AC: Nvidia has the right to pull off DX10.1

area61

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Last October at NVIDIA's Editors Day, we had the "opportunity" to hear from several gaming industry professionals about how unimportant DirectX 10.1 was, and how most companies weren't even considering supporting it. Amazingly, even Microsoft was willing to go on stage and state that DirectX 10.1 was only a minor update and not something to worry about. NVIDIA clearly has reasons for supporting that stance, as their current hardware -- and supposedly even their upcoming hardware -- will continue to support only the DirectX 10.0 feature set.

NVIDIA is within their rights to make such a decision, and software developers are likewise entitled to decide whether or not they want to support DirectX 10.1. What we don't like is when other factors stand in the way of using technology, and that seems to be the case here. Ubisoft needs to show that they are not being pressured into removing DX 10.1 support by NVIDIA, and frankly the only way they can do that is to put the support backing in a future patch. It was there once, and it worked well as far as we could determine; bring it back (and let us anti-alias higher resolutions).



We can see the result of using pixel shaders to do anti-aliasing in the resulting performance drop. What's noteworthy is that the drop isn't nearly as bad on ATI hardware running AC version 1.00. In other words, the 1.02 patch levels the playing field and forces ATI and NVIDIA to both use an extra rendering pass in order to do anti-aliasing. That probably sounds fair if you're NVIDIA -- or you own NVIDIA hardware -- but ATI users should be rightly upset.


http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3320&p=1
feel free to check the whole review.Its a nice one and it has been long since I read a nice review :sol:
 

San Pedro

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Pretty fishy move by Ubisoft, and I'm afraid it's a sign that Ubisoft will no longer use it in future games like Far Cry 2. Too bad, because the only reason I bought AC was for the 10.1 support, at least I don't have to patch it.
 
All fanboyism asside, what should we make of this? This has hit home folks. Every major decent site has said the same thing, over and over. Im not into conspiracies, Im into higher better tech. Ive followed this from the beginning, saw some people try it on their own rigs, and came to the same conclusions. We are close to a launch now, and every fps counts for these newer cards, if there wouldve been more than 1 game out with DX10.1 this would be a major situation, but since its just this one, people will downplay it, saying it means nothing. I disagree. If the techas available, shouldnt we, the people who pay for it deserve it? This is a rip off, cause the way I see it, we arent getting what we paid for
 
Not news to most of us, but good to see reviewers poking their heads out more and more.

However with a largely ignorant biased market (they'll defend what they bought more than what may be best in the long run) I unfortunately don't think this will gain much traction. Everyone talks about the power of a free market, but this is what happens when forces behind the scenes manipulate the market. They likely won't stop because it[ benefis nV, and it won't hurt Ubi that much (likely anything it does nV will cover). While I hate the system, probably the only thing that would stop something like this would be legal action, but the question would be on what grounds, and how deep into a developer's choice could you question?

IMO it's like the floptimization scandal, everyone knows it's wrong, they know it's being done, yet it contonues on and they keep selling more product because of it.
 
Really sad. In the end, we pay for it, even when its taken away, we pay for it. So to me, even if youre an nVidia fan, this adds to the cost of things. DX10.1 exists, they took the time (the devs) to implement it, Ubi paid those devs for doing it, and its absorbed into the overall costs, pushed onto us, the users.
 

area61

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the technology seems to be thrown aside even though it provides something to move on.Maybe ATI should start to sponsor some games aswell once the hd4800s are released.I did read somewhere that the DX10.1 is actually the full version of DX10.but it was stripped because the G80 wasnt ready for it.but Nvidia has the right to do it because it does sponsor Ubi.
 
Yep just like the whole BluRay HD-DVD battle, when they bribe the studios to lean one way or another that doesn't help the consumers, it means we end up paying for the bribe in the end with higher overall prices.

However just like that battle people are more interested in their own camp, not the overall health of the market, and those of us who are agnotstic end up noticing and being most annoyed/penalized by it because we're aware, whiel the sheep don't care.
 

area61

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This things alone are happening for DX10.1.You guys just imagine what would happen if SM 4.1 was rolled out.Well, the same thing would go around again.Its actually easy to see that ATI inovates and Nvidia dominates
 
DX10.0 seems pretty boring to me. It's slow (currently) and didn't live up to the hype. 10.1 is (was?) actually interesting as it showed decent speed increases (like DX10 was supposed too). I guess all we can do is have all of us go out and buy 4870s when the come out and get ATI on top.
 

area61

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i second that.