DX 10.1 games comig soon

Saw this post on another forum. Its from a AMD rep. It looks promising. Tech advancement in software at last. http://rage3d.com/board/showthread [...] 1335512390 "Something that hasn't been noted yet is that EA and SEGA are signed on with us for DX10.1 titles, we've also signed a fairly major deal with Blizzard.
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"Wavey" Dave

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Last edited by Dave Baumann : Yesterday at 12:58 AM. " If they release these games too quickly, a 4870 will be close or beat a G280 in this format

Unless it is implemented like the current DX10.0, ie. tacked-on code.

Depends if they re-use the engine from another game or not. Didn't the devs making COD5 say they could do it in 1 year?

If games are comnig next year, that is time for Nvidia to implement DX10.1, unless they simply decide to bludgeon their way through with just DX10 only and massive amounts of raw power.

Basically free 4xAA

That rings a bell. I'm pretty sure the "free AA" thing is a myth caused by twisted information. It gets worse as people pass it on, like Chinese whispers (probably originating in Chinese too).

Starcraft 2
Diablo III

..........drool........

At least ATI moving to the right direction, closer cooperation with game devs will be handy for gamers and developers themselves (10.1 coding has some advantages). Ofc nVidia screwed themselves by not supporting new tech, but its nothing major anyway, though geforce owners will be shafted a bit. Even minor attempt in Assasin creed to bring 10.1 boosted AA speed by ~20% for Radeon cards, imagine fully optimized game for it?

Another thing, its a big question if Blizzard will go full out with 10.1, they are very cautious of using DX10 at all. EA is another story, would be sweet to have COD5 with full 10.1 features.

Dude DX10.1...problem is no one wants to run Vista crap to utilize DX10! A lot of stuff now is just badass DX9 titles...funk DX10!...and especially FUNK DX10.1! LOL.

Too bad XP doesn't support it. Micro$oft and their evil schemes to get people to buy Halo2.

Call of Duty is an enhanced COD4 engine, with enhanced physics more than anything.

That's good in a way, COD4 physics were kinda non-existent.

I played the original Brothers in Arms and absolutely hated it. One of the most (if not the most) repetitive "recent" games I have ever played. I didn't bother getting any expansions or sequels if there are any.

Haha, my dad loves BIA, it's the only game he plays nowadays...

Yup I know. My father's 50 years old, so he likes to take it slow.

Don't you hate noobs who just think what they're talking about when they know like, nothing?

Does this mean that nVidias dedicated shaders are incapable, or harder hit, vs ATI, s which are more flexable?

As I wrote, they aren't incapable. In fact, they are extremely efficient.
BUT they need an extra pass AFTER shaders are applied.

So, because of this reason, HD2900 was badly hit by the nVidia optimized games. Although it was a DX10 card, it was built DX10.1 in mind. As you all know, DX10.1 is in fact, the original DX10 which MS had to cripple in order to give nVidia G80 cards with the title "DX10 supported", as there were no other GPUs even getting near it.

When you write a game which is using DX10.1, vs DX10, DX10.1 should be around 20-40% faster than DX10 counterpart because all shader effects and AA are processed in one pass, not 2 passes.

ATI HD series GPUs have a very high number of shader processors to cope with this kind of a problem. (HD2900 , HD3800 have 320, HD4800 has 800)

Considering the fact that nVidia has now 240 shader processors in an area which is 2,5 times larger than R770, sticking in 800 of them would be a GPU about the size of the graphics card itself. So, nVidia is sticking with "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" as long as it can. But at the end, we can expect them come with it with the next generation (GTX200 isn't a new generation, it's an increment on G80 architecture) as CUDA and PhysX would also benefit highly from this transition.

They would take a harder hit because there simply are less shaders to distribute the work to. I suspect it could mess up their SF unit which would really, really slow things down in games that actually do complex shader processing.

You are correct. Well, technically speaking they are not going back. They never started to do AA with their shaders since DX10 as it was specified before the NV debacle never took off. And to be really picky about it, actually AMD didn' fold either. They improved their Rops but the massive increase in Shading-Power will keep them more than able to do AA with those units if a developer want to use it. As i understand it, many developers didn't like the Shader-based AA because of it's implementation. I don't know the details about that though.

Cant wait for the guys at B3D and the Tech Report to do their full reviews i really want to know what the difference is that makes the AA so much better.
Mactronix

I think duzcizgi sorta hit it on the head.

Pretty much yes. It's a PS3 & XBox 360 title ported to PC. BTW, XBox 360 has the same GPU architecture as HD series ATI GPUs.

In fact, the hit ATi/AMD got with their first implementation in R600/HD2900 is because they were changing their structure fundamentally and they passed their deadline by 6 months. So, they said: OK let's launch this and we'll iron out the problems in time later. Yes, they fixed most of the problems, but still, they saw the processing power of R600 wasn't enough for shader AA. So they upped shaders from 320 to 800. It gives them an edge on both GPGPU and Havok implementations also, as they can use all of the GPU's processing power for GPGPU (CUDA on nVidia) or physics applications. nVidia still can't use all the processing power of their GPUs. If they really want to compete with intel's Larrabee, they have to take the same road as ATi/AMD already taken. Just they also need time to come up with their new design.

I agree. That's actually always the problem. Programmers usually do what they "can get away" with. I'm not blaming them. On really fast hardware optimization is not needed - at least on the PC. Optimization may be a huge cost (and time) factor, but on the PC it is mostly voluntary. If a game doesn't run blazing fast, wait three months and buy the next generation of GPUs. At least that's what is happening. There is no real incentive to implement these features. Investing more work to get better performance on some(AMD GPUs), but worse performonce on some other (NV GPUs) computers? That is kind of hard to sell.
Looking at it, it is no longer the software that has to be tailored. Sure, a few tweaks here and there but at some point it just gets easier to get more specialised hardware. And that is something nvidia has done quite well. They look at what is coming out during the release time-frame of their GPUs and tailor their hardware to suit it best. AMD takes a more flexible approach that involves more software.

They both have their strong and weak points. The problem is, programmers are lazier than before. With all these RAD tools to do the dirty work of coding, they just click drag and drop. (Hey, I'm also earning my living with these click drag and drops. I know it for good. ) There's no sufficient education or training for efficient programming except for msdn.microsoft.com but even there, most of the best practices aren't implemented by programmers because they involve actually writing code!

That's why, any given game written on top of a given engine has more or less the same performance level. You can expect the upcoming games using Cryengine 2 would perform on par with Crysis.

Given the heat and power specifications of the R600 i really doubt they could've packed in more shader back then, which supports your point. I suspect the shading power of GPUs has to grow again by quite a lot if both Physics and regular "graphics" have to be done on the GPU. The number of threads a R700 can tackle on seems too low for that. Maybe not for now, since there are no games that actually employ physics in a prominent manner, but once they do, the current amount won't be enough. It's actually interesting to see, but i think with these more programmable shaders we will see a transition from graphic cards to something we can actually call a gaming or processing cards (depending on what it is used for).