).

I would imagine a huge amount of people are going to upgrade from XP -> Win7, Vista will also get a service pack with DX11. So the majority of people will have DX11 support in their OS, with backwards compadibility to DX10, 10.1. The hope was to accelerate this adoption / compadibility and it looks like it will work.

It's up to you to stop using XP and DX9 so we can all get better games

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3507&p=2

Ok well, lets take this on in parts. DirectX10 was not a fail, it was a huge success. However it did not seem that way to gamers, DirectX10 was a huge leap and improvement over DirectX9 in almost every way. It allows us to have better access with the GPU and grants us the ability to use our GPUs more efficiently.

However, we never did see the power of DirectX10. No games really took proper advantage of it except for some shader model 4.0 stuff where DirectX10 wasn't really needed to get the effect (same thing achievable in DX9).

The best showcase of DX10 imo was probably Froblins:

So DirectX10 was like a complete rewrite or a core/base update. As for DirectX11 is just more things added/built on-top the existing base. Now DirectX11 has many useful, optimized, and effective things we can use in games/realtime. However, I'm sorry to say. It wont be that "near" in the future. When a new tech jumps out like DX11, it takes programmers time to learn and they must start a project with it and then finish it.

So I wouldn't expect any game to fully showcase some of the real usage of DX11 for at least a year.

This is one of the reasons why I'm not too optimistic about Dirt2 for PC via DX11. I know they emulated and got a hold of DX11 technology fairly early, and in no doubt in my mind Dirt2 will look amazing on PC. However DX11 mode on it will just be showing off just a grain of what its actually capable of.

I do agree with you that if your buying a ATI 5000 series right now your buying it for the performance not for DX11. However I'm looking forward to this future with DX11 and OpenGL 3.1, even though some PC exclusive or DX11 modes will be available in up coming games. Keep in mind, its just a *couple extra features. We wont see them starting to work mainly in DX11 until the consoles switch. Consoles are holding the PC industry back in games, which isn't a bad thing. But that's something to keep in mind.

As for DX9, we still haven't used it to its full potential. It will be at its full potential @ release of Rage and Doom4, those will be the end of the DX9 era.

Post above is good too ^!

I hope this helped explain some things, feel free to ask anything else.

Or you can just blame consoles, which don't employ any DX10 or DX10.1 type features.

Shiggity said:

The key to DX11 is backwards compadibilty.

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/dx11/apilayer.png



Previously, every DX update required almost an entire overhaul of your code. Now Microsoft has adopted a very good model, in which you could program your game for DX11, but it would still run perfectly fine on DX10 hardware (minus the cool new stuff in DX11, which really isn't all THAT much).

DX11 also gives multi-core processors more support through a newer system of parralell resource loading to the GPU. (Easier to program parallelism into your game for multi-core CPU's).

I would imagine a huge amount of people are going to upgrade from XP -> Win7, Vista will also get a service pack with DX11. So the majority of people will have DX11 support in their OS, with backwards compadibility to DX10, 10.1. The hope was to accelerate this adoption / compadibility and it looks like it will work.

It's up to you to stop using XP and DX9 so we can all get better games

http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3507&p=2

Click to expand...

Let's hope this is not as bad for the consumer as it sounds. To me it seems that marketers are going to be able to give items DX11 branding, even if they only are dx10/10.1 compliant. I hope I am wrong

I agree with most of the stuff posted here - DX9 hasn't really been given a chance - with developers focusing on DX10. Crysis, Far Cry 2, C/Warhead COD4, COD5 etc.. all look amazing on DX9 - if you remember back to when farcry 1 started to use dx9 - that looked miles better than anything ever! but look at the fantastic visuals were getting from dx9 now! i recon it could be pushed further!

also with dx10 being vista only at the time - this was to get people to buy windows vista - which a lot of people did - but all current games are all dx9 compatible because not everyone is dx10 yet - there is only 1 game ive heard of with vista only support - and im guessing theres not that many games with dx10 only. so with the new dx11 - all dx11 games will be dx10 as well - maybe even dx9 too! there will be no dx11 only games for years and years!

im still on XP with DX9 and an really happy with it!! its still pretty fast and does everything i ask of it! all my dx9 games look amazing on full res and settings - ive no need to get a couple of extra leaves floating around my screen with dx10!! like most people - ive got the ultra high config files for crysis which makes it look a lot, lot, lot better than standard dx9 - its better than dx10! especially with the photoreal hack!

i'll be staying with dx9 until next year probably - mid 2010!