Real Life DirectX 10 Performance 67
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."
Poor PC gamers... (Score:5, Funny)
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Compare this performance to being able to run ANY dx9 game at that res, with all features (except AA of course, thats not really needed at that rez) on and fraps it at decent frame rate to boot and you see that D
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What people have to realize is that graphics and sound are PART OF THE GAMEPLAY EXPERIENCE. Imagine playing Halo without the soundtrack playing in the background, or riding across the field in Zelda:OoT without the theme music playing. Imagine playing Warcraft III with crappy 2D 600x400 graphics or playing Banjo Kazooie for the N64 in black and white and 3 polygons per model.
These things would ruin
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I am not talking about the gaming "experience", I am talking about gameplay: how fluid the controls are, how intuitive the action is, how the game can offer something new each time.
SimCity 3000 has marginal graphics compared to SimCity 4, but it has better gameplay.
That means ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:That means ... (Score:5, Insightful)
DX10 doesnt have "performance". DX10 is an API. You can benchmark API quality by a great many things, but performance is fairly irrelevant when that performance is tied so much to the undelying hardware.
DX10 is a good API if in a couple of years time, the shader models match the industry direction and there isnt a whole bunch of GL_EXT_OBS_ASS_HATTERY_BUF_GAY_PRIMITIVE extensions to make things work. This is likely considering the industry partnership arrangements MS have.
Anandtech can enjoy their cry that their hardware wasnt good enough to make the most of DX10. This is really a good thing for the API, it means that DX10 has some lifetime. A scarier headline would have been "Current Gen Cards Can Max Out What DX10 Is Capable Of". That would be the death of an API...
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I mean, come on, you shell out $5k for a computer, you expect it to be shithot. It would be (and the graphical difference marginal) in DX9 over DX10. If we could compare XP to Vista performance you'd probably see where the issues lay - a bloated OS that is resource hungry vs a bloated OS that's less res
Re:That means ... (Score:5, Interesting)
DX10 is an API with a built-in performance penalty. The way it is designed has all sorts of restrictions and limitations on how things are done. Why? In order to make it "DRM enhanced". Whether you are using DRM content or not, the video system is required to operate under DRM rules. It prohibits things like direct memory access, just in case you happen to have DRM video somewhere and you tried to do a video capture. It also imposes a variety overhead costs, like validating memory accesses to prevent you from reading or writing anyplace that could impact DRM security. It cripples functions or continuously re-validates function calls to ensure that they cannot be called in any manner that might be a threat to the DRM system.
You can benchmark API quality by a great many things, but performance is fairly irrelevant when that performance is tied so much to the undelying hardware.
Normally correct, but in this case the API deliberately hamstrings the hardware.
DX10 is a good API if in a couple of years time
Yes, faster hardware will speed things up. However that faster speed will still be slower than it would have been without DX10.
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I am talking about *general* communication in both directions between the video card and the computer, not just DMA. Computer memory is DRM secured against the video card, and video card memory is DRM secured against the rest of the computer. Any functionality that could possibly threaten DRM security on either side is either prohibited entirely or castrated and loaded with constant checks and DRM-security validations. I probably should cite some specific technical details to back
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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 o
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Can you provide some sources to verify the claims and give more information?
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Thanks! I shot (thankfully) lukewarm coffee out of my nose!
Uhhhh (Score:2)
Kinda, but . . (Score:3, Insightful)
that people who bought DX10 cards so that in the future they will be able to play DX10 games when they come out have basically been sold a "Pig in a Poke".
You are correct IF that is the only reason they bought them.
But the fact is, anyone who bought an 8800 of any variety (the "dx10 cards") bought the fastest DX9 card on the market for use with any game they wanted at the time of purchase. It spanked the next card down, and didn't carry any more of a price premium than any other high end card in the history of discrete graphics (indeed, it carried less of a premium if you looked at price/performance). It was a fast card "right then" regardless of DX10. They
What if (Score:1)
Never upgrade too early (Score:5, Insightful)
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I've played both games on a GeForce 4 MX (the minimum supported card: no shaders, slower than GeForce 3), and honestly it was playable, even though not at very high settings.
Later on when I got a faster GeForce with a bazillion of pipelines a
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While we're giving anecdotal evidence... When I bought Oblivion I played it on an (unsupported) GeForce 4 Ti4600. I had to use the Oldblivion hack just to get it to run, disabling shaders and running at the lowest possible settings.
About a year later I played again with a C2D and a 7600 GT. It's like a complete
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Re:Never upgrade too early (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't buy a quad core for 266$ US in July 22n'd after the price drops, by the time a game ACTUALLY needs or uses it, a quad core will be 80$ US and faster.......
Same with a 500 / 600/ 700$ DX10 card, you want to play DX10 games fast? by the time the games come out we'll have the GF8900 not the 8800 (for example)
etc etc etc
Hell, Carmack demo'd Doom 3 on the GF3 with it's amazing shaders! - what actual cards ended up extensively using shaders and looking good / fast in Doom 3?
Hi
Depends on why you are upgrading (Score:2)
2560x1600 is real life? (Score:4, Insightful)
"OMG I can't push 30498230894384023984 pixels/sec through my DX10 card, DX10 sucks."
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Shadowrun (Score:3, Insightful)
According to Microsoft, its simply not possible as the XP version is still under development. It comes as no big surprise that DX9 can do 90% of what DX10 can do, especially since DX10 is Vista-only. Its just another attempt to push an operating system that very few people want. I'm sure I'll end up with a copy of it in a few years, but very few people actually want it right now.
No developer outside of Microsoft in their right mind would make a Vista-only game right now. It would be like releasing some Virutal Boy games.
Re:Shadowrun (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Shadowrun (Score:4, Funny)
10 FPS is not playable. (Score:1)
At this point (Score:3, Interesting)
At this point DirectX 10 is more or less just a plaything. Cards are out supporting it, since hardware is almost always ahead of software (harder to develop for something that doesn't exist), but it is brand new and few systems support it (only systems running Vista using teh very newest graphics hardware). IT is at this point a curiosity for the most part. It's not really useful to start talking about performance until there's been a good deal more time for people to work with it, including making games designed for it, not ported to it.
What's the future like? (Score:2, Insightful)
What's the future of the cards' successors like? How long before graphics cards are g
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Someone will come out with lower powered budget versions.
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But I'm more interested in what's going to happen on the high-end and how that's going to work out. I can (unfortunately) imagine 400W "cards" for DirectX 11
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And there's plenty of benefits to having older games nowadays. New games are often incredibly buggy, and receive several updates over their lifespan. If you play older games, then those updates have already happened so your experience of the game won't be so buggy as the early adopters.
Plus, there are more likely to be nocd cracks available, so you don't have to deal with keeping physical media around all the time.
And finally, ol
DX10 performance will take time (Score:4, Insightful)
As soon as NVidia releases certified drivers for doing SLI in Vista. The problem with driving 30" LCDs will disappear.
People are forgetting how many years it takes to create a new AAA game title and the fact that game developers still have very little reason to be attracted to Vista. What with it's small installed base and hardware requirements for consumers.
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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
Hardware virtualization (Score:5, Informative)
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Decent graphics cards have been able to do this for ages. My Radeon X1900XT can do this just fine while playing games in Windows XP, and I play games at 1650x1050 with max settings and 4xAA 8xAF, and I still have plenty of "juice" left ove
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I can watch a video downloaded from the net in XVid on my HDTV whilst playing a game on my monitor, as I expect the game is handled by one core of my CPU and the video by the other. The graphics card isn't really doing much work for the video other than outputting the signal on one of the DVI ports (there's probably a separate chip for this per port, but I'm
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Amen, brotha. It's about freaking time!
If I had a dollar for every time I have been lurking through some part of town in Thief3 -- creeping through the shadows, pickpocketing the locals, trimming Hammerites' nosehairs with broadheads at 100 yards, jumping out of my skin at even the most barely audible footstep, the usual -- and thought to myself, "Hey, I am like totally in the mood for some Top Gun. I've lost
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possible vs. obtainable? (Score:3, Insightful)
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What's the difference between "possible" and "actually obtainable"?
Good question. :-)
The former tends to mean what is doable in theory or in practice, but may not correspond to any actual realistic situation. For example, if you stuff nothing but data down the PCI (AGP, PCIe, whatever) bus, you get a rate which is about the bandwidth of the underlying bus, but in reality, you have to do some setup and so forth (ie, configure the target address and size for a DMA transfer) before blasting data bits, and other PCI devices also get to get some bus cycles, so the actually
Harf. (Score:3, Interesting)
Does DirectX9 have all the capabilities needed to run something like Aero? Yes, but DirectX9 also runs on systems which would drag under the demands of something like Aero. Microsoft has a vested interest in preventing their new software from running on hardware which will struggle with Aero, because then there'll be a lot of people complaining about how (insert the bad side of slow Aero here.)
DirectX10 has a much higher minimum bar to entry. If your stuff is DirectX10 ready, it's almost certainly Aero ready. That's why they made the requirement - they didn't want old hardware making their shiny new product look like crap. (That it forces new hardware purchase, which gets OEMs and VARs to support the new OS, certainly helps.)
If you look at it from a business perspective at the same time that you look at it from a technical and an "oh god I have to deal with stupid users" perspective, you'll start to see why just using the DirectX name to set the new low watermark was actually a relatively simple way for Microsoft to flatten several problems at once.
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let me see... (Score:2)