Direct X?

Hi. I was wondering if someone could explain the difference between the different versions of DirectX.

When I play Metro 2033 in DirectX 11 (in max settings), I get about 12fps average. If I use DirectX 9 or 10 (also in max settings), I get about 25-30fps average.

So I took 3 screenshots (DX9, DX10, DX11) of exactly the same place (the start of a level), and I compared them. I noticed no difference at all. There were a few slight differences, but nothing noticable.

So why is DX11 so demanding? why doesn't everyone play in dx9?

Thanks

 

DX11 has lots of new lighting and rendering features that force a GPU to work much harder for argubly little improvement in image quality. Lots of people still play in DX9 mode if possible as their cards either don't support DX11 (limited to cards released last year onwards) or aren't powerful enough to do DX11.

 

I couldn't see any difference between the screenshots at all though. The only noticable thing was the double frames per second I got in dx9.

I think i'll be playing metro in dx9 from now

 

I wouldn't be that harsh on the new DX versions. DX9 has been around for a decade, so everyone is very well versed with it. DX11 is quite new. I'm sure a few years down the road we'll see some amazing things.

 

Am I mistaken in concluding that less than 10 games right now have support for DX11 with all the fancy tesselation and occlusion rendering and lighting features?

DX10 efficiency gains haven't been realised much if at all, hence the widespread popularity of DX9(?).

Edit: I'm very mistaken. Wikipedia is great for simple lookup of facts.

 

DX11 is also faster than DX9. For the same processes, DX11 is 30-40% faster than DX9. It just happens developers use more post processing with DX11 so it does seem to work harder than DX9.

DX11 is also much better at multi-threading, which all leads to DX11 is much faster than DX9. Just because DX11 has more features than DX9 doesn't mean it's slower, it's the opposite.

 

If only the developers decided to focus less on piling on the new taxing features and more on code optimization for faster gameplay, then we'd be seeing the theoretical gains possible from DX11.

 

Dragon Age 2 did that very well I thought. It's really quite fast and so is Bad Company 2. Dirt 2 not too shabby either. Only a few games like Metro 2033 and AvP didn't optimize well. Rebellion now defunct and doubt seeing another game from 4A anytime soon, so they suffered the consequence for making games that run like crap.

 

Possibly an aside, but isn't the DX11 renderer for Dragon Age 2 really awful for Nvidia owners? In addition, it's one of three games that observers can confirm DX11 runs faster than DX9, or would that be wrong?

 

source? made up statistic?

 

You can't use google?

 

I think you mean it's faster than 10.1. DX11 is on par with DX9, speed wise.

 

My thoughts exactly...

 

Most of DX10.1 codepaths ended up in DX11. Maybe you mean DX10? That would make sense, afaik.

 

DX11 renderer is faster than DX9/10 renderer (the benefits over 10 are only in very specific things such as lighting and tesselation.) Running DX11 means you'll see some pretty impressive graphics improvements but only if the game really takes advantage of them.