AMD Demos DirectX 11-Capable ATI Graphics Card 107
An anonymous reader writes "Today at a press conference in Taiwan, AMD demonstrated the world's first GPU capable of DirectX 11 technology. The demonstrations shows the major improvements DirectX 11 gives us over DirectX 10 and also shows us what AMD has in store for an ATI Graphics Card coming out before the end of 2009 capable of DirectX 11. AMD shows three primary features of DirectX 11: a tessellator, which allows for less blocky and more fluid and realistic details; compute shaders which allows for less restricted programming; and finally, how DX11 is better designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores."
Will programmers be able to utilize? (Score:3, Interesting)
Closer to the ultimate goal (Score:2, Interesting)
Realistic 3D CGI porn. Of course.
Yet Another Feature... (Score:3, Interesting)
that isn't in XP, hence nobody cares. You'll have the what, 30% market segment with Vista, and maybe 10% that are regular gamers who will be using this.
This will just encourage the further brokenness that Windows is turning the PC gaming platform. Good Job!
PS: Before everyone jumps in to say that everyone will jump into Win7, I think you're mistaken. The only way Microsoft will kill XP for most existing users would be to introduce a critical bug that they choose not to fix. I played with Win7 for a few days and can safely say that it doesn't add anything that I've ever wanted to use that a trivial search for google wouldn't find an as-good or better alternative. And maybe its just me, but pretty much every single UI 'enhancement' since circa Win2k is always a step backwards in terms of -my- productivity.
Its lucky that I'm Linux competent since Fedora/Gnome makes practically everything I need easy and uncluttered. If the barrier for entry was a little lower, I could see mass exodus potential coming as XP users take an honest look at what they -really- want to update to.
The end of the CPU/GPU divide (Score:1, Interesting)
From the article:
Lastly, DX11 is better designed to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. This should allow developers to offload some of the work on to the processors that are typically there not doing as much work, freeing up the GPU to do the more important processing and rendering.
Interesting turnaround. The original motivation for the GPU was to allow the CPU to offload expensive graphics computation to a dedicated processor. Now it appears that that newer GPUs are allowed to offload their computation back to the CPU again.
This is further evidence that the CPU/GPU divide is being eliminated, and that there will likely be no such distinction among processors in the near feature.
Re:Will programmers be able to utilize? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think tessellation will be controllable on the driver side, in that case, you wont need to write specialized code in order to take advantage of it.
From what I understand, it is basically point based curve matching using differential calculus - a fundamental change in the way models are being rendered. So even for existing games, you just need to turn on tessellation processing with your graphics card driver, and you should be able to take advantage of it due to the fact it just changes the rendering method, models themselves and other parameters should remain the same.
Re:DX11 ALREADY? (Score:2, Interesting)
That is depend how you play the game. In Stalker Clear Sky I really used to hike through the area after I cleared it from the enemies because the graphics were just that beautiful.
Re:Direct X11? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Linux drivers? (Score:3, Interesting)
There's a reason it's a sore point for open source fanatics, it's not merely a blob addon it basicly ripped out a whole chunk of open source, said "not good enough" and replaced it with their own blob.
No one gives a shit if Nvidia said the open source part was "not good enough" - we give shit because what nvidia replaced it with is broken and can't be fixed. I wasted over $600 on two top-end nvidia cards due to their supposed "great linux support" only to have them fail to work with my high end monitor because of an extremely simple TMDS configuration bug in their driver.
When I jumped through all the hoops of their ultimately bullshit support on a freakin webforum and gave them all the debug output they requested and then even spelled out what the problem was and suggestions for them to fix it, all I got was dead fucking silence. Not even, a "we'll get to that in the next release or two," nada.
Open source fanatics are fanatics because open source lets us fix problems the vendor won't or can't. I was moderately pro-open source beforehand, but Nvidia pushed me firmly into the camp of fanatics after they wasted my money with their bullshit and false promises.