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DX9 Question

B

Badgercat

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 24, 2005
Messages
124
I have a question. Being a noob to video cards and gaming, I have no idea what the need is for a DX9 compatible card. I have a very good card that is DX 8.1. I have no wish to upgrade at this time, and I have never had a problem playing any game I want, and usually at resolutions of 1152x864 ( on my 17 inch not too bad i thought).

Can someone explain to me what the hype is on having a card that does DX9, why do I need it.

Also if someone does happen to convince me I need it, is it true that NVIDIA has forceware or something of the sort to make the card DX9?

thanks
 
DirectX 9 cards can do all the fancier (updated) pixel shading techniques, anti aliasing, filtering etc. In essence, you're getting more eye candy. If you used a directx 8 card your games wouldn't look as good and possibly not run as well.

As for upgrading directX compatibility with software.. no idea.
 
Badgercat said:
Can someone explain to me what the hype is on having a card that does DX9, why do I need it.
Click to expand...
Without DX9-level hardware you're missing out on all the amazing eye-candy offered by Shader 2.0 technology. One example is the water in Half-Life 2 (which makes heavy use of Shader 2.0 tech), check the DX8 vs DX9 comparison on the second screenshot here.....

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2281&p=2
 
ForceWare is just the name of their driver. It provides a DirectX 9-compatible interface to the hardware. That's different than the hardware itself being DirectX 9-compliant.
Even a GeForce256, which is a DirectX 7-compliant card, can use the DirectX 9 interface. It just cannot use the extra features (which boils down to eyecandy, pretty much... And some added performance here and there). For that you'd need a card that actually supports the features in hardware.

Apart from the eyecandy, DX9 cards are usually much faster and have better image quality. But you don't need one yet. The minimum requirements for games keep crawling up though, so eventually you're going to need a DX9 card to even start a game.
 
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