DX 11

C

Cally

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 27, 2005
Messages
505
I tried the search but nothing came back for what I want to know. What do I need to run DX11 game graphics? I am running DX10 now and game update will impprove that to DX!!
 
5.6 years on a tech forum and you are really asking such a question??

you need Vista or 7, a DX11 card and a DX11 game of course.
 
It's important to note that compatibility with older hardware is built-in to DirectX11.

featurelevels.png


You will never be in a position where you won't be able to play a DirectX11 game because you "only" have DirectX10 or 10.1 hardware.

DirectX11 vs. 10 is an evolutionary rather than revolutionary step. Running on DX10 hardware you will be using Shader Model 4.0 or 4.1 vs. 5.0 and you will miss out on some DX11-only features such as tessellation. The difference is certainly not night and day, judge for yourself:

tesson.png
tessoff.png


Tessellation vs. No Tessellation. IMO, one of those features like HBAO in BC2 that make little difference and are better off disabled for extra performance.
 
Just because you choose to pick a piss poor example of tesselation doesn't make it "not night and day". I could just as easily take screen shots of heavily tesselated instances and make it look night and day.
 
IRSmurf said:
I could just as easily take screen shots of heavily tesselated instances and make it look night and day.
Click to expand...

Then do it.

And those screens weren't taken by me either, they were from a review published months ago; they hardly constitute a cherry picked example.
 
I really like that demo except the cobblestone roads which would be a hazard to anybody attempting to walk on them.
 
hdgamer said:
directx-11-heaven-tessellation_maxwidth.jpg
Click to expand...

That is a screenshot from the haven benchmark. The entire purpose of the benchmark is to showcase tessellation so I'm not sure how that is supposed to be comparable to a real situation you would encounter in a game. The screenshots I posted were from Metro2033 (a real game).

Are those boulders in the road supposed to be cobblestones? I guess exaggerated tessellation is what you get when you set the tessellation to "Extreme" in that benchmark lol
 
hdgamer said:
directx-11-heaven-tessellation_maxwidth.jpg
Click to expand...

Worst example ever, there are many ways to raise the cobblestones, infact, the raised cobblestones have almost nothing to do with tessellation, tessellation smooths surfaces, a better example would be a low quality sphere , and then show it again tessellated.
 
Tesselation does look fantastic on water and many other surfaces...just no games that I know of use it yet. So, is it worth the uprade? Definitely! is it worth it right now? Nope!

But if you are buying a new high end card you get it for free so nothing lost.
 
Tessellation is going to take a while to catch up in games.... Metro barely touches it whatsoever.

I suspect we will eventually start seeing things as heavily tessellated as in Heaven, it just comes down to devs finding it worth exporting a hightmap for it.
 
GotNoRice said:
You will never be in a position where you won't be able to play a DirectX11 game because you "only" have DirectX10 or 10.1 hardware.
Click to expand...

That's mostly but not totally accurate. You can only run the DX11 path on older hardware if a developer has explicitly enumerated and supported those older feature levels (dx9, dx10, dx10.1) in their DX11 path... it's not automatic.

In the short term, I can see some devs will not do that, and will just do DX11 on the DX11 path, and DX9 from a totally separate exe (maybe utilizing their old engine).
 
If you're a game dev who cares about sales, you will not want to press TOO far ahead in terms of graphics hardware, especially if you are designing for consoles in mind. (The combined console game market is much larger than the PC game market. Many game devs follow the money, i.e., develop for consoles first and port it to PC later.)

The XBOX360 and PS3 for instance are locked into DX9, and they have slower graphics than a 8800GT. That's one reason why DX10 and DX11 are seeing fairly slow adoption. BFBC2 added some DX11 effects in as a bonus, but you can bet that they coded with DX9 and consoles in mind.
 
The relative cost of adding tesselation vs adding other advanced features to a DX9 game is lower because the game artists have already created the very high polygon count models. You just need the disk space for the higher detail version as well as the heavily cut down ones.
 
I remember when ATI first tried to debut tesselation in gaming with truform way back in early 2000s (forgot when exactly), and it did make a huge noticeable difference when working properly. Flash forward to today though, game polygon counts are much higher (a characters head in modern games uses more polys then the entire model for a character back then) the noticeable difference is of course much less.

For instance the Heaven example used, there are many ways to do a better representation of a cobblestone road (a bit of extreme tesselation there haha) without even resorting to DX 11.

I feel that most likely we won't see another leap similar to DX 9 until a version incorporates high level physics or elements of ray tracing.
 
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Digital Viper-X- said:
Worst example ever, there are many ways to raise the cobblestones, infact, the raised cobblestones have almost nothing to do with tessellation, tessellation smooths surfaces, a better example would be a low quality sphere , and then show it again tessellated.
Click to expand...

Tessellation adds geometric detail which can be used for smoothing but also for a lot of other things - like adding more detail to an object. In conjunction with displacement mapping it dramatically increases the granularity that you're working with at the polygon mesh level. Notice how the strap on the pouch on the guy's arm in those Metro 2033 shots is just a texture in both the screenshots? Proper use of tessellation would have that strap appear as actual geometric detail instead of just a pasted on texture.

blastingcap said:
Are you sure about this?
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Yes, the models that are designed in tools like Maya and 3ds Max are very high quality. After the design is completed they are simplified and downsampled to much lower detail polygon meshes for inclusion in 3D games. During this step normal maps are also created to help regain some of the lost detail but obviously things like normal maps are just lighting tricks that can't ever replace actual geometric detail.
 
trinibwoy said:
Yes, the models that are designed in tools like Maya and 3ds Max are very high quality.
Click to expand...

Interesting, you wrote that (used "are" instead "can be") as if there were only one level of detail for models: very high. I would have expected devs to aim for a console-level of detail in 3d models, rather than spend extra computing power on more-detailed models that only PC gamers would ever really experience. If they spend extra resources, I certainly won't complain, as I am 100% PC.
 
blastingcap said:
Interesting, you wrote that (used "are" instead "can be") as if there were only one level of detail for models: very high. I would have expected devs to aim for a console-level of detail in 3d models, rather than spend extra computing power on more-detailed models that only PC gamers would ever really experience. If they spend extra resources, I certainly won't complain, as I am 100% PC.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what you mean. Designing models isn't that computing intensive, it's the artists who do all the work. If you were an artist would you want to create something that looked ugly from the start and isn't detailed enough to work with as you're refining it? :) The models that these guys make don't ever appear in the game, not even on the PC. They are far too detailed to be sent over PCIe, hence the need for tessellation.

http://books.google.com/books?id=_4WwJAP6yigC&pg=PA162#v=onepage&q&f=false
 
trinibwoy said:
I'm not sure what you mean. Designing models isn't that computing intensive, it's the artists who do all the work. If you were an artist would you want to create something that looked ugly from the start and isn't detailed enough to work with as you're refining it? :) The models that these guys make don't ever appear in the game, not even on the PC. They are far too detailed to be sent over PCIe, hence the need for tessellation.

http://books.google.com/books?id=_4WwJAP6yigC&pg=PA162#v=onepage&q&f=false
Click to expand...

Thanks, and don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of pushing DX11 faster, seeing as how I have a DX11 card already. I'm just don't think the industry is in a rush to get there, so long as DX9-era consoles make up most of the video game market.
 
Yep, which is why it's all the more sad that all the attempts at tessellation on the PC so far have been relatively piss poor.
 
i'm not even sure why you guys are answering the OP. tell him to use google like the rest of the world. you know the saying, teach a man to fish...
 
cannondale06 said:
5.6 years on a tech forum and you are really asking such a question??

you need Vista or 7, a DX11 card and a DX11 game of course.
Click to expand...

Regardless of the number of years I have been a member of this forum I tend not to keep up with the current trends unless I am about to make a hardware change. If you don't have an answer to my question why did you go out of your way to not help?
I appreciate those that do offer a situation to my question.
 
GotNoRice said:
It's important to note that compatibility with older hardware is built-in to DirectX11.

featurelevels.png


You will never be in a position where you won't be able to play a DirectX11 game because you "only" have DirectX10 or 10.1 hardware.

DirectX11 vs. 10 is an evolutionary rather than revolutionary step. Running on DX10 hardware you will be using Shader Model 4.0 or 4.1 vs. 5.0 and you will miss out on some DX11-only features such as tessellation. The difference is certainly not night and day, judge for yourself:

tesson.png
tessoff.png


Tessellation vs. No Tessellation. IMO, one of those features like HBAO in BC2 that make little difference and are better off disabled for extra performance.
Click to expand...

If there is a difference between these 2 photos I can't see it. Guess DX11 isn't that big an improvement over 10. Thanks for the visual explanation it helped.
 
Cally said:
If there is a difference between these 2 photos I can't see it. Guess DX11 isn't that big an improvement over 10. Thanks for the visual explanation it helped.
Click to expand...

There are a few differences, look at the sleeve, and pouch on the sleeve for one, middle part of the goggles too
 
IRSmurf said:
Crysis 2 will have tessellation
Click to expand...
I've heard this a few times, but I've yet to see anything from Crytek's CryEngine 3 presentations that make mention of tessellation or anything to do with surface subdivision. Got a link?

So while we're on the topic of tessellation, could someone explain to me if art assets must be created differently for tessellation? I mean, if tessellation was as easy as feeding a displacement map to the Domain Shaders, then I think Dirt/AvP/Metro would have made a much bigger use of it. When I look at Heaven in wireframe mode, I see a lot of the models seem to be made of grids of quads or triangles arranged into regular hexagonal patterns. Can DX11 tessellation only subdivide surfaces that are (by definiton) already tessellated?

Edit: I just want to make sure Cally understood what GotNoRice said with respect to compatibility. In order for you to experience a feature like tessellation in a game you need:
A) A game that implements a DirectX 11 codepath, and within that code path implements a feature like Tessellation. It's entirely possible for a game to be technically running DX11 code without using all of the features available to DX11.
B) The DX11 runtime needs to be available on your machine, which can only be installed on Windows Vista or Windows 7.
C) DX11 compatible hardware. A video card that supports DX11 must implement all of the features described by DX11. Partial compatibility isn't an option anymore.
As GotNoRice indicates, if you do not have DX11 hardware, the game can still use the DX11 runtime via its DX11 codepath. The runtime will simply run in a feature-reduced mode suitable for your hardware.
 
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Cally said:
Regardless of the number of years I have been a member of this forum I tend not to keep up with the current trends unless I am about to make a hardware change. If you don't have an answer to my question why did you go out of your way to not help?
I appreciate those that do offer a situation to my question.
Click to expand...
but I did answer your question didn't I? most of the stuff others are arguing about has little to do with your actual question.
 
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