DirectX 10, What is all the Fuss?

I came across an interesting article for newbie gamers...actually anyone will find it informative:
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=30


comments and discussions welcome

 

The basic point is sound and the paper comparisons are ok but in their visual comparison, comparing Dx9 to Dx10, they compare the facial expressions of Halo - several years old - to Crysis. Yeah, because that's a just comparison! It'd be like judging a new graphics card against a 9800Pro.

Anyway, the fuss about Dx10 isn't so great now, in practice. Games aren't taking overly great use of it. Crysis will probably be the best example, up until now differences are minute and in COH it degrades performance so badly that its not even playable unless using high end hardware.

 

quite misleading pictures.
for instance, the FSX screenshot (the one on the right) is NOT an actual DirectX 10 render, it's simply an artistic impression of how FSX will look with DirectX 10 patch... so it's photoshopped...

as matter of fact, FSX in DirectX 10 will look no where near that... probably FSXXII will...

 

Ya its photoshopped ....but the article is a good read.

 

Actually I am impressed so far with DX10. Just take a look at World in Conflict maxed, looks really good if you have rig that can play it.

 

When I bought my Toshiba, I had DX10 in mind... and after playing my fav games... now I don't! Going for power! Got an sli sager on the way. It will take massive power to be able to max out the DX10 settings to make games look better than DX9, and that power doesn't exist in laptops yet. And the upcoming 8800m, I believe, will help, but won't be enough yet. Next gen should do it.

 

HUh? Thats already it, enabling dx10 already makes games better. Look at bioshock.

 

Couldn't run it at high res with setting maxed, thats my point. I'm more interested in smooth gameplay at this point. I like to run max res, all settings maxed, not to mention an lcd display looks best at native res.

 

Having the resolution higher and the settings maxed (minus DX10) is better than having DX10 on. DX10 should only be a concern AFTER you have reached the "maximum" desired settings.

Otherwise you are looking at a minor update. (Most of the "dramatic" changes in those pictures are due to low resolution DX9 renders versus DX10 "photoshopping" - where they render as little as possible to make it look as awesome as it does, when it reality the game will never look that good.)

BioShock gives us a great example of DX10 versus DX9. Not really a huge difference right now and by the time it is a major difference, it will be mostly because of the hardware. (Better graphics cards means better looking graphics. . . duh!)

 

DX10 was just another selling point for Vista IMHO. Another reason to "force" people to upgrade from XP, hence why they refuse to support DX10 on XP.
I rather like Vista though, so it's a moot point I guess, and since I don't have any intentions to buy the latest and greatest games that are DX10 only (no new games that really interest me at this point), then it doesn't really matter.
And I don't care what Microsoft says, anything is really programmatically possible, they COULD support DX10 in XP if they want to, but they don't want XP to compete with their new OS (it already is though, sales of XP are still sky high). As a matter of fact, on that note, Microsoft not too long ago came out with SP2C for system builders, just to accomodate new product keys cause XP has been so popular lately.
Windows Defender isn't so integrated with Vista either as they want you to believe. I don't know if it's a bug, but having the original RTM version (build 6000), I can rename the Windows Defender folder (but can't delete). The only "integration", is a few buttons for Defender in Security Center, along with the Defender dialog. Just cosmetic stuff.
Sorry, getting off topic and just talking out loud I guess.

 

Yes, Windows Defender.....Genuine Windows Bloatware! Oops, now I'm getting off topic.

 

I shouldn't even have right to post this topic seeing my graphic card....hey i have been fooled by hp or wat...they said 288 MB VRAM available and its 128 MB MAX

 

DX 10 is just another reason to buy Vista ....and Crysis can run with dx 9.0c.

 

Must be the Turbocache...

 

I doubt....I have been hearing HP misleads customers by giving inaccurate facts....one guy managed to make HP realise this and HP apologised and gave him choice to upgrade RAM for free or replace his laptop to get a new better laptop

 

Vista isn't worth it even for DX10... At least until SP1 comes out.

 

dx10 is far too young, I thought it was supposed to allow for better performance at the same settings. There by extrapolating would make me conclude that greater settings would equal the same performance which is far from true. Although dx10 Lost planet looks sexy, having a 8800ultra and not being able to play on full settings with dx10 really bytes.

 

Vista is just a stop-gap between XP and Windows 7.

Windows 7 will be the worthwhile upgrade... not Vista. Vista = Windows ME

 

Lost planet was terribly encoded. Nothing to do with dx10 or vista.

 

Yeah, on mid and high end nVidia cards, most UT3 engine games run as good or better with DX10 on, though the visual increase isn't huge, especially at lower settings.

 

So far I have not personally seen a game with any noticeable difference in graphics between DX9 and DX10 however even looking nearly the same the DX10 games so far have all had about a 50% frames per second hit on the machine. Definitely not worth it.

Whats worse is the fact that if you read into DX10 it was not designed to look better than DX9 it was designed to run better. Aka be faster with more fps and require less system resources not more. (this I thought would be the godsend for notebook users, because our cards are not nearly as strong as a desktop card so if they optimized games for DX10, we would use these new 8600gt cards we have and maybe have the power of a higher card running in DX9.)

So far looks like EVERY game developer has been trying to add some extra visual stuff in with DX10 instead of just making the DX9 version run better in DX10.

Its a obvious side effect that if you can run the same game with less power in DX10 that you can add some extra visual stuff and then maintain the same demand on the system with extra visuals, but seriously nobody has pulled it off yet and I really think game developer's need to take a big step back and see what they are doing and try to make DX10 run better first before stuffing this crap down our throats that you cant swallow unless you have a 8800gtx and a quad core cpu, and even still can have bad frame rates...

 

DirectX 10 is still in its infancy (or rather the games using it). It takes years for developers to really properly implement it in their games. Which is why I think we shouldn't make any conclusions about it yet. You can make conclusions about the early games that have some DX10 features, but DX10 as a whole will be looking much brighter in a few years time.

 

To be honest, I see it as a definite step in the right direction. anything bringing in tighter standards has to be good in the PC market where everything changes so rapidly. I'm not a developer but I imagine I'd see it as a godsend...

You have the option to turn the DX10 textures off y'know, you don't HAVE to have the eyecandy to have the benefits of DX10... (does everything revolve around graphics in these parts!?). I'm just pleased that I can run modern games such as Bioshock on my laptop with a mid-range graphics card... at high settings.

And do we really need to hear the "its just a way to sell Vista" argument again? It's a load of bull and not relevant to this topic. You don't like Vista? Not our problem, it seems fine for me. Yes, they COULD implement it in XP but why should they? Most gamers who play at max settings at ridiculous resolutions will have the old 7950 cards which are DX9 only anyway until the high end 8xxx cards come out. So just stick with XP and quit complaining.

 

A lot of factual errors in the article...
As already mentioned, the pics shown at the start aren't DX9 vs DX10. The rightmost would be perfectly possible in DX9 or even 8. And it's not actually rendered with DX10 anyway.

And ignore the entire "Unified Architecture" section. it's wrong in several ways.
First, DX10 does not require unified shaders, second, unified shaders are not necessarily faster or more efficient, and third, a geometry shader is not, as the article says, the combination of vertex and fragment shader, but an entirely new type of shader.

Section 3 isn't much better. DirectX 9 had geometry instancing. The overhead percentages just make absolutely no sense. It's true that there is less CPU overhead with DX10 (and that this has traditionally been a problem with DirectX), but the 40 vs 20% figures are just nonsense.