Just when you think you’ve grasped all the jargon surrounding 3D graphics, new terms and technologies flood onto the market.
AMD has been aggressively shipping DirectX 11 GPUs in almost every price category, while cards based on Nvidia’s new GTX 470 and GTX 480 DX11 parts are finally becoming available. Meanwhile, Windows 7’s sales ramp has been extraordinary—the fastest-selling Microsoft OS in history. Given that Windows 7 is what Vista should have been, it’s also arguable that DirectX 11 is what DX10 should have been.
When DirectX 10 games hit the streets, the new API gave users marginal improvements in image quality alongside huge performance decreases. The tiny gain in visual fidelity didn’t really make up for the performance hit. On the other hand, DirectX 11 brings users some very cool potential eye-candy improvements, but also promises better performance—even if you don’t have a DirectX 11 GPU.
Along with new graphics, APIs come with new buzzwords: tessellation, SSAO, HDAO, and postprocessing. That last buzzword being a catchphrase for many small but cool effects made possible with today’s programmable graphics chips.
We’ll take a closer look at these buzzwords to dissect what they actually deliver, plus discuss the performance impact of using high-end AMD and Nvidia GPUs.
