DirectX 10.1 vs 11

There is no hardware nor games that support dx 11 right now so no one knows.

dx10.1 will support a few dx11 features. Honestly just upgrade now a 4870 cost 125-150$ at newegg. Im going to skip 1st gen dx11 cards just to get the kinks fixed up.

What kinds of things will I be missing with DX10.1 instead of DX11? Do the cards normally have "kinks"? I just don't want to buy a 4870 and have it be overshadowed by a new far superior line of cards in the next couple of months.

You'll find out in a few months just like the rest of us.

I have all your DX11 answers in my hermetically sealed envelope  

^hahahah

Im not 100% sure but a few features on dx11 will be supported by dx10.1.
Just upgrade when you buy a dx11 card the next thing you know dx12 cards are on there way.

Just like all versions of directx, it will take developers time to bring software to market that utilizes the directx 11 feature set fully. You will be fine purchasing a dx10.1 card which should last you quite a while - at least until the 2nd gen dx11 cards hit the market.

In addition to requiring GPU's to have the ability to handle more instructions at once, dx11 as I understand it will offer at least three major enhancements over dx10.1.

1. Hardware tessalation.

Simply put, hardware tessalation will allow for greatly increased detail in 3d scenes without the "need" for substantially faster graphics hardware.

2. General Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Unit = GPGPU.

Finally we have an API which will allow our fancy Nvidia or ATI graphics cards to do more than crunch graphics. Think video transcoding on any GPU, hardware based physics on any GPU without the need for CUDA, PHYSX, etc...

Personally, I'd rather have my GPU doing only graphics but thats just me.

3. Greatly improved multi-threading.

Dual and Quad core or more CPU's will finally be getting a workout from games using dx11 - and the idea is that the more cores you have, the better.

Hope this helps..

The MT will be gpu side only. Tho itll help. W7 and opencl use the cpu side MT, tho M$ has found a way to bridge the cpu/gpu MT issue, cant find that link tho

Considering what you get for the price of a 4870, it's a pretty safe buy even now. Just think, you can play almost every game ever created up till now at high settings with one cheap purchase.

The next gen games could look great and play terribly. Also, ATI have such a huge lead on Nvidia that the dx11 cards could be a bit more expensive than we are used to seeing from them at first. Don't assume cheap dx11 cards just because last series were - with such a tech advantage AMD would have to be stupid not to maximise it for profit.

This is true, but their overall push has been marketshare, and that demands bang for buck too. If they win some devs over, and have a compelling product, at a great price, its a clean sweep

DX11 looks to be what DX10 would have been had nVidia gotten off their asses and worked with Microsoft much like ATI did. In fact any card from ATI starting at the HD2900 series and up already supports tesselation and a few other DX11 features. But those were removed because of nVidia not coming to an agreement with ATI and MS thus causing MS to pull it from DX10.

If you look at a 8800/9800 and probably G200 core they don't support tesselation or anything in DX11. Sad that one company can hold back progress and cause DX10 to seem like a flop when its really a great API.

As for the ATI 5800 series, so far it seems to be almost 2x faster in the GFLOPs arena even though that wont equate to FPS in games. But it has 32 ROPs, 48 TMUs and 1200 SP according to the net rumors. But the one thing I am woundering is if it supports Raytracing. The only reason is because DX11 will have that feature and from what I have seen if the GPU can and it can do it well Raytracing looks to be a very good option for more realistic reflections and stuff like glass. It will support DX11 but that doesn't mean 100% that it will do Raytracing.

I know Intels larrabee is centered around Raytracing. But of course Raytracing itself is not the best for everything and a mix of Raytracing and Rasterization along with Tesselation (for higher poly models minus the huge performance hit) will create the most realistic games to date. But of course we now have to wait for better AI and in the end graphics don't always win a game in terms of greatness (unless its a console game).

On PC it needs to be the perfect blend of graphics, physics, AI, story and gameplay. Because we demand it!!!!!!!!!!

jpmeaney: That was very helpful. Thank you.


Are you saying that DX10.1 will be similar to DX11? Or are you saying it could be good, but it was scrapped by MS and unusable?


Are you saying that I'll have to upgrade again when I change to Windows 7 and new games in less than a year? Just because I might not have DX11 doesn't mean that I'll miss out on the Windows 7 experiance, does it? Should I still be able to play most games from the DX11 era with decent quality?

No relax it will certainly take some time until the first Dx11 cards come out, and even longer until they really use all Dx11 possibilities.

A lot of the Dx11 futures can also be used on Dx10 cards.

Worst case scenario in 1 year theres a good Dx11 game and you will STILL BE ABLE TO PLAY IT with your card it will just look a little bit worse.

I just hope DX11 gets more attention than DX10 from developers. I mean just take a look at the list of DX10 games on Wikipedia its just a shame the list is so short. Even the games coming out right now are mostly DX9. Just look at Empire Total War the game can't even be played on the high settings with any DX9 era video card and yet its a DX9 game. If DX11 gets as ignored as much as DX10 then after all this time and hardware upgrades we will still be playing DX9 games.

If you have a DX10 or higher card, and play a DX10 game, using either Vista or W7, you will see improvements on most of those games.
If any of those games are optimised for DX11, which is easy to do, with a few things that are time consuming, but still very easy to do. It depends on how well optimised they are, and how much the optimisation can effect perf/visuals per game. Some games arent very challenging graphically, while others are more so.
Or, in other words, a few simply wont be worth optimising, because there isnt going to be enough improvements seen through those opts

I believe DX11 games will be more demanding than DX10 ones and we should expect more and more games supporting DX10 (and not supporting DX11) in the next year since 5800s and GT300 GPUs will chew them easily!!
I'm afraid from what crytec is preparing behind the scenes, I believe cryengine 3 will use DX11 and will put the hurt on all DX11 cards (at least the 1st gen) as crysis (cryengine 2) did for DX10 GPUs

Hopefully my 2 gtx260 sli can handle the next crysis at med-high settings.
Wonder how much power next gen cards will have.

Cryengine 3 is designed for use with the consoles. While I have not heard anything on advanced DX11 features in it, it is supopsed to be better optimized, with more graphics scalability while not really looking much different on the high end PC as cryengine 2. Crysis 2 will probably not have many advanced dx11 features.

well if cryengine 3 is built for consoles, wouldnt that mean its made in DirectX 9?

No, it just means it has to support DX9 at its lowest settings.

I think its all guess work at the moment untill we get cards and software, games and drivers that support it properly we wont know.
As far as Cryengine 3 goes I have my own reservations as to how good porting between 9 and 11 will be, but as I sad its all guess work at this point.

Mactronix

dougx1317 , what I am saying is that DX10 itself had a lot of good features pulled due to nVidia not agreeing to the terms that were set by MS itself. DX11 will include a lot more than DX10.1 did and will deffinately help, especially when it comes to multicore rendering as it will help in that area too.

But DX10 would have been better than it was if it had what it was set to be.



Well I guess that even though Crysis had pretty graphics its pooryl optimized engine and meh gameplay ended up causeing Crytek to go into the console market. Too bad really.



Yes. But what will end up happening is that since they will develop for consoles and PCs it will end up causing the PC game to suffer. It happens a lot in most multiple platform games. Except for PC and 360 titles because the transition from say PC to 360 is quite easy. But when going to the PS3 its much more complicated.

Hopefully Crytek doesn't mess around too much and really optimizes the engine as well as works on the story a bit. Crysis was not worth the price in my opinion because it was short, boring story and the gameplay got a tad repetative in the end.

I would wait 4 dx 11 cards. Y not settle with a 4850 instead of 4870. Dx 11 could be a big jump BUT it could not. Time will only tell. U can buy a 4870 at that price and when a dx 11 card comes up ( we all heard they will release 4 cards) that price u paid might give u lets say a 5830?!?! which could end up same perf as 4870 with all dx 11 SM 5 40 nm ..... techs so wait.