Real Life DirectX 10 Performance

AnandTech has a look at the performance PC gamers can expect see under Windows Vista with DirectX 10. Unfortunately, it isn't pretty. Despite the power of the new 10-compliant graphics cards, the choices made in developing this technology have resulted in a significant gap between what is possible and what is actually obtainable from commercial PC hardware. What's worse, the article starts off by pointing out that much of the shiny effects exclusive to DX10 games would have been possible with DX9, had Microsoft been inclined to develop in that direction. From the article: "[Current] cards are just not powerful enough to enable widespread use of any features that reach beyond the capability of DirectX 9. Even our high-end hardware struggled to keep up in some cases, and the highest resolution we tested was 2.3 megapixels. Pushing the resolution up to 4 MP (with 30" display resolutions of 2560x1600) brings all of our cards to their knees. In short, we really need to see faster hardware before developers can start doing more impressive things with DirectX 10."

Re:Shadowrun

[jdwilso2]

Shadowrun is not DX10. It's just restricted to only run on Vista.

Hardware virtualization

[brucmack]

Personally, the most interesting feature of DX10 is the hardware virtualization, so programs can share the card. Should make it possible to play a game on one monitor while playing a movie on another, for example. Presumably these cards wouldn't have a problem with this...

Re:DX10 performance will take time

[oliverthered]

DirectX 10 isn't so different from DirectX 9, it's basically DirectX 9 without the fixed function pipeline, or in other words you have to use shaders for everything and can't rely on the driver doing even the most basic of texturing &co outside of shaders.

This makes the pipeline cleaner than that of DirectX 9 and is supposed to give a performance increase when you're dealing with vast numbers of objects.

They've also added geometry shaders which may be useful for some games and can't be done in directx 9, I don't expect that many games to be making use of them for quite a while so there's no reason for any game to be directx 10 only.

Re:That means ...

[ozphx]

Pfft.

Any of the real DRM features provided by a TPM setup - such as bus level encryption - are already in your modern chipset / video card and can quite happily AES at full bus speed. The marking "protected pages" is no more overhead than the no-execute bit.

Like another poster in this thread mentioed: DX10 is lighter than DX9. They've stripped out most of the cap bits for one - now a card either supports DX10 or it doesnt (none of this 'find the right texture format' bs - although admittedly I can't think of a single time a modern card didnt support what I wanted to use).

I actually like this brutal rationalization of the APIs that MS is doing. Killing hardware accelerated audio made me happy - gave me hope for the death of EAX and the associated 'playing games in a public toilet' feeling.