Screenshot Comparison of Direct X 9/10/11

Lich120 - 49 days 9 hours ago

@Fantasy Star

I'm curious what GFX Card you can't peak over 30fps on for crysis? My Rig is a year old (8 gigs ddr2, quad core 2.66, and a ATI4870) and I run it on high settings 1680x1050 (no AA unfortuantely) at a solid 40FPS.

I'm asking because I feel like you would have a comparable setup from your price range and was wondering if you do have a similar card if you were running some settings that might be making you take a bit of a hit.

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FantasyStar - 49 days 3 hours ago

@Lich120

I built my rig in 2007 and accrued expenses along the way which tallies over 1k. My GFX is a 8800GT from '07 (you can check my Bio for the full-list). I haven't decided to upgrade in some time knowing that DX11 will come soon and that I'll be good to go. I'm aware that cards like the HD 4870 and 275 GTX are capable of producing the necessary FPS for my own means. With ToD mods and .cfg mods, I'm able to get playable 20-24 FPS with minor slowdowns most of the time, but I would like to strive for more in the future. I do appreciate the gesture of help though.

I referenced Crysis because I believe that tech shouldn't come at the price of performance. When Crysis released in 2007, it brought every single card on the market to its knees. What good is tech if we can't even play it properly the way it was meant to be played for at least 1-2 years? If Crysis 2 debuted with DX11 and repeats this history, then it's just going to hurt our wallets.

What I will do when I get my first DX11 card is reinstall Crysis and unleash the full-weight(along with ArmAII). That and I'm a firm believer that at my resolution (14x9), I should be able to buy a single GPU and get acceptable (30+ FPS) with that. Taking a book from consoles, adding more raw power isn't the solution to performance issues, but using existing hardware and optimizing it to fit the current envelope.

I would like to add that I was one of those people that did think that Crysis was very unoptimized, but after Crysis Warhead: I believed that Crytek did all they could and that their tech was just years ahead of our current hardware, which is a good thing. It's a great benchmark and gives us something to strive for.

@Kakkoii

I've always been aware of how ATI had a hand up on the competition with their inherent tessellation units, but vastly underused due to how developers code their games. Oh boy, You nailed all the points I wanted to write. As usual, always a pleasure to discuss PC topics with ya. DX11 is DX9. DX10 was DX8 back then. History does repeat and that's reason enough to be excited for DX11. I hope Rage uses DX11, given Carmack's position.

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dirthurts - 49 days 1 hour ago

Thanks for the link to the demos! Awesome stuff.

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El_Colombiano - 49 days 12 hours ago

...

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buckethead_911 - 49 days 12 hours ago

lol pwnt.

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dchalfont - 49 days 9 hours ago

automatic bubbles for life for you my friend, Buckethead is a sexy beast and a ****ing amazing guitarist. Rock on!

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buckethead_911 - 49 days 8 hours ago

Yup, He is one of my fav. guitarists ever! Oh and thanks! :D

Positive feedback to you aswell!

\m/

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LeonSKennedy4Life - 49 days 9 hours ago

What a jerk...

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EdFry - 48 days 18 hours ago

WHAT A TWIST!

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Kakkoii - 49 days ago

Well it's not so much that textures are being turned into geometry. But that a texture is displacing geometry, hence the name "displacement map". The texture is being used as a sort of displacement value sheet. Each pixel of the texture has a brightness value. From pure black to white. The brighter the pixel, the higher it's displacement value is. So when you map this texture onto a model at say 1024x1024, you have over a million pixels worth of displacement values spread across the model. So the more polygons/triangles a model has, the more points these displacement maps can displace, creating more defined detail.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

So no, you can't reconfigure an old game with just a few tweaks. You need to create displacement maps. And there's no tessellation engine present in DX10. Only a hard coded solution on ATI's HD2000 and up. DX11 brings a unified hardware/software standard that both teams will be using in their DX11 GPU's.

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TheMailman - 49 days 7 hours ago

It´s only me, or these pics against U2 pics don’t even old a candle...

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dragonelite - 49 days 7 hours ago

I believe the 360 has hardware tesselation dont know if games already were allowed to use it from microsoft. I think they will keep it locked from devs till now that the ps 3 is pushing consoles graphics to the top with U2,KZ2 and of course God of War 3.

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Ju - 49 days 4 hours ago

The biggest thing in DX11 is a standardized way to do some, how should I say that, "vertex compression", which they call tessellation. You can now discuss if it really is something like that, but basically for me, its just a method to "expand" vertices which are not really there.

The basic idea hasn't changed, though. To make polygons smooth, they require a LOT of vertices. So many, that we reach memory and bandwidth limitations. Instead of going the brute force route and simply expand memory and bandwidth, data are handled more intelligently. DX11 provides that standard in form of "tessellation".

The nice thing for consoles, however, is, they can sort of create their own standard. 20+ Million machines on the market justify that. I am sure, MS will start using some of its ATI chipset feature in its 360 specific DX implementation. Maybe it will even be transparent to DX11 tessellation (but not fully support all features). On the PS3 we have seen latest trends to heavily use the CELL to assist the RSX, doing in fact the same thing. Cull geometry before it hits the RSX pipeline, thus reducing the amount of vertices the graphics chip has to process (best example UC2, while KZ2 adds a lightning engine unseen on consoles to date - while keeping polycount extremely high).

All those methods are basically the same. Console can go closer to the metal to implement new ways of doing things, while PCs require a more abstract approach to make sure its transparent through all possible HW configurations. Open driver models allow to scale through HW there, but it still requires standards to follow (but will never be 100% efficient - its always cheaper to just build a new chip then maxing out an existing one).

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Grandreaper9999 - 49 days 5 hours ago

A reason to upgrade to vista, that's about it.

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NaiNaiNai - 49 days 3 hours ago

ehh

your a idiot.

If you can't see the differences between them you are just plan blind.

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devilhunterx - 49 days 3 hours ago

I do hope you know the difference between the term "Impressive" and "Difference".

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NaiNaiNai - 49 days 2 hours ago

actually there the same thing here I'm very impressed.

Look at DX 9 and 10 on the first 2, then 11, 11 actually has environment depth, something the others can't ever do. Something the ps3 can't even do.

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devilhunterx - 48 days 22 hours ago

Did anyone mention anything about PS3 here in topic?

Boy you Xboys really are childish.

p.s. Xb2 cant do DX10 or DX11 gimmicks either

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dragonelite - 48 days 20 hours ago

You sure about it theres almost no difference with dx 9 and 10 but the 11 is a major step forward with hardware tesselation.

And come on the people bashing directX 11 what the hell is wrong with you guys dont you guys want better graphics or something i think some take the console war to far with bashing every sony and microsoft achievements that doesnt involve the consoles.

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Kakkoii - 48 days 19 hours ago

Displacement is exactly what it is. But it's coupled with tessellation. DX11 hardware is configured for tessellating models now. Using GPU hardware tessellation, you can drastically increase the poly-count without a big hit on performance, allowing many more points for your displacement map to displace. And creating a much smoother, refined model.

Thus allowing us to render more complex environments in real-time.

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Shrinkwrap - 48 days 18 hours ago

I understand what its function is.
But when it comes down to adding Poly's, I just question the overhead.

Purification of the software, that's always a plus.

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Kakkoii - 48 days 17 hours ago

Yes, normally such a high poly count increase would create incredible overhead. But the way it's being done in DX11 is very efficient. Your not loading high poly models into a game, it's using the exact same models from the DX9/10 screens, but tessellating within the base mesh to create more vertex points. Because it's using tessellation to increase the poly-count, and not merely sub-division, it is able to run a lot faster through some simple mathmatics for creating a fractal mesh pattern.

To much to explain here so read this:
http://www.tomshardware.com...

If you have an ATI card, try out the 2 interactive demo's here:
http://developer.amd.com/gp...

They'll give you a feel for the performance of tessellation.

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Kakkoister - 48 days 17 hours ago

Notice how the 3D models in the DX9/10 images are all flat and whatnot?
Now notice how the DX11 models have amazing detail and physical depth?

That's the difference. With DX11 you can increase the detail of the models and displace it using displacement maps to add very fine details, and also huge changes like the tiles on the roof.

Everything in the DX11 screenshot is using the exact same 3D model as the other screenshots. They are merely being tessellated and displaced to look awesome and realistic :P.

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EdFry - 48 days 17 hours ago

Can't wait to get a PC in the near future...

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Kakkoister - 48 days 16 hours ago

Your missing the whole reason this is good. Tessellation. Sure displacement mapping has been done before and most game studios have in house code for it. But GPU accelerated Tessellation isn't something any developers use. The first real games to utilize it are a few on the Xbox 360, which has an ATI GPU which supports some basic tessellation. As do all Radeon HD2000 and up GPU's.

Tessellation allows for much more detailed displacement. It creates a much higher polygon model, without a huge performance hit. I don't know what you don't understand about this..

Displacement mapping isn't what we are all praising. It's the ability to render such high polygon models and displace them with great detail in REAL-TIME that we are praising.

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