I don't think DX 10 or even

Submitted by DBsantos77 on Sun, 11/01/2009 - 9:16pm

I don't think DX 10 or even 10.1 was being developed as smoothly like DX 11. Tesselation is the biggest feat of DX 11, looks amazing.

-Santos

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Better than DX10

Submitted by bloodgain on Sun, 11/01/2009 - 5:48am

DX10 wasn't the improvement everyone hoped for (much like Vista), but it's also fair to say developers didn't spend enough time with it to use it as efficiently as possible.  DX9 is well-known to developers, who have had plenty of time to learn to use it for realistic graphics that run relatively fast on even somewhat older DX9 hardware. 

The idea of developers taking years to gain efficiency can be seen in multi-core (parallel) processing -- users should see near 1:1 speedups for every core added in computation-heavy apps, but in reality users are rarely seeing speedups of more than 50%.  Multi-core CPUs are just making multi-tasking faster so far.  Parallel processing has been around for a couple of decades, but commercial developers have only had an incentive to move away from sequential processing in the last few years.

Likewise, it should take a year or two before we really see what DirectX 11 is capable of in real world applications (test/demo applications are easier).  That said, DX11 does come with some nice features: 

1) It takes advantage of the unified shader architecture introduced in DX10 (which even sped up DX9 games).  It should, arguably, take better advantage of the architecture than DX10 did due to improvements which should have been made in the low-level libraries.  By all indications, this should take little or no effort on the part of the game/application developers -- which is a good thing for us, as not every developer is as adept at understanding hardware architecture's effect on their code.

2) It adds support for "new" hardware tessellation (AMD technically already had tessellation units, but built-in support will make this more useful to everyone).  Tessellation, the process of breaking down complex shapes into smaller, simpler shapes (triangles, in this instance), is a relatively intensive process that can be made much more efficient and effective by using dedicated hardware designed to handle it.  For the developers, it means less work and better results.  For us, it means more detailed graphics that take less time to generate (less time per frame means more frames per second).

3) It brings better support for compute shaders.  While the concept has existed for a while, DX11 brings with it explicit compute shader support.  For one, this means that GPUs can be used more efficiently for general purpose applications (think video transcoding).  For another, it means that both developers and hardware manufacturers have more freedom in how to apply algorithms to objects and data sets.  This means fancy details like motion blur, soft shadows, depth of field, and other post-processing graphical enhancements will again look better and run faster.  Also, since compute shaders are more mutli-purpose, you could see improvements in AI or physics processing if your card has enough processing power to handle the extra duties.

So, in short, it will take time for developers to use DX11 to its best, and probably a couple of patches for Microsoft to weed out the remaining bugs.  But there are improvements over DX10 in DX11, including some that software developers -- both the game-making type and more real-world type -- may get excited about this time.

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October 22, *2009*

Submitted by bloodgain on Sun, 11/01/2009 - 12:59am

I'm really not trying to be a jerk on purpose here, but on the planet I live on Windows 7 DID get a late 2009 release.

Also, being a software developer and knowing just a little about Microsoft's development cycles, neither Vista DX11 support nor Windows Mobile development are going to affect Windows 7 development.  Different teams work on different products.  If a product is dropped, a few of those people will fill empty slots in other teams, but some of them will also just go work for a different company.  That is, Microsoft isn't dividing it's manpower -- it hires more people to develop more products.  That's how business works.

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spammer?

Submitted by johnny3144 on Sat, 10/31/2009 - 1:41pm

umm... this comment is a spam?

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Nope. Your right, there is

Submitted by snapple00 on Sat, 10/31/2009 - 8:30am

Nope. Your right, there is no point for advancing technology. Games will indefinately be written in DX 9.

(the above is sarcasm)

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