DX10 - How Far Have We Come?

MojoKid writes "When DirectX 10 was first introduced to the market by graphics manufacturers and subsequently supported by Windows Vista, it was generally understood that adoption by game developers was going to be more of a slow migration than a quick flip of a switch. That said, nearly a year later, the question is how far have we come? An article at the HotHardware site showcases many of the most popular DX10-capable game engines, like Bioshock , World In Conflict , Call of Juarez, Lost Planet, and Company of Heroes, and features current image quality comparisons versus DX9 modes with each. The article also details performance levels across many of the more popular graphics cards, from both the mid-range and high-end." PC Perspective has a similar look at DX10 performance.

Re:DX9 looks better?

[LiquidCoooled]

The fog looks bad because it was not designed around dx9.
I've can't remember seeing visuals look as bad as those did, and even where glitches occur the action happens so fast its not noticeable.

(one exception, in Half life 2, the frosted glass doors had a glitch near the edges of the screen, nothing major but ruined the effect)

Re:Backporting DX10 to XP

[webmaster404]

Sort of, Im not that aware of the project on that page, but WINE is trying to get it to Linux/XP
http://wiki.winehq.org/FAQ#head-fbaa851e07d7484640cc10b6d0c48abc741260b2 [winehq.org]

from that page

Does Wine support DirectX? Can I install Microsoft's DirectX under Wine? Wine itself provides a DirectX implementation that, although it has a few bugs left, should run fine. Wine supports DirectX 9.0c at this time. Plans for DirectX 10 are underway. If you attempt to install Microsoft's DirectX, you'll run into some problems. You can install the runtime, but it will not run. The runtime needs access to the Windows drivers, and Wine cannot access them for obvious reasons. The only native Microsoft DLLs that could be useful anyway are the d3dx9_xx.dll type ones, and these require you to accept Microsoft's license. Regardless, don't try and do this.

Re:Color me underwhelmed

[Anonymous Coward]

Meanwhile, my Wii works fine with my digital TV as it does for most Americans, and we'll buy HDTV when it's cheap (or we have to in 2009

This is a pretty common misconception. The 2009 mandate is for digital television signals to replace the current analog signals, not for High Definition to replace Standard Definition. The new signals may be Standard Definition, Enhanced Definition, or High Definition, but Standard Definition will be the baseline.

You might want to have a read over the FCC's Digital TV FAQ [dtv.gov].

Shadows are wrong!

[glpierce]

"shadows in DX10 are crisper and more accurate than in DX9. In the image below, the shadow in DX9 has blurry edges while the same shadow in DX10 has sharp and crisp edges"

That's great, except for the fact that shadows don't have crisp edges in the real world. Unless it's illuminated by a point-source (which immediately excludes the sun, lamps, flashlights, and pretty much every other light source you're likely to encounter), there will be a penumbra. The DX9 image here: http://www.hothardware.com/articleimages/item1031/big_stateofdx10_wic_shad.jpg [hothardware.com] is more realistic.

Simple flash example: http://www.goalfinder.com/Downloads/Shadows.swf [goalfinder.com]

Re:Motion

[Phil John]

That GeForce 8400 only has 16 stream processors (the basis of the Unified Architecture that makes up current gen graphics cards). The 8600's suffer a great deal with double that (32) as seen in their framerate tests (apart from BioShock most games were almost unplayable at 1280x1024 - which has become the "new 1024x768" baseline).

The minimum card you want for the new crop of direct x 10 games (to actually get the "eye candy" at anything over 800x600) is the 8800 GTS with 96 stream processors.

Of course, gp could always go for that as a "stop-gap" measure and then at least they're on the PCIe bandwagon. Once they have some more cash, get whatever the mid-range graphics card du jour is

Re:How far have WE come?

[n00854180t]

Well technically the hardware makers support shader model 4, which has the main and most promising feature that DirectX 10 supports: geometry shaders. It is a fairly big distinction, but this is a more accurate way of saying what they actually meant, "Shader model 4 was introduced by the hardware manufacturers and Microsoft supported it in DirectX 10." Using OGL extensions, you don't *need* DX10 or Vista to make use of the geometry shader. Now, granted there are a number of other changes that are nice in DX10, but the geometry shader is the *sole* reason that anyone is excited about SM4 (DX10). Being able to create geometry on the GPU is something entirely new and has a wide range of possible (and exciting) uses. A simple example of this is demonstrated by nVidia's procedural terrain demo. As an aside, there's no particular reason most if not all of the effects seen on the DX10 screenshots in the articles couldn't have been done in DX9. My suspicion is that most were done specifically in DX10 to promote sales of it, rather than because of any technical limitation.

Just jump to the summary.

[aepervius]

quote :

Are We There Yet? The DX10 exclusive effects available in the five games we looked at were usually too subtle to be noticed in the middle of heated gameplay. The only exception is Call of Juarez, which boasts greatly improved graphics in DX10. Unfortunately these image quality improvements can't entirely be attributed to DX10 since the North American version of the game -- the only version that supports DX10 -- had the benefit of a full nine months of extra development time. And much of the image quality improvements in Call of Juarez when using DX10 rendering were due to significantly improved textures rather than better rendering effects. Our test results also suggest that currently available DX10 hardware struggles with today's DX10 enhanced gaming titles. While high-end hardware has enough power to grind out enough frames in DX10 to keep them playable, mid-range hardware simply can't afford the performance hit of DX10. With currently available DX10 hardware and games, you have two choices if you want to play games at a decent frame rate; play the game in DX9 and miss out on a handful of DX10 exclusive image quality enhancements, or play the game in DX10 but be forced to lower image quality settings to offset the performance hit. In the end, it's practically the same result either way. While the new DX10 image quality enhancements are nice, when we finally pulled our noses off the monitor, sat back and considered the overall gameplay experience, DirectX 10 enhancements just didn't amount to enough of an image quality improvement to justify the associated performance hit. However, we aren't saying you should avoid DX10 hardware or wait to upgrade. On the contrary, the current generation of graphics cards from both ATI and NVIDIA offer many tangible improvements over the previous generation, especially in the high-end of the product lines. With the possible exception of some mid-range offerings, which actually perform below last generation's similarly priced cards, the current generation of graphics hardware has a nice leg-up in performance and features that is worth the upgrade. But if your only reason for upgrading is to get hardware support for DX10, then you might want to hold out for as long as possible to see how things play out.

/quote

Re: ai

[Anonymous Coward]

If the AI was smart, you wouldn't need a mob. You would only need a few individuals.

Just so you know, 'mob' is a term for an individual enemy in a game like that, which dates from text-based MUD days (which would explain why the person used the term, having explained that he writes AI for text-based adventures).

Hopefully your misunderstanding is cleared up.