Here comes DirectX 11

[legendz411]

Do we even have a GPU that can fully handle DX10 yet? Last I saw, Crysis was the only game to make truely extensive use of DX10, and the top cards are still getting pushed around by that game at high resolution and aa enabled. The 8 series and 2xxx/3xxx series were obviously not ready for DX10, so I'd say skip the first gen DX11 cards.

Most of us do anyways. Only the early adopters buy them, then most regret it when the price drops $100+ dollars in 3-4weeks.

That's just it - they didn't try. We got a couple of crappy 360 ports. Where is the equivalent of Halo, developed exclusively for the PC? I don't mean a port of Halo 3, I mean a real new game, a real new IP that would only work on a PC because it is beyond what consoles can do. Something like Crysis, except, you know ... an actual playable fun game, and optimized so that it blows the barn doors off a pc running a top of the line GPU like a 4870 / GTX 2xx.

I resent that. Esp. seeing as how Crysis runs absolutly fine on my G92 GTS and it looks drop-dead gorgeous. Besides that fact, Crysis is a VERY fun and playable game. One of the best single players in a FPS in a long while.

Thank you.

 

[Scali2]

Most of us do anyways. Only the early adopters buy them, then most regret it when the price drops $100+ dollars in 3-4weeks.

Well, I would say that people who bought the 8800GTX at launch have gotten their money's worth. You can still play Crysis with an 8800GTX today, it should do about as well, if not better than a 9800GTX (it has more memory and more bandwidth, so it should scale better to higher resolutions/AA/AF settings).

Same goes for the Radeon 9700Pro back in the day, it could have lasted you until the DX10 era if you really wanted. I had a 9600XT, and I've played through pretty much all the big games of that era, like HalfLife 2, Doom 3, Far Cry, FEAR etc. I didn't quite make it to the DX10 era because I had to upgrade the rest of my machine, and my card was AGP. So I temporarily bought a GeForce 7600GT before I got my 8800GTS to usher in the DX10 era.

So basically for the past 2 generations of Direct3D, the first generation of hardware was a huge success.

 

[Frostex]

I'm not sure why people still think in terms of 'effects'.
DirectX is not an 'effect-library'. It's an API/programming model for GPUs.
Things like "DX10 effects" or "DX11 effects" simply don't exist. Effects are whatever you program.
A more elaborate programming model, together with a more powerful GPU simply allows you to implement certain effects more efficiently.

It's more like going from a Pentium 4 to a Core2. Core2 is more powerful but it doesn't have "Core2 effects" or anything. From a programming point-of-view, the Pentium 4 can do everything the Core2 can. The Core2 can just do some things more efficiently, and is faster overall, which enables new possibilities.

I'm not sure if I agree with this or not, certain effects are too complex to be realistically achieved on earlier versions of DX, the type of shaders that were used in HL2 for example, just aren't possible using the limitations of DX8 or before.

For the end user (gamers) it's easier to associate directx versions with the capabilities it enables that generation.

As for CPU's newer CPUs do tend to support more instruction sets like SSE and that sort of thing.

 

[Scali2]

I'm not sure if I agree with this or not, certain effects are too complex to be realistically achieved on earlier versions of DX, the type of shaders that were used in HL2 for example, just aren't possible using the limitations of DX8 or before.

Well, yes and no.
Firstly, HL2 with ps1.4 barely looks different from HL2 with ps2.0.
Secondly, this is outdated. One major problem with DX8 was the lack of precision. Effects could be done in multiple passes, but sometimes with unacceptable image quality.
Since we have floating point pixel processing, this is no longer an issue.

For the end user (gamers) it's easier to associate directx versions with the capabilities it enables that generation.

Is it? I'd have no idea what kind of capabilities DX9 or DX10 enable, because it's all very vague and differs from one title to the next. Crysis for example, handles a LOT of effects in DX9. The most striking difference with DX10 is the increased geometry detail, which is more a result of more processing power than of increased capabilities. The same level of detail can be enabled with a hack in DX9, and still performs very well on DX10-class hardware.

As for CPU's newer CPUs do tend to support more instruction sets like SSE and that sort of thing.

Yes, but SSE doesn't actually do anything new. We've had fully IEEE-compatible x87 processors since the late 70s (and for those that didn't own an actual x87, software emulation could perform the same operations). SSE simply does the same in a slightly more efficient way. Much like how DX10 can do some things faster than DX9 can. But we've pretty much passed the point where some things aren't doable at all.
In fact, with things like Cuda, pretty much everything is possible, even non-graphics tasks.

 

[evolucion8]

But the difference between DirectX 9 and DirectX 8 is more pronounced than DirectX 9 and DirectX 10. Direct X10 is just more efficient, has less draw calls thanks to the change in the display driver model on Vista, introduced Geometry Shaders, also got back the Integer operations on shaders (DX9 was only Float), higher registers, higher HDR precision, stuff like that allows to run more effects on real time, I know that DX9 could do lots of these effects, but probably would be unplayable. DX9 problem is the drawcall overhead that it has.

 

[Scali2]

There we go again... HDR?
There's no such thing as HDR as far as Direct3D is concerned.
What you have is floating-point rendertargets. That people want to implement HDR-postprocessing effects on them, nice, but D3D doesn't know nor care.