DX11 - will it actually matter?

Mr. Bluntman

Mr. Bluntman

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With the glut of developers mulling over DX10, coupled with the fact that due to current console capabilities are limited to DX9 thus influencing multi-platform development, what impact do you think DirectX 11 will have on game development? If any?

I'm hoping it will give developers a reason to put better emphasis on PC development because of the hardware and API's superior flexibility, but still do not have high hopes because of the cashing out on this generation of consoles.

So what do you think, [H]?
 
Next Console generation should be DX11, so then thats when more DX11 games will be made. Of course there will be a few DX11 pc first games but since game developers will have to wait for the hardware we've got a while.
 
DX9 brought a ton to the table graphically.

DX10 and DX10.1 not so much, mostly reduced shader passes and efficiencies. Most other things weren't heavily noticeable. Will DX11 be different? Don't know. I've not got my hopes up for miracles.

More polygons and higher resolution textures along with our current visual tricks I think is where most graphical improvements are going to be seen.

Or full on ray-tracing, granted by Larrabee, if it lives up to the hype and can bring the necessary horsepower to the table. Of which I am skeptical of that as well.
 
I think one of the big things will be tesselation since both (or should I say all three?) camps will have to support it. Am I the only one annoyed by models "popping" when switching LOD?
 
Well if MS didn't fuck around with the direct x11 screenshots like they did with the dx10 promos, then this is how it will look I guess.
 
 
Menelmarar said:
Or full on ray-tracing, granted by Larrabee, if it lives up to the hype and can bring the necessary horsepower to the table. Of which I am skeptical of that as well.
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Larrabee won't be bringing real time ray tracing. If we see real time ray tracing (which I doubt, since its largely pointless - a hybrid approach makes more sense), it will be from OpenCL and the raw power granted by current nvidia and ATI cards. There isn't anything magical about Larrabee that makes it better suited to ray tracing than current cards.
 
With XP still being so popular and DX11 limited to Vista/Win7, I doubt game devs will be jumping on it any time soon. As said earlier DX9 was the last really big upgrade to DX, everything after that has been tweaks.
 
Given that DX11 incorporates feature sets for DX10, DX10.1, and DX11 hardware, and that it will be available for both Vista and Win7, and brings a bunch of optimizations and multi-core features to the table, it will be a big win for developers vs. the DX9/DX10 straddling.
 
I dont think DX11 will change anything, infact DX9 may be able to do similar effects for far less hardware requirements, with that said im still getting W7 and a DX11 hardware.
 
BlueStorm said:
Given that DX11 incorporates feature sets for DX10, DX10.1, and DX11 hardware, and that it will be available for both Vista and Win7, and brings a bunch of optimizations and multi-core features to the table, it will be a big win for developers vs. the DX9/DX10 straddling.
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We'll see. At this point DX 10 doesn't seem to be that relevant, with large games such as Fallout 3 using DX 9 only, yet still being hailed as one of the most visually impressive games in a long time.

It'll take at least 1-2 years before we'll see any significant uptake of DX11 at any rate (engines and tools need to mature).
 
If early indicatons are accurate then it seems win7 will have a much faster adoption rate th
an vista had and this is a good thing. Between the next gen consoles and win7 i think dx11 will take off nicely, unlike the abortion that was dx 10/vista.
 
I've read that because DX11 is just feature add-ons of DX10, that developers can make games with DX11 features and not need to make a DX10 version. One game client will run on both, just if you run it in DX10 you won't get some of the features.
 
I have high hopes for DX 11 as well. Since anything that can be made easier for the developer to do through the API is always a good thing. And also DX 11 at least some components as far as I can understand can run on DX 10 hardware.

And yeah I am definitely one of those people who is going to upgrade to win7 when SP1 gets released for it probably.
 
surya said:
I have high hopes for DX 11 as well. Since anything that can be made easier for the developer to do through the API is always a good thing. And also DX 11 at least some components as far as I can understand can run on DX 10 hardware.

And yeah I am definitely one of those people who is going to upgrade to win7 when SP1 gets released for it probably.
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Why wait for SP1?
 
If DX10 was any indication not for a year or two after the release of Windows 7. In other words, if I were shopping for hardware today I wouldn't sweat it.
 
directx is just an api , it makes programming the hardware easier. Nothing more nothing less. That is to say, API itself is insignificant without the leap jump in hardware capabilities.
 
surya said:
Because thats when an OS really matures IMHO. And also it will give me enough time to build a whole new system around the Intel Westmere processor next year :) Its all about timing :)
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xp was garbage untill SP2 fyi, Vista still has problems with SP1 and weird copying speeds, saying an os "matures" with SP1 is retarded.

and FYI i'm using vista 64 sp1
 
risqu3 said:
xp was garbage untill SP2 fyi, Vista still has problems with SP1 and weird copying speeds, saying an os "matures" with SP1 is retarded.

and FYI i'm using vista 64 sp1
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I think Windows 7 will finally be Windows done right. We shall see though.

Back on topic? DX11 - win or fail?
 
DX11 = win

I think it will be mostly because you get improvements in multi core threading. Maybe we will finally see having more cores in the cpu finally start paying off without having to make sure that the program was written for it from the start. The other thing being the support from next gen consoles will help push it into mainstream quicker.

As for the Win 7 thing, I think it will be seen as a very stable OS launch from MS. Unlike XP/Vista, Win 7 was support to be Vista, but the OS was cut in half and made into two parts: 1) The unloved, abortion as some see, that was Vista and 2) Win7 which should have followed XP. I think it will win a lot of people over from XP since it seems to be mostly Vista SP2 in the making for ~4 yrs. Lots of time to get it right, especially when you already have a public version (Vista) out there to get usable feed back from.
 
My question is will we have to download the latest DirectX updates for DX11 like we do currently with DX9.

Are there even DX10 updates?
 
I've read that you could upgrade to dx11 with vista. Don't quote since I don't remember the source.
 
htphm42 said:
I've read that you could upgrade to dx11 with vista. Don't quote since I don't remember the source.
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Yes

The thing with DX10 was it was revolutionary with how DX was incorporated into Windows, and it got rid of alot of legacy support too. It took alot of the forefront of problems and will probably be seen as an overall dissapointment to alot of people, but it was a needed step to keep moving forward with the API. DX11 will not have most of these problems, DX10 has alot of developers for it now and with DX11 the transition will be smoother then going from DX9 to DX10 was.

DX11 will be a win, but DX10 was also a win, just not graphical wise and I'm not even sure DX11 will be a huge step forward with graphics, hopefully it incorporates more physics so we don't have seperate API's needed.
 
Elledan said:
I vote for 'meh' :p

It's an evolutionary change. OpenGL 3.0 and 3.1 are ground-shifting changes in comparison.
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What do you think will be the most useful changes in the API, speaking as a programmer (IIRC)?
 
Dx11 should not offer too many changes but enough to allow newer games to be programed to run smoother with more features and better graphics. Question more important is when will we see dx11 cards. I am dying to upgrade and would hate to dropcash on card that's gonna be obsolete soon.
 
No DX will really matter until the next gen consoles appear and support it, and chances are they will come out in 2012 and hence probably support at least DX12. Most of the DX11 we will see in the short term is where ati/nvidia have paid to get it added.

It's not like we even use all the functionality we already have in older DX's - for example the big selling point of DX11 is tessellation but you've got to remember that we've already got something similar with true displacement mapping in DX10 (possibly DX9 too), which can achieve similar effects but a different way. e.g.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hollywood-nature-compared,2049-8.html

Nothing much uses it (other then crysis on very high) because it's another performance hit (tessellation will obviously hit performance too).

So while I agree tessellation is cool, it's no more cool then the displacement mapping we already have and don't see much of.
 
Fun part is of course that not even MSFT's own console uses DX. Out there it's only OpenGL ES and some weird DX-like dialect which isn't directly compatible with DX. Since PC gaming is apparently dying this would mean that DX11 won't matter one bit :p
 
surya said:
Because thats when an OS really matures IMHO. And also it will give me enough time to build a whole new system around the Intel Westmere processor next year :) Its all about timing :)
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Windows 7 is an incremental build on Vista and runs great. There's no need to wait for SP1.

There wasn't really anything horribly wrong with Vista on its release either, other than really awful driver support for the first couple months.
 
risqu3 said:
xp was garbage untill SP2 fyi, Vista still has problems with SP1 and weird copying speeds, saying an os "matures" with SP1 is retarded.

and FYI i'm using vista 64 sp1
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Even SP2 had same issues, ultra low copying! Vista was crap imho.
 
DX11 has something that even non-gamers can appreciate - dx compute. When Microsoft finally gets around to using GPU acceleration in Windows you can bet they won't be using OpenCL...
 
SharpieFiend said:
DX11 has something that even non-gamers can appreciate - dx compute. When Microsoft finally gets around to using GPU acceleration in Windows you can bet they won't be using OpenCL...
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Oh yes, how wonderful, using a completely proprietary 'standard' over a completely open and universal one. I can see that one going down really well :p
 
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